The first phone call came in to the Minneapolis Police Department shortly after 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 7, 1963.

Two little girls — Melissa Ann Lee, 5, and Barbara Ann Foshaug, 4 — were missing. They had been playing outside their families’ apartment buildings, just south of downtown, when they disappeared.

In the coming days, police officers and civilians would comb a 55-block area looking for the girls. But 3½ weeks later, their badly decomposed bodies were found a dozen miles away by a municipal worker mowing grass in a wooded area near Medicine Lake in Plymouth.

The case triggered a huge investigation by Minneapolis police, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI, dominating local front pages for weeks and garnering national headlines. Records show that authorities focused on Melissa’s stepfather as a main suspect — a 24-year-old laborer named Melvin Leverett. But he was never charged, and no one was arrested.

Ten years later, the Sheriff’s Office investigated a different suspect in the case: 27-year-old Wayne Waukazo, then living in Maple Grove. Waukazo was subsequently indicted in the murder of the two girls, but the charges were dismissed after he pleaded guilty in 1974 to murdering two teenage sisters in an unrelated case.

When Minneapolis Police Capt. Robert Finn retired in 1975, he told a reporter that his greatest regret was never solving Melissa and Barbara’s murders. “I only hope that now, that before I die, they find out who killed those two girls,” he said.

Finn remained haunted by the case until his death at the age of 93 in 2012, said his granddaughter Anne Finn, intergovernmental relations director at the League of Minnesota Cities. “It was something in his career that he never came to terms with,” she said.

In the decades since, the girls’ murders faded from memory. Then in 2023, former Minneapolis police arson investigator Sean McKenna, a history buff looking for stories to post on a retired officers’ website, came upon the case while combing the Minnesota Star Tribune’s online archives.

“How could two kids disappear in broad daylight, and in a far gentler time in America?” said McKenna.

McKenna contacted Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s reporting project that fields reader questions on local topics. His inquiry turned into a yearlong investigation by the newspaper.

We obtained thousands of pages of long-closed files of the investigation, including transcripts of interviews with potential witnesses, and retraced the steps of law enforcement officers. We plowed through old news stories and talked with relatives of the girls, who still recall the crime with deep emotion.

“It’s the most tragic thing in my life,” said Joy Roney, 65, Melissa’s childhood playmate and the younger sister of Melissa’s mother.

In the late summer of 1963, Minneapolis was a bustling city of 480,000 that was just beginning to reflect the social changes about to sweep the ’60s.

The City Council was debating Mayor Arthur Naftalin’s proposal to form a human rights commission, and Police Chief E.I. Walling was seeking funding for 16 additional officers to combat a rise in burglaries. Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” was flying off the shelves at the downtown library, and news of the civil war in Vietnam was frequently showing up on the front pages.

More than 500 people demonstrated for civil rights at the State Capitol and listened to a speech by Attorney General Walter Mondale. Gov. Karl Rolvaag was making plans for the Duluth visit in September of President John F. Kennedy. Some 113,000 people were on welfare in Minnesota and 25,000 were receiving “general relief,” including 5,000 in Minneapolis. “The trend is up, although population is rising, too,” wrote the Minneapolis Tribune’s Sam Newlund in a series on poverty.

The families of Melissa Lee and Barbara Foshaug lived in “old, run-down apartment buildings located in an old, depressed and poor area,” according to a memo by Richard Held, special agent in charge of the Minneapolis FBI office. Many residents in the neighborhood near E. 17th Street and 3rd Avenue S. were transient, elderly or welfare recipients. Rents were cheap.

The area, not far from where the Convention Center stands today, was undergoing a transition. Buildings were being demolished to make way for Interstates 94 and 35W, and children played in the huge piles of sand left by the bulldozers that were clearing land for the freeways.

Ann and Melvin Leverett had moved there from Georgia in April 1963 when Melvin got a lead on a tiling job in Minneapolis. Ann’s mother, Violet Sparks, begged her to stay in Georgia, or at least leave behind Melissa — Ann’s daughter from a previous marriage — until the Leveretts could get established. But Ann, who was pregnant, insisted on bringing Melissa with them.

Living across the alley from the Leveretts was Earla Foshaug, who had lost her husband to tuberculosis the year before. Her two children, Barbara and 7-year-old son Lynn, also had been hospitalized for TB, which Earla blamed on their damp basement apartment. The family subsisted on welfare payments and her late husband’s veterans benefits.

Money was also tight for the Leveretts, who had just had a baby daughter, Tracy. But Ann and Melvin were big pro wrestling fans, and on Sept. 7, 1963, they were hoping to scrape enough together to attend that night’s bout at the Minneapolis Auditorium featuring Dick the Bruiser and the Crusher.

