Dead of the Night Podcast · Kenneth Bailey

Ep 2: The Thing About Isaac

November 16, 2020·25 min·2 clips

A tip from Kenneth's college friend reveals Isaac Miller has an active profile on Grindr, and the profile photo appears to show a woman in a Christmas dress cropped out of the image.

The first problem is the phone. Brett explains that Devin's phone pings the 833 Tyler Road tower at 1106, then stays at Patty's house. Isaac's data briefly lines up with that. His phone hits the same tower at 1106 and 1108, then leaves Tyler Road for the rest of the night. No return ping shows up. That gap matters because it weakens the idea that Isaac went back to Devin's house after those first two signals. Then the map shifts. The trail moves from downtown Emmett to a Verizon tower in Horseshoe Bend, putting Isaac's phone toward the forested area investigators keep circling. The host wants that to mean more than it can. Brett will not give him the easy version. A boyfriend inside a broad 40-mile forest area is suspicious, but it does not prove what happened. The frustration stays tight. They say the missing piece out loud: the location history suggests a route, but Devin's water-damaged phone may hold the context. Texts could change things. If Devin and Isaac arranged a meeting at Boiling Springs, the forensic extraction could give investigators something firmer to follow. The phone is not the only loose end. The white van from Patty's 911 call is still unresolved, and proving whether it was real could change the case. Patty's voice sits over all of it. She talked about the van more than once, but her decline after Devin disappeared left investigators with interviews that became harder to trust. There is grief inside the procedure. Patty died from end-stage liver disease on October 7th, 2019, without knowing what happened to her daughter or whether Devin was alive. Then the episode closes on an image. Isaac's profile, under the username buttoncruncher, shows a cropped photograph where the missing person is reduced to an arm and an ugly Christmas dress.

As heard by us

A patient, unsettling case file that turns cell pings and grief into real tension.

The episode keeps tightening around Isaac Miller with a kind of patient pressure. Cell-tower data, the route toward Horseshoe Bend, the damaged phone sent off for extraction, and Patty's repeated warning about a white delivery van all make the case feel ordinary on the surface…

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Why you'd press play

Follow the cell pings that put Isaac somewhere he should not have been.

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