The disappearance of 10-year-old Lyric Cook and her eight-year-old cousin Elizabeth Collins hit their Evansdale, Iowa clan like an atomic bomb, destroying individuals, couples, and close-knit family ties that to this day have yet to fully heal. Driven by input from virtually everyone associated with the case, Max’s three-part Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth? (August 8) is a thorough and compassionate examination of relatives and law enforcement’s investigation into the girls’ plight. What it proffers, ultimately, isn’t a definitive answer to its title question, but rather a snapshot of the pain, fury, and annihilation wrought by senseless, mysterious tragedy.
First-time director Dylan Sires was a local news photographer when the call came over the police radio that Lyric and Elisabeth had vanished while riding bikes in their neighborhood around noon on July 13, 2012. Over the ensuing years, he covered the story from every angle, including conducting hundreds of interviews with its principal players, and that material forms the foundation of Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth? From the outset, Lyric and Elizabeth’s disappearance garnered regional and then national attention, and it completely and irrevocably altered the lives of Elizabeth’s mom and dad Heather and Drew, and Lyric’s separated parents Misty and Dan. An enormous manhunt ensued, and it turned up promising (if disheartening) clues, with the girls’ bikes found at the edge of gated Meyers Lake, and Elizabeth’s purse (with her cell phone) discovered nearby in the brush. And yet, as relayed by DCI Special Agent in Charge Larry Hedlund and Chief of Police Kent Smock, follow-ups on those pieces of evidence—such as draining Meyers Lake—resulted in few concrete leads.
At a certain point, it became apparent that Lyric and Elizabeth weren’t just missing; they’d been snatched by an unknown assailant. This was, shockingly, incredibly rare: There had only been 15 prior double abductions in the United States since 1973. While police didn’t initially have much to go on, they were compelled to look into Misty and Dan, who opted to be less than fully cooperative with police, in large part because both had been previously convicted of (and went to prison for) drug offenses, and at the time of the girls’ disappearance, Dan (a meth cook and user) had just rejected a plea deal on narcotics-conspiracy charges that would have earned him three decades behind bars.
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Their unwillingness to work with authorities made them appear intensely suspicious, as did subsequent inconclusive polygraph tests. Theories arose that perhaps the girls had been taken as retaliation for a drug deal gone awry, or because Dan’s shady associates viewed his plea-deal rejection as a sign that he was planning to turn state’s evidence.
Dan laughs off this conjecture in Taken Together, and he was swiftly eliminated as a person of interest. Before long, the inquiry began to lose steam. Then, on December 5, 2012, hunters stumbled upon Lyric and Elizabeth’s remains in Seven Bridges Wildlife Area, 20 miles northeast of Evansdale. Since this was a remote location, investigators surmised that their suspect knew the park—and was possibly one of the numerous sex offenders residing in the region. Alas, those avenues led nowhere, although a potential break did emerge 10 months after the start of this nightmare, when in Dayton, Iowa, another double abduction took place—and this time, one of the victims, twelve-year-old Dezi Hughes, escaped before she could be killed alongside her friend, fifteen-year-old Kathlynn Shepard.
Dezi’s attacker was Michael Klunder, a convicted, violent sex offender, and once he realized that his apprehension was an inevitability (since Dezi was free), he dumped Kathlynn’s body in a river and hung himself. This may have been a fitting end for the fiend, but it stymied law enforcement’s efforts to link him to Lyric and Elizabeth’s abductions. Before Taken Together is over, director Sires focuses on additional related tales of woe, including the 2016 arrest of Des Moines, Iowa pedophilic sexual abuser Jeff Altmayer, and the February 2017 kidnapping and murder of Delphi, Indiana friends Abigail Williams and Liberty Germane, the latter of whom took a cell phone video (complete with a snippet of audio) of an anonymous hiker who may have been their killer. Yet in both instances, ties to Lyric and Elizabeth’s case were circumstantial at best, leaving the girls’ families to cope with the possibility that the perpetrator is still on the loose.
Still from ‘Take Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth?’
Photograph by Courtesy of MaxBolstered by home movie clips, archival photographs, and commentary from Drew, Heather, Misty, and Dan (from multiple chats recorded since 2015), Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth? proves a comprehensive and deeply empathetic overview. Sires’ interviews are rife with tears, heartache, and candid confessions about the tormented feelings that never go away; hearing Drew admit that he felt some relief when Lyric and Elizabeth’s bodies were found—and, ever since, he’s been wracked by guilt over those feelings—epitomizes this docuseries’ warts-and-all portrait of the grieving process. In its many sit-downs with parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and detectives (some of whom struggle to refrain from crying while discussing this ordeal), the proceedings provide a bracing up-close-and-personal perspective on this most horrific of situations, putting the emphasis as much on the survivors as on their deceased loved ones.
To this day, Lyric and Elizabeth’s case remains open. However, Taken Together does lean toward Drew’s belief that Michael Klunder killed both girls—this despite the fact that police decided years ago that it would have been impossible for him to have committed the crime. Via conversations with two ex-cons (Roy Conkling and Chris Ricketts), Drew attains new information that supports his opinion, and though it’s not enough to change law enforcement’s mind, current DCI agent Scott Reger pronounces that his team is still working the investigation. Alas, that’s small solace for the families whose worlds were shattered by Lyric and Elizabeth’s passing, and a family reunion on the 10th anniversary of their deaths suggests that while their sorrow may have slightly subsided, their scars run terribly deep.
