# 24: What Happened To Lindsey Baum?

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 6 Jul 2023, 21 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880294/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851562-44100-2-136c8cfa0495876f.mp3

Today's episode is on the unsolved (or solved?) Lindsey Baum case, originally published in July 2019. Tips for Lindsey Baum's case can be directed to the FBI's Seattle Field Office at (206) 622-0460. You may also contact your local FBI office, the nearest American Embassy or Consulate, submit a tip online at tips.fbi.gov , or call McCleary Police Department at (360) 495-3107. Please check local call charges. Trigger Warning: abduction, kidnapping, child death Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[0:09] Neil, A True. Crime.
[0:10] Podcast where we. Crack.
[0:11] Open some of the most notorious cases in history.
[0:15] Given the topics that we'll be investigating, it goes without
[0:18] saying that this show comes with a content warning.
[0:21] The details can get a bit heavy and you might find some of the
[0:24] themes we discuss triggering. Listener discretion is strongly
[0:28] advised and check the description for some resources
[0:31] and further information. So today's video is going to be
[0:40] another solved ish true crime case.
[0:45] Now, this is not officially solved in the eyes of the law.
[0:49] However, police believe that they kind of know who did this.
[0:53] However, I am not accusing anyone in this video S
[0:57] technically this video is unsolved.
[1:00] This case is unsolved. Today we're going to be talking
[1:02] about the case of Lindsay Baum. And this was a channel member
[1:06] suggested case. So thank you so much to Caroline
[1:08] who suggested this one. So yeah, before I get into this,
[1:11] I just want to give my usual disclaimer that I mean
[1:13] absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in this
[1:16] video. This video is for educational
[1:18] purposes and everything that I'm about to say is just information
[1:22] that I have found on the Internet and I'm compiling into
[1:24] one video. S Lindsay Baum was a 10 year old
[1:27] girl born on July 7th, 1998 in Tennessee, USA.
[1:31] She had an older brother named Joshua, and when she was still
[1:34] very, very young, her parents had quite a messy divorce.
[1:38] And following this divorce, Lindsay's mother, Melissa,
[1:41] decided that she was going to take her two kids, moved to
[1:44] Washington, moved to a very small town named Mccleary, and
[1:47] they were just going to start over.
[1:49] They were going to start a new life.
[1:50] And Mccleary was like the perfect place to raise two
[1:54] children. It was very, very small, very
[1:56] remote. It was on its own.
[1:58] There wasn't many neighboring towns and cities.
[2:01] The population was around 1500. It was very, very safe.
[2:05] Everyone knew each other. As for Lindsay herself, she was
[2:08] a very, very outgoing little girl, very energetic, very
[2:12] active, very opinionated. For someone so young, she was
[2:15] one of those characters that kind of like when they walk in
[2:18] the room, you know, they're there.
[2:20] Her mother Melissa said that Lindsay was always talking, no
[2:23] matter what it was about. She just always had something to
[2:26] say and they always used to joke that she came out of the womb
[2:29] already talking. She was just a very happy,
[2:32] lively girl. She was very creative, she
[2:34] really liked creative writing and like telling stories and
[2:37] things. And aged 10, her dream career
[2:40] was to be an author. On Friday, June 26th, 2009,
[2:45] Lindsay and her older brother Joshua set off walking to
[2:48] Lindsay's friend Michaela's house and on their way they got
[2:52] into a bit of an argument. Now I just want to say that this
[2:56] part of the story is a little bit messy and the details are
[3:00] very contradictory between a lot of different sources, so I'm not
[3:04] 100% what went down during this part of the story, but I'm going
[3:09] to try my best. So I think Lindsay and Joshua
[3:12] got into an argument over a bike and at some point during this
[3:15] walk, the two of them were arguing and they passed a family
[3:18] friend and this family friend told Joshua to go back home and
[3:22] let Lindsay go to Michaela's by herself because they were
[3:26] arguing. Maybe they were getting upset, I
[3:28] don't know. Joshua turned around, he walked
[3:31] back home, he was back home within 5 minutes and Lindsay
[3:34] walked the rest of the way to Michaela's house alone.
