Stuff You Should Know
SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Unsolved Indiana Dunes Disappearances
26 Sep 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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The Indiana Dunes disappearance is one of the lesser-known cases in American true crime. One day in July 1966, three women went for a day at the beach along Lake Michigan in northwest Indiana, not too far from Chicago. They vanished that day, and no trace of them has turned up since.
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Chapter 2: What happened during the Indiana Dunes disappearance in 1966?
Yeah. And the only thing I remember, well, I remember a lot about that show because I loved it. I was in love with those daughters, man. I don't remember them. I mean, that was the whole setup is that their daughters lived in the same house or next door or something.
Chapter 3: Who were the three women involved in the disappearance?
Caused trouble? Yeah, you know, they were just a couple of— Hellraisers? Hellraising beauties. And who was the guy that was so great? I think you're talking about Charles in Charge. No, I'm thinking of Too Close for Comfort. But he was a cartoonist, and he would wear college sweatshirts as part of his character.
And he wore a Georgia Bulldog sweatshirt one time, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It's like, how did they know that that's a thing? You're like, I'm basically on TV right now. That's what it felt like. Oh, man. Monroe. That was him, the Monroe character, Jim J. Bullock. I want to say Ted Knight. Yeah. No, Ted Knight was – The lead. The main guy. Jim J. Bullock, man. What was he?
Hollywood Squares? Sure. Among other things, like Too Close for Comfort. Does this kind of as a tangent if we haven't actually gotten started? No, this is a preamble.
Okay, preamble. Yeah, preface.
Nicely done, Chuck. Yeah, this is a good one. And you put this together. Where'd you get most of this stuff? Wrote it myself. Oh, well. There's one part that I was like, here, this is just easier if I copy and paste from a Chicago Tribune article from 1987. I read that one. It's very good.
That's one of the things about this case is anyone who kind of gets involved in this will see there is not a lot of information out there. Yeah, and funny enough, one of the biggest mysteries of this whole thing is what kind of boat that was, which we'll get to. That was my bad. Well, no, man. I saw in a couple of other articles it called this boat a trimaran, which is very much a catamaran.
Right. They made the same mistake.
So they were just wrong? Yes.
Okay. Yeah. Because it's the same thing. So a tri-hold, I was like, oh, it's a tri-cat, which is a sailboat, and that's what I thought it was. No, there's a tri-hold speedboat called the runabout that was kind of big in the 60s. Well, more specifically, it's a tri-hold runabout. A runabout doesn't necessarily mean it has three hulls. Okay.
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Chapter 4: What were the initial reactions to the women's disappearance?
You should write mystery novels. That's pretty good. Do you think so? Yeah. Thanks. So the weeks and months wore on. And as it did, like there are fewer and fewer people actively looking for them. As it happens. It just happens that way. But sadly, Harold Blau kept this vigil basically for the rest of his life. Yeah. He just kept – That stuff is always just heartbreaking. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know if he kept actively searching, but I know he did some traveling even later on in life to go check out leads that he'd heard about. He kept in contact with cops and reporters who were working the case. And even afterward, after other groups stopped searching, he chartered his own plane so that he could fly reconnaissance flights looking for evidence. Yeah. All to nothing.
He never found any trace of his daughter or what happened. And he was convinced that all of them were dead or they were being held against their will. Right. He was like, my daughter, you know, he said, we're not overbearing parents. He's like, she's got all the freedom in the world. Do what she wants. She wouldn't have to run away because, like, we're the coolest. Basically.
There was a psychic that got in touch, and this was pretty interesting. The psychic said, I visualized a cabin on Lake Michigan, not too far from the beach blanket, with dark-colored sand, rickety wooden stairs up from the beach. The cabin's on a bluff, and it has a lawn chair outside with its bottom out.
One of the cops investigated, drove as far as he could drive, then did some hiking, and found a cabin there. that met this exact description right down to the chair with the bottom rotted out. And this was nine years later.
Yeah, I mean, you hear stuff like that, you're like, man, you know, I don't believe in psychics calling the cops with clues being super accurate, but it turns out there was no body there because she said to dig, and they dug for three days and found nothing. But unless it was a prank, it was a weirdly, eerily accurate description.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, if you have an old abandoned cottage. Is there like a 50-50 chance there's going to be a lawn chair with the bottom rusted out? That's my theory. Maybe. It could be coincidence. I'm with you, though. It is pretty interesting at the very least. So, the case remains open. And, again, not a hint, not a trace. Nothing has ever surfaced.
metaphorically or literally, that suggests what happened to those three women. And so theories have been allowed to kind of grow and take different shape and be argued over. And there's like a handful. Most of them are fairly sensible, actually. Some are kind of pedestrian. Some are kind of sensational.
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