Tawnya Dawn Knight (3 of Clubs, Kansas)

In a new audio-chuk-limited series, the truth about Natalie, Hoshan-kip investigates the

“disappearance and death of 27-year-old Natalie Jones.”

What starts as a missing person's case uncovers allegations of abuse, hidden secrets, conflicting evidence, and one haunting question was Natalie the victim of a tragic accident, or did someone have a reason to silence her? Listen to the truth about Natalie now, wherever you get your podcasts. Our card this week is Tonya Dawn Knight, the three of clubs from Kansas.

The search for answers in Tonya's case began after her remains were found by a farmer on June 7th, 1997. It's a search that has been ongoing for decades, but when detected Natalie Bright of the Johnson County Sheriff's Office picked up Tonya's file in 2020,

“she realized that the reason the case was called might be because of all the time lost”

early on, and the missteps of those who came before her. "What is that like when you come into that, like?" I was pissed. "You see, Tonya had been reported missing six months before her remains were found, but at the time law enforcement wrote her office a runaway. Sure, they looked around some, but when someone said that they got in a phone call from

Tonya, they were quick to call off ground searches that they had planned for the very field that she would later be found in, six months later. Coincidence, or a strategic misdirection that played right into old tropes. This case has layers, and detective Bright is going to keep peeling them back one by one until she gets to the truth of what happened to Tonya Dawn Knight.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. The Beanfield in Spring Hill, Kansas, where Tonya Knight's remains were found was a couple of acres in size. It was situated alongside Highway 169, and partially bordered by the local cemetery.

It was her skull that the farmer found first, and further searches by authorities uncovered

more remains, not buried, but concealed deep in some hedges along the edge of the property. And despite how decomposed they were, detective Bright told us investigators at the scene had a suspicion of who these remains belonged to.

“I think they had a good idea that was more than like Laitania. She was the only missing person”

case out there that I'm aware of, that I think that they were aware of, and when they immediately found her remains, they identified her through dental records. 15-year-old Tonya Dawn Knight had been reported missing six months earlier, back on December 8, 1996. It was her father Frank and her stepmother Judy, who contacted the police after she didn't return home from a sleepover at a friend's house the day prior.

The police entered Tonya's information into the National Crime Information Center, listing her as a runaway, but they still checked around town some themselves. There was an even bigger physical search plan for her, but at the last minute, the search was called off. Tonya's step uncle went to the Spring Hill Police Department in person and reported two officials that he had spoke with Tonya on the phone, and he told them that Tonya was fine,

and that she was going to come back home. As soon as her family life was better, as soon as she got along with her stepmom, she was going to come back.

Tonya and her stepmother didn't always get along, and the police seemed quick to accept this

explanation for her absence. Family drama should be back kind of thing. When he reported that, they were going to do a search for Tonya in the field over there and by the cemetery, because of what the stepmom reported, that search was called off. The idea that she had runaway just never added up to her mother, Lori, and she conveyed those feelings to law enforcement. I did have a conversation with them, and I said, you know,

she didn't take any of that. If you're going to run away, you take some of that stuff with you.

“Lori stayed in Arizona where she lived, just on the off chance that she was wrong,”

and Tonya would turn up there. Tonya had moved to Kansas about a year and a half before she went missing to live with her father, stepmother, and step sister. She started doing real good in school. A lot of her and she was out here in these schools, and she seemed to like that school and, you know, getting involved in the activities. Despite the long distance, the mother and daughter regularly kept in touch. She would, you know, tell me what she'd done lightly, like went

spend the night with a friend, or, you know, she did get a part-time job. One of the grocery stores there in Spring Hill, and she was, she'd had her driver's permit working on that. The thing that Lori kept coming back to is that they called off the search because apparently Tonya had called someone and said that she had problems with her stepmother, and she was going to,

like, lay low. But if that were true, Lori knew that Tonya's first call would be to her.

She knew if she was having a problem back there with her dad or anybody. All she had to do was call me, or her grandparents out here, and we would be on our way to get her. So she wasn't a runaway,

“and I think parents know their kids better than the authorities. But for six months, you know,”

it was just, you know, kind of sitting and waiting to see if we heard anything, or, you know, try to contact the authorities to see if they'd heard anything yet. So it was, it was pretty upsetting because you worry. At the end of those six months, the very feel that they were supposed to search was now a crime scene, which the smaller Spring Hill PD turned over to the larger Johnson County Sheriff's Office. Their texts were sifting through to collect what was left of Tonya.