Melvin and a neighbor hocked a radio and an electric shaver for $5 at nearby Acme Loan, giving them more than enough for the $2 admission ticket (“Ladies,” the ad said, got in free when accompanied by a paying customer). Melvin spent the balance on a pint of whiskey and a six-pack of beer.

Later that afternoon, Melissa asked her mother if she could go outside to play with Barbara. Ann Leverett agreed but told her to stay close to home and come back in time for the babysitter so the couple could get to the wrestling match.

Melissa went to Barbara’s apartment, where Earla gave the girls some soda crackers and told Lynn to watch them as they played outside. Meanwhile, the Leveretts settled down in a neighbor’s apartment to watch an hour of pro wrestling on TV before heading to the auditorium.

It was getting dark and Barbara had not yet returned home, so Earla went to the Leveretts’ apartment to see if she was playing with Melissa. “She isn’t here,” Ann said. “Aren’t they together at your house?”

Ann went outside and called for Melissa, but there was no answer.

“We won’t be able to go to the wrestling matches until we locate Melissa,” Melvin told Ann before leaving to look for the two girls. He told a neighbor who had been watching TV with them that he was going to spank Melissa when she got home.

Ann called Minneapolis police a few minutes after 8 p.m. to report that the girls were missing. Officers didn’t immediately respond — a delay that would be considered unacceptable today, but was explained at the time in a law enforcement document: “Past experience has disclosed the majority of children [in the neighborhood] receive little, if any parental supervision. Accordingly, it was assumed at first report that the little girls had walked away and were staying overnight with some friend.”

When the girls still hadn’t turned up, Ann placed a second call to the police at 8:55 p.m. This time a squad car was dispatched to investigate. Within hours, more officers showed up to help in the search.

Tribune police reporter Jim Parsons was working the late shift in the “rat pit,” the name reporters gave their small basement office at City Hall. When an officer tipped Parsons about some activity, he walked down the hall and was told about the missing girls. As the night wore on, officers speculated that the girls had been abducted.

Parsons interviewed the tearful mothers at 3 a.m. in their apartments. “Barbie is afraid of the dark,” Earla Foshaug told him. “I know she would have come home long ago unless something happened to her.”

Melissa “wouldn’t have run off,” Ann Leverett said. “She knew I had been looking forward for about a week to going to see wrestling.” She then turned to her husband. Didn’t he think someone took her in a car?

“Yeah,” Melvin replied. “I do.”

Said Ann, her voice trailing off: “God, I hope nothing happens to them.”

Two days later, Mayor Naftalin was briefed on the case by Chief Walling, who had launched an extensive search for the girls involving 20 Civil Defense reserve officers, 15 patrol officers and FBI agents. They checked boiler rooms, storerooms, vacant homes. They probed the sand piles near the apartments and went door to door, questioning residents.

Said Walling: “The longer the girls are missing, the more apprehensive you get about their safety.”

The Leveretts and Earla Foshaug were interviewed and re-interviewed by police and given lie detector tests. While such tests today are inadmissible in Minnesota courts, the polygraph examiner wrote that in his opinion, the Leveretts “did not tell substantially the truth,” according to tests performed by the University of Minnesota police.

Authorities chased numerous other leads. A report of a man who had been seen pulling little girls around the neighborhood in a wagon yielded a composite drawing that was published in the newspaper and circulated by the FBI. Possible suspects who resembled the man in the drawing were called in for questioning. But the leads went nowhere.

On the afternoon of Oct. 1, a Plymouth Township employee was mowing the grass along 36th Avenue N. near Medicine Lake when he spotted a human foot beside a large tree. “I knew what it was,” he said.

Twenty-four days after the girls disappeared, their remains had been found. A distraught Earla Foshaug told a KSTP-TV reporter: “I just had this feeling something was going to happen.”

Records say the bodies were so decomposed that their features weren’t recognizable. Melissa’s body was unclothed, her garments strewn nearby; the body of Barbara, still wearing her white headband, was clothed only in red shorts.

Police held a news conference at the site and allowed in photographers and TV crews for a closer look. “It seems they were kidnapped and slain,” Minneapolis Police Capt. Henry Deason told reporters.

“The bodies may have been dead before being placed there, as there was no evidence of a struggle,” Hennepin County Sheriff’s Lt. Stan Hurley wrote in an internal memo. The clothes, he said, “may have been pulled away by some wild animal or dog.”

Dr. Leonard Crowley of St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis conducted the autopsies. He found no obvious fractures, bullet or stab wounds or evidence of trauma, according to his report. But because of the condition of the remains, he could not determine the cause of death or even confirm the genders.

The death certificates concluded: “Probable homicide.”

Dr. Andrew Baker, Hennepin County’s current medical examiner, said specialists today might be able to uncover more information. His staff includes a forensic anthropologist who can analyze “skeletonized or decomposing remains … in some cases finding subtle evidence of injury — injuries that might inform the investigation and possibly even the cause of death.”

