A Private Matter, Episode 4

0:00You can get an ad-free version of this season for just $20. Go to patreon.com slash bearbrook or follow the link in the show notes. to pull the one-of-one Cooper flag rookie card worth $8 million and the Pikachu illustrator card worth $2.8 million in packs as low as just $1. Download PrizePix and use code SPOTIFY to get $25 instant link and bonus packs when you buy your first $5 pack. PrizePix, run your game. 18 plus eligible areas, terms apply, collect responsibly. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

0:54I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. So it's just you two today? It is, yeah. Okay. How would you like to get started uh just so you know i mean i appreciated your email and stuff but we've kind of figured for quite a while now that he's probably not with us anymore okay um there's just it's a very long story but there is... My grandmother used to do astrology. Okay. That's the voice of Rob Hickey, Jay Hickey's youngest brother. Rob is a retired ATM repairman.

1:55He lives in Massachusetts. It's easy to tell that Rob and Jay are brothers. Rob has a similar presence. Gentle, deliberate, thoughtful. And while Rob wasn't quite as close with their grandmother, Izzy, she also shaped his worldview. Which helps explain why Rob and his wife, Sandra, are on this Zoom call discussing Jay's disappearance with a medium. Rob later shared the video of the call with me. Intuitively, I kept trying to place him somewhere safe, and I just couldn't do it. Right. So the energy just isn't there. That's what it means in my terms. Right. I'm going to be speaking in medium terms, so try to bear with me. By this point, more than a year had passed since Jay was reported missing.

2:56It wasn't clear where the police investigation was going, if anywhere. I got the sense that Rob and Sandra felt this call was their next best chance at getting some kind of closure. Rob and Sandra lay out the whole saga for the medium. Patty's stories about Jay visiting a brother, Emily calling the police, the sale of the Christmas tree farm. Rob had been talking with the private investigator, Joe Murphy, and he and Sandra shared some of Joe's suspicions. I feel like we're hoping to find Jay's remains and some information about what happened. There's some speculation on whether there was foul play or not. He definitely was neglected. By whom? His wife. By his wife. In the video, I can see Rob and Sandra sitting by a window in their home. The medium sits on a couch,

3:55seemingly taking notes and occasionally looking off into the distance to receive a message. He is there somewhere. He is on. If he's not on their land, he's close to it. Okay, his remains. Pardon me for just speaking very frankly. Please, that's okay. I get a yes on the foul play too. Okay, so let me see if I can dissect this. The medium confirms Rob's suspicions. There was foul play, she declares. Money was the motive. And then, suddenly, she claims to receive an even more important message. It's from Jay. The medium sits up a little straighter. She looks like she's listening, hard. Oh, oh, this is him. Okay. Okay. Okay. He says, thank you. He says, be patient with me, please. And he says, hear me out.

5:11He says he went along with it he says that he is at rest where he is and that he isn't waiting to be found necessarily for not for his sake he says where there appears to be injustice, he wants there to be peace. Wow. That's pretty profound. The medium seemed to be saying that there was foul play in Jay's disappearance, but that Jay wasn't too mad about it. I talked with Rob after this call, and he told me it's exactly the sort of thing Jay would say. Jay always wanted everybody to get along, Rob says. Rob says the call with the medium did bring him some peace. It lifted a sense of responsibility that he needed to be out there looking for his brother's remains. And maybe that's what's important in a situation like this.

6:15Some sense of closure for the people who love Jay. Because outside of this call, closure has been hard to come by. This episode is sponsored by Quince. The best pieces in your closet are the ones you can count on, whether you're heading to work, going out, or keeping things casual. In this time of year, Quince wants to make finding something great for everyone else on your list just as easy. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 14-karat gold and Italian leather. Timeless, versatile pieces that feel special to unwrap and become everyday favorites long after the holidays. Quince says everything is priced 50 to 80 percent less than similar brands. Their cashmere sweaters start at

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8:30Right now, get 70% off your new system with professional monitoring at SimpliSafe.com slash Spotify. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit SimpliSafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Despite months of investigating, the Epsom PD's case seemed to be going nowhere. No sign of Jay, and no sign that Patty would be facing consequences. It was frustrating, and not only for Jay's family or people in town. It was also getting to the person in charge of the investigating, Epsom Police Chief Brian Michael. You know, I've never seen anything like it in my career. I don't understand how your husband can go missing for a significant amount of time, and how you could not report your husband missing