[3:38] So I believe the idea was at Lindsay and Josh were going to
[3:42] walk to Michaela's. Obviously now it was just
[3:44] Lindsay. They were going to meet
[3:46] Michaela, stay there for a little bit, and then I think
[3:49] they were going to walk back to Lindsay's and have a sleepover
[3:52] at Lindsay's. I don't really know what
[3:54] happened, but somehow plans changed and they were no longer
[3:57] allowed to have this sleepover. And so at 9:30 PM, Lindsay sets
[4:02] off walking back from Michaela's house.
[4:04] But back to her house alone. So around half an hour went by
[4:08] and it was starting to drop dark at this point because it was
[4:11] summer and it was getting to around 10:00 and Lindsay still
[4:15] wasn't home. And this walk back from
[4:17] Michaela's did not take half an hour.
[4:19] Lindsay had done this walk hundreds of times before, and
[4:23] her mother, Melissa, knew how long it would take her, and it
[4:27] was taking her longer than normal.
[4:29] So Melissa started to worry a little bit.
[4:31] She rang Michaela's mother, who obviously told her that Lindsay
[4:35] had left at 9:30 and she should have been home by then.
[4:38] And so Melissa knew something must have been wrong.
[4:41] And so she went out in the car and began driving around the
[4:44] streets on Lindsay's normal route home looking for her.
[4:48] And Melissa did this for a little bit longer.
[4:50] She kept going back home to check if Lindsay had come home
[4:53] yet. And then around 11:00 PM, it was
[4:56] getting properly dark outside, and she realized she needed some
[4:59] help. And so she called the police and
[5:01] reported Lindsay as a missing person.
[5:04] So immediately a mini search party was formed with some
[5:08] police officers, Lindsay's family, a couple of neighbors,
[5:11] and they were out searching the whole of Mccleary, not just the
[5:14] route that Lindsay would have walked down, but there was
[5:17] number sign of her. There was absolutely no trace
[5:19] that she'd ever been there. And this continued into the next
[5:23] day and then the next day and then for weeks.
[5:27] And pretty much by the end of this search, the whole of
[5:30] Mccleary was in on this search party.
[5:32] Everyone was looking for Lindsay Bond.
[5:34] There were cadaver dogs. There were air searches.
[5:37] There were people on horseback. There were people searching
[5:40] woods and forests and bodies of waters, rivers, streams, ponds.
[5:44] There was nothing ever found. Of course, there was a little
[5:48] bit of speculation right away that maybe Lindsay had run away
[5:52] from home. Maybe she had purposely left,
[5:55] and that was because she'd just been told that she couldn't have
[5:58] a sleepover with her friend Michaela.
[6:00] She just had an argument with her brother Joshua, and people
[6:04] think that maybe she was angry and upset at all these authority
[6:07] figures being unfair to her. And so she ran away, and maybe
[6:12] she got lost and couldn't find her way home this whole time.
[6:15] But at the same time, she was 10 years old.
[6:18] She didn't have her phone on her.
[6:20] She didn't have any spare clothes, her toys, no money.
[6:24] She had absolutely nothing with her.
[6:27] So she wouldn't have been able to get out of Mccleary.
[6:29] At least she wouldn't have been able to afford travel because
[6:32] she had no money. But the whole of Mccleary had
[6:34] been searched. So she obviously wasn't in
[6:37] Mccleary, but she couldn't have got out of Mccleary by herself,
[6:40] realistically. So police immediately thought
[6:44] that a third party must be involved.
[6:46] So police interviewed pretty much every single person in the
[6:50] immediate area, specifically the people that lived along the
[6:54] route that Lindsay would have walked that evening to get back
[6:57] home. They were interviewing everyone
[6:59] to see if they'd seen any kind of vehicles, obviously, if
[7:02] they'd seen Lindsay or if they'd seen any unusual activity in
[7:06] that area. And one person had seen
[7:09] something. A neighbor saw Lindsay walking
[7:11] back home at 9:30 PM that night. But what was really frustrating
[7:16] in this case, of course, among other things, is that it wasn't
[7:21] getting the airtime on, like news channels and newspapers and
[7:24] things that it deserved. And that was just down to
[7:27] really, really unfortunate timing.
[7:29] Lindsay actually disappeared the day after Michael Jackson passed
[7:33] away. And of course, Michael Jackson's
[7:37] passing was one of the biggest things that I remember ever
[7:41] happening in my lifetime. Like everyone was talking about
[7:44] it for months. It was on every top headline.
[7:47] It was on every news channel, local, national, It was all
[7:51] anyone was talking about. Whereas on a normal day, if a
[7:55] child goes missing, that's all that anyone's talking about.
