The story began with the discovery of the remains of an unknown man and woman. It took four decades to identify them and learn the fate of their missing daughter.
Everyone thought that the little girl had died with her parents, but it turned out that she became a mother and even a grandmother.
In the state of Texas, on 12 January 1981, a hunter came across two bodies in a hard-to-reach swampy area of the forest. As forensics revealed, they were a young man and woman.
Numerous injuries pointed to a brutal crime.
However, it was not possible to establish the exact day of the tragedy – the influence of climate and animals shifted the frames from one week to several months. The victims’ clothes were plain and no documents were found.
The police investigated the crime by checking all the cases of disappearances in the last couple of months, but it was not possible to understand whose bodies they really were. A year later, they were buried as unknown.
Remarkably, the police had received a missing persons report for a young couple with a one-year-old child, but at that time no one connected them to the remains found. The reasons for this were.
Back in June 1979, 20-year-old Dean Klaus and sixteen-year-old Tina Lynn were married in Florida. In the winter of 1980, their daughter Holly was born. During the summer, the family moved to Texas, where Dean took a job and Tina stayed with their daughter. Although they lived in cramped conditions, the couple supported each other.
In October of that year, contact with them went missing. Dean’s mother tried for a long time to find them, and finally, in January 1981, turned to the police in Texas. However, the bodies were found only two, and the entire family.
Klaus family was reported missing as a threesome.
Dean’s mother also said that her son had temporarily joined the Marginalists, a religious sect. It was thought that Dean might have gone back to the sect, taking his wife and child with him.
This version was supported by the discovery of his car in California in late 1980.
In the XXI century in the United States began to actively identify unidentified bodies. In 2011, it was the turn of the Texas remains. Biomaterials were taken for analysis, and in January 2021 it became known that the bodies belonged to Dean and Tina Klaus.
But what became of their daughter?
In June 2021, DNA testing confirmed that an Arizona woman was related to Dean and Tina. The woman was already 42 years old and could not remember anything about her past. Holly grew up in foster care, becoming a mother of five children and a grandmother.
It turned out that in late 1980, two women in white capes brought the infant to an Arizona church without explaining anything.
The girl was given an age and a name, placing her in foster care.
Holly, who learned the truth 40 years later, chose to remain incognito. She did not reveal her name and refused to speak publicly. She communicated with her paternal grandmother only once via video link.
This story does not have a happy ending. Holly survived, but became a stranger to her biological relatives. And the circumstances surrounding the deaths of her mother and father are still a mystery.
Their deaths are believed to be linked to sectarians, but they decided to spare the infant. Now the police are trying to find out who was part of this sect and what really happened in the Texas woods 40 years ago.