9:20is absolutely beyond anything ethically or morally that I can comprehend. Chief Michael. He's the one who plopped the investigative file on the desk for dramatic effect when interrogating Patty. The one who tried to warn her that Channel 9 was calling. Chief Michael has been a police officer in Epsom since 2001, steadily climbing the ranks until he made chief of police in 2022, just two years before Jay was reported missing. And over the years, he got to know Jay a bit. When Chief Michael built his house in Epsom, Jay was the zoning officer who approved the construction. And like so many others, when it came time to get his family's Christmas tree, Chief Michael drove up McCoy Mountain to Jay's farm.

10:12He was just a nice guy that was lost in the 60s. What do you mean lost in the 60s? Just the long hair, you know, the big mustache, and loved his Christmas trees. More than anyone else, Chief Michael had confronted Patty about her explanations for Jay's disappearance. With mounting frustration, he had meticulously dissected for her the many ways her story just didn't add up. You pushed her pretty hard in that second interrogation, and she kept returning to that notion that he was just very private and wouldn't have wanted the police involved. Yeah, I don't believe that. That simple. Chief Michael does not believe Patty. And as you may remember, he told Patty that without some explanation about all this that made sense, he'd have to pursue the matter criminally. But pretty quickly, Chief Michael's

11:07threat to charge Patty with a crime encountered an interesting question. What crime exactly had been committed here? Unfortunately, it is not illegal to not report your husband or your wife missing. It's ethically immoral. I have some serious moral issues with what went on in this case, but we spoke to the Marymount County Attorney's Office, and there is no criminal charge that we can charge anybody with if you just simply don't report somebody Was that a surprise to you? Yes, it was. Yes, it was. If your spouse disappears, New Hampshire law doesn't require you to report them missing. It does feel weird, doesn't it? I spent a good while trying to wrap my head around this. Here's what I can tell you.

12:06Most of the time, we define crimes by actions, not inactions. If you push a stranger into the river and they drown, obviously a crime. But if you see a stranger drowning in the river and you don't jump in to save them, not a crime. There are exceptions to that rule, though, like when it's your duty to care for someone, say a child. In that context, doing nothing can be a crime. But didn't Patty have a duty to care for Jay? By all accounts, he had become unable to care for himself. The answer is complicated. There is a law in New Hampshire that makes it a crime to neglect impaired, disabled, or elderly adults. New Hampshire lawmakers created the law about 25 years ago. And as it turns out, they did so because of another situation where the cops were surprised to find they couldn't charge someone.

13:01The case involved an elderly woman allegedly neglected by her son. The details were harrowing. The son removed his mother from a nursing home against the advice of a doctor, and then later she wound up in a hospital with bed sores covered in her own feces. The officer who investigated the case said the woman had been lying in her own feces for so long it had stained her skin. Police wanted to charge the son with a crime, but they couldn't find one that fit. The son hadn't done anything to his mother exactly. It was just the opposite. And so in 2002, lawmakers in New Hampshire passed a new law making it a crime to, quote, cause serious bodily injury to an elderly, disabled, or impaired adult by neglect.

13:54But in the years since, only six people have been convicted of it. Most of those cases were similar to the one that inspired the law, severe neglect that led to obvious injuries. And that's the big difference with Jay's case. Even if a prosecutor could establish that Patty neglected Jay, there's no direct evidence that Jay suffered, quote, serious bodily injury as a result. In other words, without Jay's body, police can't say whether Patty's failure to call for help was a crime or not. Other states have their own laws about this kind of thing, and it's possible that somewhere else Patty might have been charged already. But even then, it hardly seems cut and dry. A handful of years ago in Iowa, two elderly adults wandered away from two different nursing homes.

14:50Both of them froze to death, just weeks apart. In each case, there was evidence that a nursing home employee had failed to do their rounds. One of the employees was originally charged with second-degree murder. The other faced no charges at all. One last thing I learned that surprised me. Jay is not officially dead. According to New Hampshire state law, a missing person can only be declared dead after a, quote, continuous period of four years. If you start the four-year clock from when Jay was reported missing, he can't legally be declared dead until February 26, 2028. Which means this whole time Jay has been in a weird sort of legal purgatory. No signs of life, but not yet dead. So, where does all of this leave the investigation?