[7:59] Of course, Lindsay's disappearance was still shown on
[8:01] the news and it was still on newspapers and things, but not
[8:05] as much as it would have been any other time of year, not as
[8:08] much as it deserved to have been anyway.
[8:10] Despite that, police and all of Lindsay's family were working as
[8:14] hard as they could to piece together any possible evidence
[8:18] because obviously there wasn't really anything.
[8:21] It was like Lindsay had vanished into thin air.
[8:24] And I know that's a very common thing for people to say in
[8:27] disappearance cases, but there was no evidence left.
[8:30] There was absolutely no lead that they could have possibly
[8:33] taken. And so Lindsay's mother,
[8:34] Melissa, began thinking about things that might have happened
[8:37] in the run up to her child's disappearance that might have
[8:41] any connection to it. And I just want to mention a
[8:44] couple of things. These don't have any connection
[8:46] to it really. It's just interesting pieces of
[8:50] information that her mother recalled from the week before
[8:53] her going missing. Her mother has said in
[8:55] interviews that about a week before Lindsay went missing, the
[8:59] whole family was sat watching the movie Taken.
[9:02] And I mean, I haven't seen Taken personally, so I don't really
[9:05] know what it's about, but I believe it's about a girl
[9:08] getting kidnapped. In itself, it's very eerie.
[9:11] But the fact that Lindsay actually turned to her mother as
[9:15] they were watching this film and she said, mom, is this kind of
[9:18] thing real? Like, does this actually happen
[9:20] in real life? And Melissa said to her
[9:22] daughter, yeah, of course it happens in real life.
[9:25] That's why I'm so careful about where I let you go and why
[9:28] you're not allowed out after a certain time.
[9:31] Like, that's why we have rules because this kind of thing is
[9:34] very real. And then just a week later, the
[9:36] exact same thing potentially could have happened to Lindsay.
[9:40] But even more eerie than that, the night before Lindsay's
[9:43] disappearance, she went and spoke to her mother, Melissa.
[9:46] She sat her down and she just said, mum, I have a really bad
[9:50] feeling. And Lindsay couldn't explain why
[9:52] she had this feeling that something bad was going to
[9:54] happen. She didn't know what was going
[9:55] to happen or but she just had this gut feeling that something
[10:01] bad was going to happen. And obviously Melissa tried to
[10:03] come for her saying oh don't worry, you've probably just got
[10:07] a bit of anxiety today. But within 24 hours, Lindsay had
[10:11] disappeared and was never found again.
[10:14] Melissa also remembered a couple of events that happened in the
[10:17] run up to Lindsay's disappearance in the week before
[10:20] it as well. One of them being that the
[10:22] girls. Now I don't know who the girls
[10:24] are, but this is how Melissa tells the story.
[10:27] So I'm assuming that one of the girls is Lindsay and the rest
[10:30] are her friends. I don't know how many girls, but
[10:33] the girls, They were in a public bathroom at a local park when a
[10:38] man walked in, opened the door on 2, 2 little girls in the
[10:42] bathroom and he just stood there in the doorway.
[10:45] He looked at them, I don't know for how long, and then ran away.
[10:49] He ran, he got on his bike and speed away in the opposite
[10:53] direction. And then in that same week,
[10:55] Lindsay and her friend were walking down the road, a very
[10:59] close road to her house, when they felt like a white vehicle
[11:03] was following them. And as soon as Lindsay's mother
[11:06] told police about this white car, they began looking out for
[11:09] a white car. So they were already checking
[11:11] CCTV of pretty much every place in Mccleary to see if anything
[11:16] had happened around that time. And then they checked from the
[11:20] night that Lindsay disappeared, they checked the CCTV at a local
[11:24] gas station, and there they found a white car.
[11:28] Now, personally, I don't really like this piece of evidence
[11:31] because Lindsay didn't mention a make or a model or any specifics
[11:36] about this car. She said a white car, and then
[11:39] police took it and ran with it and found a white car at a gas
[11:45] station on the night of her disappearance.
[11:47] And they thought of it to be real evidence.
[11:49] And to me, that's just that. That's a little bit ridiculous.
[11:54] White cars, I don't know how common they were in that
[11:56] particular place in 2009, obviously, because I wasn't
[11:59] there. But white cars are not the
[12:02] rarest in the world. Police did try to track down
[12:06] this car and find the owner and everything, but obviously it
[12:09] didn't really go anywhere because it's just a white car.