Even before the bodies were found, internal police reports show that Melvin Leverett was getting increased scrutiny from investigators.

Leverett had a record of criminal offenses going back to when he was 18, according to a rap sheet compiled by the FBI. He was picked up on suspicion of auto theft in Florida in 1958 and arrested again in 1959 for auto theft, receiving a six-month sentence. He was arrested for vagrancy in 1958 and 1961 in Florida, and in November 1962 he was arrested in Georgia for driving “very drunk,” a Hapeville, Ga., police detective informed the Minneapolis police.

Two weeks before the girls disappeared, Leverett was arrested in Minneapolis on suspicion of looking in a neighbor’s window. According to charges, he had threatened to beat up the neighbor, a woman in a wheelchair. He was found not guilty.

During the three weeks the girls were missing, Leverett sold his 1953 Ford panel truck, piquing police interest. By the time they got the truck to the crime lab, it had been “swept” and no signs of incriminating evidence were found, according to reports.

Hours after the bodies were found, police supervisors told homicide detective Russ Krueger to drive Leverett to the site to see if he could identify Melissa from her clothes but also to observe his reaction, according to police reports. “Mr. Leverett became noticeably pale and nervous while standing near the bodies,” Hurley wrote in a report.

In a lengthy memo on Oct. 21 to Hennepin County Attorney George Scott, Assistant County Attorney Don Omodt (who would later be elected sheriff) wrote that the investigation by local and federal authorities “suggests that Melvin Leverett, stepfather of Melissa Ann Lee, is among others, a logical suspect.”

One reason that authorities suspected Leverett: his familiarity with the Medicine Lake area. He had been there several times shooting guns, according to police interviews with people who had accompanied him.

Harry Roman, a neighbor of Leverett’s, told police that he had gone for a ride with Melvin to Medicine Lake after the girls disappeared but before their bodies were discovered. As they passed an empty farmhouse, Roman said, Melvin told him “the bodies could even be hid, even out here.”

Police files included reports that Melvin had been seen striking Melissa. “First he hit her on the rear end,” neighbor Ronald Livingston told police, “and then he slapped her on the head a couple of times and then pounded her on her back.”

Another neighbor, Helen Christy, told police that once when Melissa expressed fear over a cat that Melvin had brought home, she witnessed Melvin beating “the daylights out of her,” leaving her with black and blue welts from her back down to her knees.

Livingston’s wife, Barbara, said Melvin had once told her that the only reason he kept Melissa “was because she got $20 [weekly] support from her [biological] father” in Georgia. There were several reports that Melvin had also assaulted Ann.

Ann and Melvin returned to Georgia for Melissa’s funeral. Violet Sparks, Ann’s mother, bought Melvin a suit for the funeral, but he got drunk and didn’t go, Sparks told Minneapolis police. According to Sparks, Melvin had said: “Why should I go to her funeral? I hated the little son-of-a-bitch.”

Reporter Parsons, now 89 and retired, said he was told by a reliable source in the U.S. Attorney’s Office that an FBI agent met Melvin in a bar to get him drunk and admit to killing the girls. It was a tactic that would be frowned upon today; in any event, it didn’t work.

The Leveretts ultimately divorced. When a Hennepin County investigator spoke with Ann in 1973, she said that “she was scared to death” of Melvin and had not seen him in many years.

Melvin continued to have problems with the law. A year after the girls’ deaths, he was arrested and convicted of drunken driving after fleeing police in Minneapolis. He was later arrested on charges of raping a 21-year-old woman, though those charges were dropped. He died in McCormick, S.C., in 2007, at age 68.

Ann Leverett, who remarried several times and was known at the time of her death as Miriam Bush, died in Florida in 2015 at age 74. Ann and Melvin’s daughter Tracy, who was born shortly before Melissa and Barbara were abducted, was struck and killed by a car in Clearwater, Fla., at age 19 in 1982.

The Star Tribune asked Minneapolis Police Cmdr. Rick Zimmerman, who formerly led the homicide division, to review the department’s files on the case. His verdict: Police in 1963 “did a pretty good amateur job,” but added that what they did “wouldn’t meet the standards we have.”

For example, Zimmerman said, police today would not bring Melvin Leverett to the area where the bodies were found. If police later found evidence implicating the suspect, such as a footprint or a cigarette butt, the suspect could claim it was there because he was brought there.

“I don’t mean to disparage the detectives at the time,” he said. “They were [following] the general practice.”

Zimmerman noted that one officer picked up a bone he found at the scene. “We never touch evidence like that,” he said. “We have the medical examiner come in and pick up the evidence.”

Police today also wouldn’t interview little children about the case, as happened in 1963 when a 5-year-old girl claimed she saw Melissa and Barbara forced into a car. The girl later admitted she was lying, but the report sidetracked police for weeks. Today, social workers or psychiatrists rather than police officers interview children under 12, Zimmerman said.