16:11Are we basically just stuck? I don't know if we're stuck. The investigation is open, but it's currently suspended until there's more leads that come in. Do you have plans for another search, or what do you do at this point? Well, at this point it remains an open investigation, and we don't have any plans for another search, but we will wait and see if anything else comes in. We have followed up on every lead, every phone call, every Internet comment that we can find to see if we can find Jay. Obviously it's personal to me as well as professional. I knew him on both levels, and it's one of the ones that's going to haunt me for my career until we can find him. Chief Michael is haunted by Jay's disappearance.

16:57It was beginning to feel like everyone I talked to about this was. The frustration over the lack of answers had pushed people to elaborate conspiracy theories and supernatural explanations, anything to inject some logic and meaning into the situation. I felt this most strongly in a conversation I had with Patty and Jay's daughter, Kay Danko. Like her uncle Rob, Kay had turned to spiritual means to look for Jay. I did start meditating. I'm determined whether it's physically, whether it's astral travel or whatever, which my stepdad's grandmother was Isabel Hickey. She was an astrologer. Kay is Patty's daughter from her first marriage. She was raised by Patty and Jay, who eventually adopted her.

17:46Kay's description of childhood with Patty was similar to her sister Emily's. Kay left the house at 16. She struggled with alcohol, eventually going sober six years ago. And along the way, she fell out with both parents. She hasn't spoken with Jay or Patty in more than 10 years. In fact, Kay only found out her stepfather was missing after a friend sent her an article about it. It did not surprise me one bit when I heard that my stepdad was missing. And my initial thought was she killed him because that was what I always thought would happen. Kay says she actually tried to deliver this warning to Jay himself. It was around 2007, during a period when K told me that Jay and Patty were actually briefly separated.

18:46While I was waiting for an apartment. And we were sitting across from each table and I said, if you take her back, she will kill you someday. I think at the time I meant more like she'll scream at him to death or poison him. But I just figured one way or the other, she'd be the death of him. He loved her. that she would let him, if she did let him wander off and die alone like that, that, I can't even describe how that makes me feel. Which maybe that's why it's easier for me to believe that she killed him and she just won't admit it doesn't want to admit it because I don't want to picture him wandering around either in the woods or falling in a hole and dying like that what kind of a person does that to someone

20:06who doesn't report them missing? Somehow it was easier to imagine Jay was murdered. Maybe that's what private investigator Joe and the medium and the rumors swirling in town were all getting at too. That the most straightforward explanation, that Patty simply looked the other way when Jay wandered one day, and that he died alone and confused in the woods, is just too bleak to accept. I thought about that call with Kay for a long time afterwards. Maybe I had also been avoiding the mental image of Jay dying of exposure. Then, one day in March 2026, I got a text from Kay. When I read her message, I called her right away. Okay, so tell me the news. What's going on? I was on the phone with Kathy O'Mara.

21:17Kathy O'Mara was Kay's former babysitter, of all people. And she had called Kay with a wild update. You've already met Kathy. The day the news broke about Jay, Kathy was the one who went up to the farm to talk to Patty. And I just stood outside and talked to her. I really just wanted to look her in the face and say, Pat, what happened? What's going on? Kathy babysat the Hickey kids from when she was 12 into her 20s. But by the time Jay went missing, Kathy was no longer regularly seeing the Hickey family. She and Patty exchanged Christmas cards, but not much more than that. So it was unusual when this February, almost two years since Jay was reported missing, that Kathy got a call from Patty out of the blue.

22:10I just looked at the date. It was February 2nd. I actually have the voicemail. Hi, Kathy. This is Patty Hickey. I'm all like messed up for many reasons. But anyway, the basic one being that my husband, Jay, is gone. And it's been real hard for me to adjust to that. He's dead. So anyway, he's not gone like he left me. It's not like that. But anyway, blah, blah, blah. So Patty goes on rambling a bit. She seems confused about whether she's even leaving a message for the correct Kathy. So if you're Kathy Kettman, then you know, you know my address because I got a Christmas card from you. A beautiful, beautiful card. Thank you. Okay. Bye. So I called her back and then she was just talking and then she starts saying about Jay that,

23:20and I actually grabbed a piece of paper because I was, I just started writing stuff down because I just realized like something's really off. Kathy says it was as if, in Patty's mind, this was the first time the two had ever spoken about Jay going missing, which, of course, wasn't true at all. Like, I don't think she remembered, actually, that I had gone up to the house because she was like, you know Jay's dead? And I was like, yeah, I know. She's like, you know, and I wrote down, she said like, yeah, I know. She's like, um, you know, and I wrote down, she said, you know, I, I found him. He was dead when I found him. And I said, well, what happened? She said, well, he went off, he was wandering, and then he was down by the old foundation.