If that search was not called off, I think they would have found Tonya's remains. Then I think we would have been in a better spot than we are today. I promised you that this case has layers. Didn't I? When Tonya's remains were found in June, that's when the step-up was said, I lied. Well, only partially lied. He clarified. He really did believe the call happened. It's just,

he didn't get the call. His co-workers daughter, who knew Tonya did, but she didn't want to get involved, so he stepped forward thinking that he was helping. Law enforcement obviously interviewed the girl, but it's not like things got cleared up. Yes, she said. She really had gotten a call, and she didn't want to come forward herself, so she told her father, who then told Tonya's step-uncle, but the details of the call were shaky. Not the kind of things anyone should

feel confident enough to call off a search for a missing team. According to the friend, Tonya said all the stuff about wanting to stay away till her home life got better. Except, let's be clear here,

Tonya never even said her name on the call. This friend thought that whoever it was, sounded

like Tonya. Now I'm not saying that she didn't get the call, but we're dealing with teenagers here. It's possible she was print. Another part of dealing with teenagers is they apparently asked zero follow-up questions. Who was Tonya with? Friend doesn't know. Can't say. Though Tonya mentioned being in overland part a little over 30 minutes away. So, you might be thinking like, okay, well, you know, where exactly did she call from? Let's just pull those records.

It's 1996 when this took place. We're not talking about the dark ages, but detected bright told our reporter, Annie Roderick Jones, that phone records are not part of the case file that was passed down to her in 2020. You know, I'm not 100% sure why those phone records were not obtained. It could have been because of the delay in time. It could have been because six months later when her remains were found that those, like, oh, factor. Maybe that phone call was important,

“or maybe it wasn't real. They're not, they're not a percent sure. And I think when it was initially”

reported, they believed them, you know, because you're going to believe a family member. And I think that's maybe why that they didn't initially get those phone records is because they wanted to believe that she didn't talk to them. It seems unlikely that Tanya talked to anyone after she was reported missing. Detected bright believe that she may have been in that soybean field for nearly the entire time her family was looking for her. Because with her remains, they also found her bra,

one clasp torn, and more to the point, the genes that she was last seen wearing the night that she

I think like a dark blue one. Those items were never found, though there is some conflicting

“information out there that the jacket was found. Detected bright confirmed that it was not”

nor were the pair of Nike's that she was known to be wearing. What was found, though, was an item of clothing that Tanya's parents said was not hers. In a small town, unsolved stories don't fade away. They remain in the places people know by heart, and in the lives of those who never stopped looking for answers. I'm Kylie Lowe, and on my podcast, Dark Down East, I cover true crime cases from my home state of Maine in New England with care, context, and the people impacted at the center

of the story. These cases shaped communities, even when the rest of the world moved on.

Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

In the Spring Hill Kansas Soybean Field, where Tanya Knights remains were found.

“There was something discovered that her parents said they didn't recognize.”

There was a white t-shirt that was out there. It had kind of an interesting saying on it. It said if you don't like my attitude, dial 1-800-inch. Detected bright wouldn't tell us what size the shirt was or if anything was found on it, like blood or biologics. She's pretty tight-lipped when it comes to this. Though she confirmed a fact we found reported in the Olaitha Daily News that, quote,

"imperfections," described in the article as being "compatible with puncture." "We're found on this shirt." The conclusion that's easy to jump to when you're listening to a true crime podcast, and you know that this shirt was found near a homicide victim,

is that those imperfections were caused by a weapon. But that's never been determined.

Those could have just as easily been caused by a natural decay or even animal activity. But it still begs the question, was it the killer's shirt? Was it just a piece of clothing that she owned but her parents didn't know about? I mean, God help me if I tried to walk out of the house with a cutward on my shirt when I was 15. Maybe she borrowed it from someone that she was hanging out with before she died. Right is extra careful to clarify that she doesn't

actually know who owned this shirt when all reporter Annie asked if it could have been Tanya's. That's a great debate. There is not a definitive answer if that's her t-shirt on. We have different reporting. I have somebody that says it was hers and I have numerous people that says it was not hers or his or theirs. This t-shirt was found inside out as were her jeans. And that combined with her torn bra class begins to paint a picture for me about the motive for this crime.

