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Episode 2: An unlikely person makes a surprising connection between the woman in the woods and Mindi, just as law enforcement spend months trying to determine the woman's identity. Investigator Jack Frost gets creative working with existing evidence to track down a possible suspect and learns more about Mindi and Nick through her parents. Episode 3 will be available on Wednesday, September 30th, on The Woman in the Woods podcast feed. Follow the series wherever you get your podcasts. With 48 Hours Plus, you can listen to this and other limited series from 48 Hours early and ad-free.
Duration
28m
Broadcast on
29 Sep 2026
Audio Format
other
Just a warning, this episode includes graphic descriptions of a crime scene. Please listen with care. So what do you call this area? This is the intersection of Jones Road and the hunt club known as the new road. Philip McCaller drove me and his white pickup truck to a rural wooded area, about 50 miles south of Savannah, Georgia. Come out here pretty regularly. Pretty every Friday and Saturday we hunt, we was hunting that block of woods that particular day. He and his hunting buddies bring their dogs regularly here to track deer. We start hunting at 6.30 in the morning and hunt till dark. And that's why he was here on December 2nd, 2022. Philip and I returned to that spot and parked on a dirt road to retrace his steps. We got radios in our trucks and somebody hit call and said that they killed the deer which come right here and started kitchen dogs and that's when we found it. But it wasn't a deer. Well, kind of thought it was a mannequin to start with. He didn't look real. He didn't have no color. It was pale white. And then once we got to looking at it a little better, we kind of figured that it was real. Philip and his friends called 911. Told me he found what we thought was a body. A dismembered body, human arms and a torso. As the hunters waited for deputies, they discovered more evidence. And this area right here and all around this is where all the trash, the bags are closed, the tote, the knife, that's where all that was found right here. And what kind of knife do you remember the kind of knife? It was like a sheetrock knife you might load the cut sheetrock with. The blade, he says, was about 6 inches long. It was wrapped up in a towel like a sheet. Law enforcement arrived on scene to investigate, but the horror of what he witnessed wasn't over. The next day, McCaller was hunting two miles away. And then what did you find the next day? The leg. McCaller found a human right leg. Investigators then expanded their search area in the middle of a 25,000 acre tract of land, filled with planted pines, swamp bottoms, and creeks. They brought in their canine team. And less than a mile south of where the right leg was found, they found the other leg. Investigators thought the remains belonged to a woman, but they had no face, fingerprints, height or weight to make any kind of identification. At that point, I mean, it's trying to figure out who that person is. Years later, on December 7th, investigator Jack Frost with the Liberty County Sheriff's Office went back out to the woods. He spotted an area near an oak tree. The dirt looked like it had been disturbed. And that is where I discovered the head. It's something you can't prepare yourself for. Now that they knew what the mysterious woman's face looked like, investigators released two sketches to the public asking for leads. I was like, whoa, wait a minute.

Transcription truncated.

Episode 2: An unlikely person makes a surprising connection between the woman in the woods and Mindi, just as law enforcement spend months trying to determine the woman's identity. Investigator Jack Frost gets creative working with existing evidence to track down a possible suspect and learns more about Mindi and Nick through her parents. Episode 3 will be available on Wednesday, September 30th, on The Woman in the Woods podcast feed. Follow the series wherever you get your podcasts. With 48 Hours Plus, you can listen to this and other limited series from 48 Hours early and ad-free.