24:07Wow. So she said, I found him, he was dead? Yeah. She said, I found him, but he was dead. Whoa. wealth. She kept concentrating like, there's a lot of rocks there. There's a lot of rocks on the bottom. And I was like, okay, but Kat, you know, have you told anybody else this? I said, and she's like, no, now you know, and I know, it's a private matter. And I said, no, that's, it's not a private matter, Pat, because you have kids and those kids deserve to know what their father is. So if you know something, you need to, you need to say something. If you know where he was or where you last saw him, you need to make sure that they know that. And then she just kind of went off subject, which is Pat,

25:14you know, like, oh, I'm not talking about this anymore. Patty said she found Jay dead in the old foundation. It's the remnants of an old house just a few hundred feet from the Hickey house. Some stone walls in the earth marking what was maybe once a cellar. Kay had told me she used to play archaeologist there as a kid, trying to dig up artifacts. Kathy sent me a picture of the notes she took during the call with Patty. They're written on a stray piece of mail, like Kathy was looking for the nearest piece of paper, any paper, to capture what she was hearing. The notes read, He went off, wandering. I found him, but he was dead. Old foundation. Then later, It's private. Now you know, and I know.

26:11When I got off the phone with her, I called my husband. I was just so shaken. I was just like, I don't even know what to think of this. And he's like, it sounds like a confession to me. Like, you need to call the police and report it at least. And so I did. Was it a confession? And if so, why? Why would Patty decide to call the family babysitter and tell her this? But then, why had any of this happened the way it had so far? Kathy calls the police, and the next day they obtain a search warrant for the area around had so far. Kathy calls the police, and the next day they obtain a search warrant for the area around the old foundation. State police arrive with two cadaver dogs, and they start looking.

26:55But it's February. The entire farm is blanketed in several feet of snow. The police realize that to do this properly, they're going to have to wait until the snow melts. So they stop the search, and they wait. The waiting was agony. Weeks went by. More snow fell. In the meantime, I kept trying to make sense of Patty's call to Kathy. The Foundation story had the ring of plausibility to me. And it was almost a relief to think that Jay could have died on his own property rather than in some unfamiliar ditch. He poured 50 years of his life into that land. But then, in a state of advanced dementia, it's possible that everywhere, even the Christmas tree farm, was an unfamiliar place for Jay. Eventually, April came.

28:19The snow melted. And the police headed to Patty and Jay's house once again. Okay, so they went up, they did, they finally did the search. Really? I wasn't there. The police told me what happened, so then I called Kay and Kathy to relay it to them. Epsom and state police arrive at the farm with a warrant. They went and they searched the area of the old foundation with a cadaver dog and they didn't find anything. Yeah. I am a little surprised that they didn't find anything. Yeah, I don't know what to make of it. Because this was the closest... This felt the closest we've come. Police had confronted Patty about what she said to Kathy on the phone. But Patty told them the old foundation was one of the last places she saw Jay alive.

29:26She said he waved to her while standing near it. It was as if Patty was saying this whole thing was just a big misunderstanding, a game of telephone. None of it made sense to me or Kathy. Yeah, but I mean, we all kind of knew, like, it wouldn't be, it's complicated, you know. Pat is complicated. I can only speak for myself, but I do feel he knows, obviously, where he is. We were back to where we started. Another bizarre chapter of paddy behavior that left people confused, suspicious, or both. We'll be right back. cards instantly for cash or ship them home. PrizePix Packs gives everyone the opportunity to pull the one-of-one Cooper flag rookie card worth $8 million and a Pikachu illustrator card

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31:29Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit SimpliSafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. From the studio that brought you WandaVision.