I don't have to stretch my imagination to get there. Sexual violence against women and girls is an all-too familiar reality, a motive as old as time. Detective Bright won't comment on whether they were signs of a sexual assault. But truth is, much like Tanya's cause of death, they might not know. Six months of decomposition in an open farm field exposed to all of the elements and wildlife doesn't leave much for investigators to work with. The seasons that we

go through in Kansas are very harsh. We have extreme colds that we have extreme heat and we have rain and we have everything in between. But just because the cause of death was unclear doesn't mean the manner was. Along with some sort of traumatic injury, the specifics of which detective Bright wouldn't get into. The totality of what they were looking at told a clear story.

“I think the circumstances surrounding Tanya's death are very suspicious at nature. There's no”

way that was a natural death. Making up for lost time, the Johns and County Sheriff's Office did something unique to try and solve the now homicide investigation they had on their hands. What we do in the Kansas City Metro area, when we believe we have a big murder case or a very complex case, they call it a Metro squad and they invite numerous detectives from all over the area to come together as a team. The detectives immediately scramble and they start really trying to

backtrack Tanya's timeline and trying to figure out where she was last. Obviously, that starts with her parents. Her father Frank told investigators he last spoke

somewhere and her dad said that she was able to. That friend was Rachel, who when Tanya didn't

return home the next day and her parents called Rachel's house. Guess what? Rachel was unaware that Tanya had said that she was going to go spend the night at her house. This switcheroo is like right out of the how to fool your parents playbook. Who among us hasn't told a similar white lie to pull one over on mom and dad so you can be young and free because they just don't understand what it's like to be 15. She doesn't want to step mom and dad to know that she's going

to go to kind of the party house. Maybe drive around town for a few hours and so I get it.

“She picked a safe friend where I think she would get dad's approval to spend the night.”

Investigators discovered that the two friends Tanya actually went out with that night

were Sarah and Crystal. So, investigators spoke to them. Sarah at the time had her driver's license so the girls told investigators they drove around hung out and met up with a boy. Pretty typical teen stuff but as the night went on. Sarah and Crystal wanted to go to Alethan which back in of the mid-90s. Alethan was kind of the more popular type town. They had more things to do because they had pool halls, they had some restaurants that was just a great place to go hang out.

Well, Tanya did not want to go with them and according to Sarah and Crystal she wanted to go to another friend's house in Springhill, Kansas. That friend is someone we're calling Shawn.

“Now we're using a pseudonym for him at the request of detectives as they are actively working this lead.”

He was 16 so just a little bit older than Tanya though he didn't go to high school with her. He had dropped out. Now why Tanya wanted to go to Shawn's rather than continuing hanging out with her friends is a little unclear. But Shawn's house was known to teens back then according to detective Wright. His house was kind of one of those split style ranch houses. You had a garage portion out front. That's where the kids hung out. That was the hang out spot for a lot of kids back then. They didn't

go into the main portion of the house and there was a lot of times where mom and dad were not interacting with whoever was in that garage. The girls told police that they dropped Tanya off at Shawn's house sometime between 8 and 10pm on the night of December 7th. Sarah and Crystal told Tanya that

“they're probably going to spend the night and only then they may not make it back and they said if”

they don't come back by midnight they're not going to be able to pick up Tanya. Back then in the 90s if you're out past midnight and you're a younger kid driving you're probably going to get pulled over by the cops. Fair enough. So it appeared Tanya might be flying solo the rest of the night. According to detective Wright, Shawn, on the other hand, wasn't. There was another boy at his house that night who I'm going to call loop because they both are still people of interest.

Now these two boys told police a pretty typical story. They hung out with Tanya, they played video games, drank, smoked a little weed, and then sometime around midnight Tanya decided to head out. She lived just a little over a half mile from Shawn's house so she was just going to walk like she did a lot since she didn't have her driver's license yet. Now walking in December sounds bananas to this girl from Northern Indiana but I looked up the temperature would have been in like the

30s around midnight so could be doable for a kid living in the Midwest. So the boy say that she left the house on foot and Shawn's mom still awake at the time. Back to that up.

So Shawn's mom was first interviewed in 1997 right after Tanya's remains were found and then

she was re-interviewed shortly after that for a follow-up. She actually had a close relationship with Tanya and that when Tanya was over at their house she would talk to her. She said she did ask Tanya if she wanted to write home and Tanya refused. She did see Tanya leave on foot from looking out the bedroom window on the second floor of their house. Investigators in 97 didn't seem to bulk at the story but Detective Bright has some concerns. First off Shawn's house was about a

block from where Tanya's remains were found. Literally right around the corner was a street that dead ended into a local cemetery the one that is next to the field where she was found and which

Ashley what if she was picked up by someone else on her walk home after she left and they put

