The Double Abduction and Murder That Confounded Police
The disappearance of 10-year-old Lyric Cook and her eight-year-old cousin Elizabeth Collins hit their Evansdale, Iowa clan like an atomic bomb, destroying individuals, couples, and close-knit family ties that to this day have yet to fully heal. Driven by input from virtually everyone associated with the case, Max’s three-part Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth? (August 8) is a thorough and compassionate examination of relatives and law enforcement’s investigation into the girls’ plight. What it proffers, ultimately, isn’t a definitive answer to its title question, but rather a snapshot of the pain, fury, and annihilation wrought by senseless, mysterious tragedy.
First-time director Dylan Sires was a local news photographer when the call came over the police radio that Lyric and Elisabeth had vanished while riding bikes in their neighborhood around noon on July 13, 2012. Over the ensuing years, he covered the story from every angle, including conducting hundreds of interviews with its principal players, and that material forms the foundation of Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth? From the outset, Lyric and Elizabeth’s disappearance garnered regional and then national attention, and it completely and irrevocably altered the lives of Elizabeth’s mom and dad Heather and Drew, and Lyric’s separated parents Misty and Dan. An enormous manhunt ensued, and it turned up promising (if disheartening) clues, with the girls’ bikes found at the edge of gated Meyers Lake, and Elizabeth’s purse (with her cell phone) discovered nearby in the brush. And yet, as relayed by DCI Special Agent in Charge Larry Hedlund and Chief of Police Kent Smock, follow-ups on those pieces of evidence—such as draining Meyers Lake—resulted in few concrete leads.
At a certain point, it became apparent that Lyric and Elizabeth weren’t just missing; they’d been snatched by an unknown assailant. This was, shockingly, incredibly rare: There had only been 15 prior double abductions in the United States since 1973. While police didn’t initially have much to go on, they were compelled to look into Misty and Dan, who opted to be less than fully cooperative with police, in large part because both had been previously convicted of (and went to prison for) drug offenses, and at the time of the girls’ disappearance, Dan (a meth cook and user) had just rejected a plea deal on narcotics-conspiracy charges that would have earned him three decades behind bars.