Susan Welsh

Hey, Debra.

Good to see you.

Good to see you, too.

oh it really did and particularly because of that video that you're talking about because i'm a mom you're a mom from the moment you see that video with this little girl running around and she is clutching a pillow she's barefoot i was clutching my chest you know holding my breath just because you know that there's nobody around she's there by herself and something is definitely yeah something something bad had happened and we knew that from the very beginning well a kind stranger

Yeah.

yeah i think that one of the ways we certainly knew we wanted to talk to the family and friends of lintel because so many of them just sort of you know rallied around after we found out what happened and wanted to be there for her young daughter

and just wanted to be there as family and friends.

So we approached them and we really asked for them to share that story with us, to share what they were going through, what the daughter was going through, how she was feeling and how she was coping at this point.

Because by the time we did this story, she was nine years old.

old yeah yeah so so many of them had just rallied around her to try and make sure she would be okay and we wanted to make sure that we understood who lintel was as well to get a good sense of who she was what kind of mom she was what kind of teacher she was and we found that she was so beloved everyone really was willing to talk to us

We found Lintel's best friend, Melissa Mason.

And Melissa was intentional.

about making sure that the story got out and making sure that she and others would be able to represent Lintel because Lintel could no longer speak for herself.

And so once we started talking to Melissa about her best friend, Melissa was able to help us find a few more friends and some colleagues, even a student of Lintel's that said, of course, we'll talk to you because we want the world to know who she was.

This was indeed a massive area.

This is the bayou in Louisiana.

There's all...

all sorts of elements that are there um you know the the muddy waters the alligators it's just a large swath of land in iberville parish down in louisiana is where we were this area was just massive and it but it was also one of the places that we we wanted to show you just how massive it was

that we got on a boat on the waterway, a waterway they called Whiskey Bay, to basically show us like this is where, unfortunately, this is where bodies get dumped.

So this is one of the first places we looked.