[12:12] Now, As for specific suspects, not suspects, but people of
[12:18] interest in this case. A man named Tim Hartman owned a
[12:22] jewelry shop on 4th St. and 4th St. was on Lindsay's route home
[12:27] from Michaela's that night. She would have crossed over 4th
[12:30] St. to get home. So obviously Tim Hartman was
[12:33] questioned, just as every other person on Lindsay's route was at
[12:38] the time of her disappearance. And he initially said that he
[12:41] didn't know Lindsay, he didn't know who she was, he'd never met
[12:44] her before. He wasn't even in Mccleary on
[12:46] the night of her disappearance. He was actually volunteering or
[12:50] training with an ambulance company or something.
[12:53] And so police just kind of took his word for it, you know,
[12:56] whatever. And as police continued with the
[12:58] investigation, they were looking at CCTV footage and then they
[13:02] came across one particular lot of footage from one particular
[13:06] shop in Mccleary around the time of Lindsays disappearance.
[13:11] And there was Tim Hartman, a man that was supposedly out of
[13:15] Mccleary doing volunteering or training.
[13:18] So he lied to police or gave a fake alibi.
[13:22] For what reason? Like, obviously that was
[13:25] suspicious. Not only was he in Mccleary, in
[13:27] that shop on the night of Lindsay's disappearance, when he
[13:31] left the shop, he also left in the direction of the street
[13:36] where Lindsay would have disappeared from.
[13:38] And remember, this man said that he had no idea who Lindsay was.
[13:42] He never heard of her, never met her, didn't know she was
[13:45] missing. However, Melissa Lindsay's
[13:48] mother then told police that he'd actually helped with the
[13:52] search that night. He was actually going above and
[13:55] beyond to help with the search. He had Melissa, Lindsay's own
[14:00] mother, in his car and they were driving around looking for her,
[14:04] going to certain places that they knew that Lindsay liked to
[14:07] go, double checking if she was there.
[14:09] So of course, he knew who Lindsay was.
[14:11] He knew what she looked like. He knew she was missing.
[14:13] Hartman had a lot of inconsistencies with his whole
[14:18] story, not just his alibi but every part of his story.
[14:22] So police asked Hartman why he said he was doing his
[14:26] volunteering training thing when he was actually in Mccleary and
[14:29] he said it was because he didn't realise how early it was.
[14:32] So when police asked him where were you at 9:30 on that night,
[14:36] he thought he was still training.
[14:38] He didn't realise he'd come home so early and initially he was
[14:42] pretty cooperative with police, so obviously they wanted to talk
[14:45] to him quite a bit because nothing was adding up and he was
[14:48] seeming very suspicious and he understood that.
[14:51] He understood that his story had been very inconsistent.
[14:54] So he went to every single questioning, every single
[14:57] appointment police wanted him to be at.
[14:59] I think Tim was just getting very annoyed because police were
[15:03] calling him in for questioning all the time and they were
[15:06] asking him the same questions and they knew the answers and
[15:10] Tim knew that they knew the answers.
[15:12] He'd already given him these answers, and so he stopped
[15:15] cooperating. He was never actually a suspect
[15:18] in the case, He was always just a person of interest.
[15:20] Because there was no evidence against him.
[15:23] There was no reason for police to think he was a suspect other
[15:27] than his back alibi, which at the end of the day could be an
[15:31] honest mistake. He could have just messed up his
[15:33] timing. So Tim Hartman did actually take
[15:36] two polygraph tests in this case.
[15:39] Now, if you don't know what a polygraph test is, it's a lie
[15:41] detector test. They're not that accurate.
[15:44] They're not admissible in court. Just because it comes up that
[15:46] someone's lying doesn't mean they're actually lying.
[15:49] It's just a good indicator. So Hartman took the first
[15:53] polygraph test right at the beginning of the case when all
[15:56] of the suspicions started. He just given that fake alibi.
[15:59] So they gave him a polygraph test and he passed.
[16:04] But then a couple of weeks later, police called him and
[16:06] said, oh, no, actually you failed.
[16:08] So police asked him to do a second test.
[16:11] Hartman went back. He sat this second test and the
[16:14] answer was inconclusive, meaning it wasn't a pass or a fail.
