Cold Case MHS: Monsters and Demons · Randy Hubbard

Season 4: Episode 8 - Vanished into Time - Murder of Linda Pagano

·26 min·1 clip

A 17-year-old went to a Crosby-Stills National Young concert, argued at home, and vanished that night.

The episode returns to a 1974 Ohio homicide. Linda Pagano was 17, and the students trace her final night from a Crosby-Stills National Young concert at the Cleveland Stadium with her boyfriend to the heated argument she later had with her stepfather, Byron Claflin, after coming home around 3 or 4 in the morning. The case has gone quiet for decades, and that silence matters to the group because they are trying to show that older cases can still hold details worth another look, even when the evidence is thin and the timeline is messy. Linda's body is found in a river, half in the water and half on the bank. It is almost completely skeletonized, with some skin left on the back and animal activity having taken away much of the remaining bone, which makes the scene harder to read. The death is ruled a homicide. They walk through the wound path carefully, explaining that the shot entered the back left side of Linda's head and exited through the right temporal bone. No gun turns up. No bullet is recovered either, so the group has to work from the wound shape and a few outside clues to understand what kind of weapon may have been used. Mr. Craiger helps them think it through. He is a science teacher at the high school and an avid hunter, and he explains that a .25-caliber bullet is very small, centerfire, and not the sort of round you would expect to travel cleanly through a skull from far away. His example is blunt. The students mention his comparison to shooting a gopher, which gives them a practical way to picture why a distant shot would not fit the evidence as well as a closer one. From there, they begin to wonder whether the shooter was close enough to know Linda, or at least close enough to approach without much warning. They do not overstate it. Instead, they keep coming back to the same point: the case still has unanswered questions, and the little evidence they have has to be handled carefully. The episode stays student-led and plainspoken. It moves like a guided classroom investigation, with one person framing the next question, another answering what they found, and the whole group trying to piece together Linda's story from records, recollection, and a few hard facts.

As heard by us

A student-led cold case that uses a small bullet clue to raise a sharper question about distance.

The episode treats Linda Pagano's case as a cold case with real staying power: a 17-year-old who went to a Crosby-Stills National Young concert at Cleveland Stadium, came home late, argued with her stepfather, and was left to a mystery the students are still revisiting 50 years…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a student-led Ohio cold case built around Linda Pagano's 1974 concert night, a late argument, and a river-side discovery.

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