“her there in the field. Well authorities considered that back in the day and they looked at neighbors in the”

area. There was a few people that I've been reported that maybe were violent with spouses or something like that but nothing to the extent of what happened to Tanya. By all accounts the last people who saw Tanya were Shawn and Luke in Shawn's house and then leaving it. Oh and Shawn's mom but did she like are we a thousand percent sure about that? Maybe but you know you really are separated from the other kids down on that garage and what are the chances that you just happen to look at your

bedroom window around midnight 12 30 and see her leaving. Our reporting team reached out for comment but as of this recording we haven't gotten a response. The implication is obvious. Could Shawn's mom have been covering for something? Maybe something Shawn did or Luke did or both. Detective Bright wouldn't tell us if either of the boys admitted to any physical relationship with Tanya that night but at least one of the boys admitted to something else in later interviews. They were into hard

core drugs such as meth. Not just into them but doing them that night. Now look someone doing hard drugs does not a murder or make but it just puts some huge red flags around Shawn and Luke's story like you like to the police once are you lying again and then there's just some obvious logical things detective Bright points to you. If Shawn and Kowe's story is that Tanya left the house that night okay fine. But then what was her plan? What happens when she shows up at home in the middle of the night

after drinking after maybe smoking weed? She had lied about where she was staying. She and her

“stepmother already had issues. It would have been an after school special in the making. I think”

she would have been questioned like I thought you were spending an at someone so maybe she could say hey it felt real or nothing happened but they're going to be like where where were you? What would Tanya say to that? Obviously she's not going to tell her dad that she was hanging out with two boys who were doing meth. So she would have to compound the light making it even worse

and more than likely getting caught. Now her second option would have been to go to someone else's house.

Rachel did live close by but that would have had some of the same problems if not more. What she have tried to go stay at her friends maybe but it's also was really late at night. You're 15 without cell phones. You probably have to knock on doors or windows and I don't know if Tanya would have done that. If this went down today with ring cameras and whatnot not to mention cell phones and social media most of Tanya's night would have been traceable in some way but in the mid nineties

“investigators were flying a little more in the dark but also I think they had a hard time seeing”

what was right in front of them because as fancy as it sounds to have the metro squad come swooping in none of those investigators took some of the basic steps that detected bright would hope to see in a case like this like Sean's house the last place that Tanya was confirmed to

have been at it was never searched neither was a car that the boys might have had access to that night

phone records weren't gathered either although detective bright says at least in that regard attempts were made at some point. We come to found out that during that specific time frame I think their household phone because back then they had the landline phones there was not working. As quickly as Tanya's murder investigation had kicked into gear the metro squad disbanded. After your metro squad disbands because they have to go back to their home agencies it falls

onto the lead agency. That meant the Johnson County Sheriff's Office was back in charge but one year turned to two then three and then you get the idea the detectives came and went as did potential leads but there was nothing that ever stuck so by the time detective bright was handed Tanya's case in 2020 many hands had touched it and a lot of time had passed. Kind of how I worked these cool cases is I read everything I make notes and then I want to see what evidence we have.

And Tanya's case is one of the lucky ones where they still had evidence no floods or fires

almost begging to be examined for the first time ever.

“In a small town unsolved stories don't fade away they remain in the places people”

know by heart and in the lives of those who never stopped looking for answers.

I'm Kylie Lowe and on my podcast Dark Down East I cover true crime cases from my home state of Maine and New England with care, context and the people impacted at the center of the story. These cases shaped communities even when the rest of the world moved on. Listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. By 2020 more than 20 years after Tanya was murdered. The only items detected

bright could find that were ever tested were some items that weren't actually at the scene where

“her remains were found and they were items she felt weren't relevant to the investigation”

though she wouldn't elaborate on what those were. But somehow the original detectives in 97 not to mention every detective after failed to realize that the items found at the scene

were never tested. It was so unfathomable such a major misstep in an investigation that at first

detected bright thought there had to be a logical explanation. I thought that maybe I just was in a different folder because that's the other thing with these cases and I know that you have to hunt for a lot of stuff because they're old and they get misplaced and we actually made a phone call to the crime lab. I said, "Hey, what do we get from the crime scene?" and she was like, "Let me call you back." That's not exactly what you want to hear in a situation like this, so she weighed

hoping upon hope that she was wrong. And so we got a phone call a few hours later and I was like, there's no way. There's no way that this was missed and basically she calls back and said, "Well,

