May 15, 2017
In a case like this, there are a ton of theories. In August,
it will be twenty-one years. Twenty-one years since Cayce McDaniel
vanished. In that span of time, a lot of things can happen.
Potential sources pass away. Recollections from people close to the
case become fuzzy.
There is this game called Chinese Whispers. In the United
States, it is known as The Telephone Game.
In this game, one person whispers a message in the ear of the
next person in line. The second person does the same thing to the
person next to them and so on. The last player announces the
message to the entire group. The objective is for the first person
and the last person to have the same message. But errors happen in
the retelling, and depending on how many people are playing the
game, many times, the last message in no way resembles the original
one.
While this makes for wonderful child’s play, it can cause high
blood pressure and hair loss when it comes to investigating a
twenty-one year old missing persons case.
I’m Brandon Barnett. And this is Searching For Ghosts.
This case is the Chinese Whispers game on steroids. After
twenty-one years, the stories didn't just morph, they attained
urban legend status. And these stories are the ones that always
include the disclaimer of “I know what happened” from the people
who tell them.
The stories that are repeated most, seem to have the least
amount of hard evidence behind them. Obviously, they can’t be
ignored—they might be true…or at least have a kernel of truth in
them.
Then you have the one off stories. The ones where a name comes
up that you’ve never heard before…and you never hear again. Once
again, you don’t want to ignore this information, but these stories
hardly ever lead anywhere. So you file them away in your notes and
move on.
Then you have the stories that are not as prevalent. But you
have two or more sources who give similar accounts with similar
details. And sometimes these correlate with news reports. Those are
the ones that interest me the most.
The idea is to walk this thing slowly, and look at the reports
carefully and objectively. Obviously something was missed in
this case. And I see no point in blazing through everything and
making the same mistakes some two decades later.
I noticed something in the first article of the
Mirror-Exchange concerning Cayce’s disappearance. At the end of the
article, the author gives some family history with a seemingly out
of place piece of information concerning a “friend” of Cayce.
QUOTE
“Cayce’s parents are divorced. Her father, Ronnie Mcdaniel is
living near South Fulton. He’d recently been injured in a
motorcycle accident. Cayce reportedly had been friends with a Milan
teenager who is now being held on federal charges in a McNairy
County jail. She also has an uncle living in Florida and an aunt in
Knoxville."
UNQUOTE
That passage struck me as odd when I first read it. That kind
of information would either take a little digging or it came from a
tip. It’s in the article for a reason.
I later received a tip from a reporter who remembered an
in-depth Jackson Sun series that revealed that Cayce was pen pals
with someone in prison.
Then, the day after releasing the bonus episode, I received
those back articles of Cayce’s disappearance from the Jackson Sun
newspaper in Jackson, TN. And there is some gold in there.
From the September 15, 1996 edition of The Jackson Sun.
QUOTE
Once, a year ago, Cindy heard Cayce talking on the phone to a
young man named Charlie she’d met at church.
I said something about him to a friend and she was horrified.
Cindy, she said,He’s 18.
And I jumped Cayce about it. She told me I just didn’t know
him.
And I said, I don’t care if he’s the pope, he’s too old for
you and you’re not to call him. She thought she was going to turn
his life around. He was the first one I checked on, but he’s in the
McNairy County jail.
UNQUOTE
And this information verified what Kathy had said a few weeks
prior:
In Episode 2: Valorie, I talked about a rumor that Cayce had
used a phone at the church to make a call.
Dawn/Kathy
I asked former Lead Investigator Jerry Hartsfield if he
remembered investigating a phone call made from the church by
Cayce. He had no knowledge of any phone call being
made.
Hartsfield
There is also nothing in the news reports we have recently
obtained about any phone call being made from the church. Is this
just an urban legend or an oversight by police? Because without
there being a working phone at Cindy’s house, any call made by
Cayce would be a game changer as to her whereabouts after she left
the church.
I had a source ask a member of the church who was there in
1996, about the phone situation from back then. The church member
indicated that it would’ve been a church phone and not a pay phone
that Cayce would’ve used.
Then I received word from a source that there was a letter
written to Cayce some months before she went missing. So I set up
an interview to see what this was all about. This source stated
that Cindy had possession of this letter at the time, and that she
let my source read it. It was from an adult authority figure who
stated that God was telling him that Cayce was to be his virgin.
That was the only detail given to me, but my source said that it
was Quote “Creepy” Unquote.
I was also told that Cindy, Cindy’s boyfriend Steve and Joe,
her brother, took matters into their own hands. This was also
confirmed in the interview I did with Kathy.
There is nothing in news reports to substantiate this, so I
again contacted former lead investigator Jerry Hartsfield to see if
law enforcement knew about the letter at the time.
There seemed to be a pattern of adult men showing an interest
in the underage Cayce. This is unsettling at best. This type of
thing sets up a scenario that could easily lead to a motive to do
harm to Cayce. Do these things have anything to do with Cayce’s
disappearance? Is the letter real? Was this the doing of a
delusional older man who felt that God was speaking to him in this
manner?
There is one person who can either confirm or deny the
existence of this letter. One person who might even still possess
it and knows who the author is. That person is Cindy McDaniel,
Cayce’s mother.
An update on Cindy: I’ve heard from family members that she
has been released from jail. I’ve sent word that I still want to
speak with her. There are so many questions that only she
can answer. And she can remove the cloud of suspicion hanging over
her by coming on this podcast.
Cindy, when you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here.
Waiting.