32:07I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. It's like I'm losing my... The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Why am I losing my... Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming only on Disney+. The location of Jay's remains. It kept eating at me. It felt like the one thing in this whole bizarre story that we should be able to figure out. Patty might be a moving target, but Jay's resting point, that was a fixed spot somewhere in Epsom. So why couldn't we find Jay? Was there more the police

33:07could have done or could still do to search for him? I took these questions to a guy named Robert Kester. He's an expert on searching for missing people, including those with dementia. I figured if there was anyone who might have ideas on where to look for Jay, it would be Robert. He's been looking for missing people professionally since 1981. He's worked for the Coast Guard, NASA, the Park Service. He's got a master's in neurobiology. And sure enough, Robert was practically overflowing with tidbits of search and rescue research. Very few people will actually backtrack when they get lost, even though it's probably one of the more effective strategies. And instead, people will want to plow forward. Wow. Well, note to self, backtrack next time I'm

34:00lost. Or the best thing is not to get lost in the first place. Touche, Robert. Touche. It turns out there is a lot to know about getting lost. Did you know that lost people traveling at night or in fog often end up walking in circles? Okay, but did you know that one hypothesis for why is that one of your legs is a little bit shorter than the other? Crazy, right? But the most important thing I learned from Robert is that different types of people behave differently when they don't know where they are. A lost hiker is not the same as a lost child, is not the same as a lost person with dementia. So when Robert is planning a search, he looks at the data to see how the particular type of person he's looking for tends to behave.

34:54How far they usually travel, what kinds of routes they're likely to take, that kind of thing. Robert was a pioneer in developing that data for people with dementia. He noticed he was doing a lot of searches for people with dementia starting back in the 80s. But all we had in the literature, search literature at the time, was a category for people over the age of 65. So it could be a 65-year-old hunter, it could be a 65-year-old marathon runner, or it could be a 65-year-old who has dementia. So Robert started collecting data specifically from cases of lost people with dementia, and he started to see some patterns. Robert says from a search and rescue perspective, there are two types of dementia wandering. The first kind is the type

35:46where the person is trying to get to some specific place, often from their past. I've seen people trying to go, you know, go to somebody's funeral, but, you know, their friend actually died 15 years ago. Remember when the landscaping worker found Jay wandering at the bottom of McCoy Mountain? Jay told the landscaper he needed to get to a meeting at the town offices, even though he had retired three years earlier. Robert says this kind of wandering is associated with milder dementia. But once it progresses, he says another, more unnerving kind of wandering can start. They go until they get stuck. So whatever direction they were initially going, they're probably going to keep going that direction, guided by whatever is the path of least resistance that is directly in front of them.

36:48So what are things that get people stuck? If you go into thick vegetation or you go into a stream or a water body or you hit a fence and you're just stuck in the barbed wire. I don't know of any barbed wire on or near the Christmas tree farm, but thick vegetation, streams and ponds, yeah, a million places for Jay to get stuck. So where to even begin looking? This is where the data from previous search and rescue incidents really shines. Robert could tell me exactly how far out from the house Jay was likely to have traveled based on data from similar cases. 50% of subjects are found within a half mile. And for 75% of the subjects, I only have to go out to 1.2 miles. And those numbers were for dementia? Dementia for a subject on foot, temperate,

37:48wilderness, mountainous. 75% of lost people with dementia in terrain like New Hampshire's are found within 1.2 miles of where they were last seen. Didn't seem that far to me. And compared to other types of lost people that Robert studies, it's not. Even children age seven to nine travel farther on average when they're lost. Robert says in theory, a 1.2 mile radius could be searched within just a few days, assuming you had a team of at least 24 trained searchers and a few dogs. So what did the Epsom and state police actually do to try to find Jay? Some people I talked to had questions about this. Where were the drones, the call for volunteers, the kind of all-out search effort you might expect in a TV cop thriller?

38:43Let's walk through what the searchers actually did. According to police reports, the Epsom PD searched the inside of the house and the barn. State police, using cadaver dogs, also searched in and around the house. When that came up empty, state police got a search warrant for a half-mile radius around the house. They spent about three days searching it. I don't know how many searchers were involved. I'm still waiting on the state police to release their reports. Remember, based on Roberts' data, 50% of lost people with dementia are found within a half-mile in this kind of terrain. So you could say this search had a 50-50 chance of finding Jay. When it didn't, the Epson PD then called on New Hampshire's Fish and Game