“who percent down because she goes, I think this was missed. It hasn't been tested." And so my immediate”

response to that was stress and panic because I know we're fighting upheld battle now. Due to time, because things degrad and you have bacterial interference with stuff like that and forensically, I know you're kind of in a bind a little bit and I immediately was like, this is the first thing that has to get done like ASAP like today. What if anything they have found as a result of testing items detected right wouldn't share with us? But I know that if they found

DNA, they don't have anything that is currently suitable for a database like codis. Though she appears to be hopeful that at least one piece of evidence might give them what they need one day. I will say that it's good and we can do something with it and in the future it's only going to get better and I know that eventually we'll get something maybe a little more clear in the future with it. This is just me spitball in here, but I kind of wonder if it was the white shirt,

you know, the one that read, testing on that t-shirt is still ongoing according to detective bright, whether that has been at all useful forensically or not remains to be seen, but detective

bright has put a lot of work into that shirt as a clue. According to her investigators never

really looked into it much, which feels like another missed opportunity. I have been tracking down, trying to find where that shirt came from for the last six years. She's also been tracking down some of the main players in this case like Sarah, Crystal, Sean, and Luke. She's even gone down the rabbit hole with that step uncle who lied about Tonya calling him, and she's talked to the girl who claimed that the call did happen. Now exactly what was said in all these interviews or

if any new leads or inconsistencies were revealed, that's not fully known as we weren't given access to the files, but it sounds like most have roughly the same old stories. I'll be it now with fading memories. Though there is one last story that we do need to tell, and it's actually

He claimed that her murder involved several people. Now in most cases when he talks about this,

he uses nicknames for the people, but we know who this theory is built around, specifically two of Tonya's friends that we've talked about. Sarah and Crystal, and one that we have it, Steve McCarley, who this PI named publicly in an episode of The Status Pending Podcast. One of her closest friends was Steve McCarley, and she hung out with him quite a bit. The PI believed the motive revolved around typical teen jealousy type stuff over boys. The PI

theorized that shortly after Tonya left Sean's house, she was lured to the cemetery next to the

field where she was then attacked. Now admittedly, he has no proof of this. He had actually never

investigated a murder before, but this theory became a public narrative. These girls were talked about on the justice for Tonya Facebook page run by the family, but for Detective Bright, working this case today, she's not convinced of their involvement. Sarah and Crystal, and don't

“think that they were involved. I think that from what I reviewed and the evidence that I have”

seen and talking to Sarah and Crystal, and we short up their alibi that night, I did not believe that Sarah and Crystal were involved. That alibi put them staying about 10 miles away with a friend

in a lathe, as they had suggested to Tonya might happen. We did reach out to Sarah and Crystal,

but we haven't heard back from either of them. Steve McCarley died in 2019, so he's not someone that even Detective Bright got a chance to interview. Past investigators did, though, because he was a little too overzealous in helping with the case, and considering this case hasn't been solved, Detective Bright admits that she can't entirely rule Steve out. But for her, she keeps going back

“to the people that Tonya was last known to be with that night. I believe Sean and Luke know what”

happened to Tonya. They were one of the last people to see her, and when I've done re-interviews with individuals, there's a level of cooperation. I think that goes a long way, especially with these cases, and when you get kind of some pushback from them, when you can tell they have information, and they're holding back, and I think, you know, that raises red flags for me anyway. Detective Bright calls both Sean and Luke persons of interest in this case.

This year, she traveled to Arizona to speak with Luke, where he had moved shortly after Tonya's murder. According to her, quote, "It didn't go as well as I wanted it to." It's important to point out that no one has been arrested in this case, which means, for Tonya's family, no one has been held responsible. Now, almost 30 years later, something Tonya's mother Laurie is all too aware of. You know, I am hit with the reality every day that the person or person's responsible

is walking around free as if they didn't do anything. Their family gets to see them. They get to spend time with their family. I don't. We don't get to spend time with Tonya. I would like to see them arrested. I want to see them face to face in court. I wouldn't like to know why, but I doubt. I'd ever get that answer. And, you know, they need to be put away for good. If you have any information about the murder of Tonya Don Knight, please call the Johnson County

Sheriff's Office directly at 913-715-5560, or you can also email their tip line at coldcase tips at J-O-C-O-G-O-V dot org. The deck is an audio-check production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck

“in our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. I think check what to prove.”

Every story has layers, and sometimes the truth hides in plain sight. I'm Josh Dean, host of Communion, the podcast about people who transform, deceive, and survive.

quite as it seems. Because to understand the world, you sometimes have to change the way you see it. Listen to Communion wherever you get your podcasts.