[16:18] And then police asked for him to take a third test.
[16:22] And he felt like police were taking the Mick again.
[16:24] And so he refused to do a third test.
[16:27] So we don't really know whether he passed or failed the first
[16:30] one. We don't know what happened with
[16:32] the second one either. And for a long, long time, that
[16:35] was it for this case. There were no more suspects, no
[16:38] more people of interest, absolutely no evidence, no sign
[16:42] of Lindsay Baum for years. That was until nine years after
[16:47] Lindsay disappeared, her remains were found in September of 2017.
[16:53] Hunters found Lindsays remains in a very remote area in Eastern
[16:58] Washington, which is actually hundreds of miles away from
[17:02] where Lindsay disappeared. And they weren't actually
[17:05] identified as Lindsays remains for a long, long time because
[17:09] they were so far away from where she went missing.
[17:11] No one connected the two until finally they were sent to an FBI
[17:15] lab in Virginia and DNA tests proved that they were the
[17:19] remains of Lindsay Bond. So now this case had turned
[17:22] very, very quickly from a missing person search to a
[17:26] homicide. And obviously with the drastic
[17:29] change in location, police decided that they now needed to
[17:32] look closer to where her body was found for a suspect maybe.
[17:37] So police ran a check of local criminals in that area to see if
[17:41] anyone was capable of doing something like that.
[17:44] And 1 result in particular came up that they were very
[17:47] interested in. And these were three elderly
[17:50] brothers all living in the same house, all in their 70s and 80s,
[17:54] and they were all known paedophiles.
[17:57] Their names were Thomas, Edwin and Charles Emery, and they're
[18:01] better known in this case as the Emery brothers.
[18:04] So the men's home was searched and police found thousands of
[18:09] indecent images of children, videos.
[18:12] There were letters of the men writing about things that they
[18:16] wanted to do to girls, unimaginable things, not even
[18:20] just sex crimes, but like torture and murder and
[18:24] horrendous things. But not only that, police also
[18:28] found in this house a lot of girls clothes and toys and shoes
[18:34] and underwear. And it's very, very concerning
[18:37] how they might have on hold of those kind of things.
[18:40] And yes, this home where the Emory brothers lived was
[18:44] hundreds of miles away from where Lindsay disappeared from.
[18:47] However, during this background check, they also found that the
[18:51] brothers owned a house 30 miles away from where Lindsay
[18:54] disappeared, which if they were at that house at the time, it
[18:58] puts them closer to the area, close enough to just be driving
[19:02] around looking for someone to kidnap potentially.
[19:05] So like I said before, these brothers were known criminals.
[19:08] They'd done things and they'd been charged for them before.
[19:12] Thomas and Edwin actually pled guilty to their charges and
[19:15] served time, whereas Charles was ruled incompetent and so his
[19:19] charges were completely dismissed.
[19:21] It's been a year, a full year since police have made this link
[19:25] between the Emory brothers and Lindsay Baum potentially, and I
[19:30] believe the investigation is still ongoing.
[19:32] Like I said, no one has been officially charged for this
[19:35] crime, for anything to do with Lindsay, but police are still
[19:39] working on this case. They still want any information.
[19:43] If you have any information, I'll leave contact links and
[19:46] numbers and everything in the description, not even just about
[19:49] the Emory brothers. But if you feel like you have
[19:51] any kind of information about Lindsay or any other potential
[19:55] suspects, make sure you're getting in contact with police.
[19:58] I don't believe Lindsay's cause of death has actually been
[20:01] established. Maybe her family know, and maybe
[20:04] it's just not public information.
[20:06] Or maybe her body was so badly decomposed that they couldn't
[20:09] find A cause of death. She'd been dead for eight years
[20:13] before they found her remains so.
[20:15] The likelihood is that she was very, very decomposed.
[20:19] So that's it for this case. Like I said, please do get in
[20:21] contact with police if you do have any information.
[20:27] Thank you so much for listening to usual disclaimer.
[20:30] At this point, I just want to say that if you've been affected
[20:33] by any of the topics we discussed today.
[20:35] Please. Check the description where
[20:37] we've left some helpful resources.
[20:39] If you. Want to hear more cases like
[20:41] this one? Make sure to follow Usual
[20:43] Disclaimer on your podcast app so that you get notifications
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[20:49] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[20:52] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[20:56] production. See you next time.

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