39:33department to see if they would help. Fish and Game Lieutenant Adam Chaney was the one who picked up the phone. Lieutenant Chaney has led searches in New Hampshire for lost people with dementia. And you can tell some of those experiences have stayed with him. It's a sad thing. I mean, you find a guy who has dementia and he's been missing for 14 hours. And finally you find him and his pants are down around his ankles. He's laying on his stomach on the ground because he can't get up and he's just covered in bug bites. You know, that's just, and he's still alive. It's like, you know, you get sick of seeing that stuff. So Lieutenant Chaney takes these cases seriously. But when the Epson PD called him and told him what was going on,

40:18he told them another search just wouldn't be feasible. For one thing, state police had already searched the area with cadaver dogs. Fish and Game would just do the same thing. The other problem is when we do a search, it costs a lot of money. Maybe you've been waiting for this to come up. Sending a bunch of trained searchers into the woods is not cheap. And like it or not, every search planner has to be prepared to make tough choices about how much time, effort, and taxpayer money is worth it. Decisions like these take us into murky waters. How many resources get devoted to finding someone can read like a judgment on the value of their life. When the person is in their mid-70s, it's even more fraught.

41:06Would the searches have been different if Jay was a missing child? Fish and Game Lieutenant Adam Chaney says no, he doesn't think so. But Robert Kester says in his experience planning searches... I know I will probably get more resources for a missing two-year-old search than a missing 72-year-old search. It's just kind of human nature. Human nature is that we tend to see older people as less valuable. Not in every culture, but in ours, yes. It's ugly, but it's true. But Lieutenant Cheney said there was another, even bigger reason that a wider search for Jay just wasn't feasible. It had simply been too long. Usually when Fish and Game is searching for someone, it's because someone called for help within hours or maybe a day or two.

42:05The searchers are hoping to find someone alive. The survivability rates for lost people with dementia are not good. According to Roberts' data, about a quarter die within the first 24 hours. I don't think anyone has data on what happens after 10 months, but it's not hard to extrapolate. So in all likelihood, Fish and Game would have been searching for a body, not a living person. That not only lowers the stakes, but it also makes the search harder. When you have leaf cover and stuff like that, the foliage falls and grows back and comes off, and it buries any kind of evidence like that. You're looking for bones that are going to be underneath leaf cover. Bones underneath leaf cover. Basically, he's saying to find Jay, they'd almost have to step on him out in the woods.

42:57And even then, Lieutenant Chaney says there may not actually be much left, thanks to rodents. It's like a deer. You know how many deer have died in the woods, and you go for a walk in the woods, very rarely you find a bone. It's because the rodents chew them all up. It's not a pleasant image, but now that he mentions it, I have never seen a deer skull in the woods. So, did the Epsom PD, the state police, and Fish and Game do enough to find Jay? The answer probably depends on who you are. Now that I'm invested in the situation, do I wish they had searched out to Robert's 1.2-mile radius with cadaver dogs? Yes. Can I understand why they didn't? Yes. Can I understand why they didn't? Yes. If Jay's remains are ever found, it'll probably be by accident.

44:01A hunter making their way through the woods, who just happens to walk in the right spot. It's a remote chance, but I still find it tantalizing. Enough that I spent an afternoon crunching through the woods myself. I went to an area on McCoy Mountain that was beyond where the police had searched, but within the 1.2 mile radius. I didn't find anything. But it felt good to look. To at least try to find an answer. And now, it seemed to me, there was just one last place to go to look for one. You miss him, yeah? Oh. Enormously. You miss him, yeah? Oh, enormously. There's not even any word that I know of that would describe how much I miss him. That's on the next and final episode of A Private Matter. A Private Matter is written and reported by me, Jason Moon.

45:25It's edited by Katie Kulinarian. Additional editing and production by Lauren Chulgin. More editing support came from Dan Barrack, Rebecca Lavoie, Taylor Quimby, Anne-Marie Timmons, and Marina Henke. Photos and video by Elena Eberwein and Raquel Zaldivar with the New England News Collaborative. Fact-checking by Dania Suleiman. Legal review by Jeremy Eggleton. Thank you. which was created by Sarah Plord and Matt Tobin. Original artwork by Judith Poitras-Rainaud and original music and scoring by me, Jason Moon. If you have more information or story tips, get in touch with us at barebrook at nhpr.org. A Private Matter and Bare Brook are productions of the Document Team at New Hampshire Public Radio. the award-winning racial justice organization focused on election reform, hosted by me, Colin Cole.

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