At one point, four officers interviewed Leverett; today it would be no more than two, Zimmerman said, to avoid giving defendants the chance to argue in court that police were ganging up on them. Nor would reporters be allowed to get so close to the spot where the bodies were found.

“Nowadays, the crime scene is a block away … to protect the evidence and possible contamination of evidence,” Zimmerman said.

The investigation lay dormant for a decade. When it was revived in 1973 by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, the focus had shifted to another suspect.

In September 1963, Wayne Waukazo was a troubled 18-year-old, the son of a Native American woman from the White Earth Reservation. By the time he wound up at the Red Wing Training School, as the state juvenile correctional facility was then called, he was addicted to several drugs including a barbiturate and possibly morphine tablets, according to a memo by Dr. C.A. Schwartz, a state Corrections Department consulting psychiatrist.

A little more than a week after Schwartz’s assessment, Waukazo fled Red Wing with another escapee, Mike Olson. They stole a car, wrecked it, stole another car and eventually wound up in Minneapolis. According to investigative records, the pair then traveled to the Plymouth area near Medicine Lake, where they stayed at an abandoned cabin and met a teenage girl Waukazo knew. They stole a third car near Medicine Lake, a black Mercury Comet, and drove back to Minneapolis.

Several days before the girls were abducted, Waukazo and Olson rented a room for $10 a week at the Cordova Apartments, 1600 4th Av. S., near the apartment buildings where the Leveretts and Earla Foshaug lived. A few days after the girls disappeared, the stolen Comet was found and returned to its owner, and a Hennepin County sheriff’s investigator arrested Waukazo as an escapee.

When the bodies of Melissa and Barbara were discovered, two sheriff’s investigators questioned Waukazo. They drove him to Plymouth, where he pointed out the cabin he and Olson had occupied, about a mile from where the bodies were found. But Waukazo denied having anything to do with the girls’ deaths, and authorities found nothing in the Plymouth cabin linking him to the crimes.

“I’m satisfied he’s not involved in this case,” Gene Arnold, a sheriff’s inspector, told the Tribune.

But law enforcement authorities were not yet done with Waukazo.

On March 13, 1973, the bodies of two sisters — Pamela and Linda Kuehl, ages 18 and 13 respectively — were found in a field in Maple Grove. Following a tip, Hennepin County deputies arrested Waukazo in the murders. He subsequently admitted that he had killed the teens.

According to court documents, Waukazo met the Kuehl sisters at their Maple Grove apartment complex on Nov. 30, 1972, and drove them to his apartment, also in Maple Grove, where they got high on marijuana. He testified that when he and Pamela headed into a bedroom to have sex, Linda grew angry and a fight ensued.

Waukazo said that he took a hatchet off the wall and killed Pamela, then strangled Linda. He carried their bodies to his car and dumped them in the field, where they were found 3½ months later.

While awaiting trial in the Hennepin County jail, Waukazo talked openly to four inmates about killing the Kuehl sisters, according to sheriff’s records. But he also talked obliquely about the 1963 murder of Melissa and Barbara. The inmates began sharing what they heard from Waukazo with sheriff’s investigators.

According to one inmate, Waukazo said that he “wasn’t really worried about it now,” alluding to the murder of Melissa and Barbara, because he didn’t think “the police could dig up enough evidence to prove that he was involved.”

Another inmate told investigators that Waukazo “did not state exactly how he had killed the two little girls, but he did say that one girl had an arm and a leg chopped off,” according to a report by Hennepin County sheriff’s detective Archie Sonenstahl. The inmate said that Waukazo told him he had dumped the bodies in the Wayzata area and “poured lye on them.”

Waukazo, who was already indicted in the murders of the Kuehl sisters, was indicted by a Hennepin County grand jury in the deaths of Melissa and Barbara on June 26, 1973. Three days later, Charles Ostlund, a detective in the Sheriff’s Office, got a phone call from Ann Leverett, who had remarried under the name Miriam Massaro. She had learned there was a suspect in Melissa’s murder and wanted to know if authorities would fly her to the trial because, she said, she wanted “to see [Waukazo] hang.”

Ostlund asked Massaro if she had known any of the people living next door at the time that Melissa was abducted. She said that Melvin “had been in a fight several times with the Indians next door.” Asked if she could describe anyone with whom Melvin fought, “she stated a young Indian about 17.”

That description apparently interested Sonenstahl, who traveled to South Carolina in July 1973 to question Melvin Leverett. He told the detective that a night or so before the girls disappeared, he was at a drinking party and that a fight had broken out between him “and several of the Indian people present.”

Sonenstahl showed Leverett 15 photos of young men and asked him whether they were at the party. Melvin identified a man who he said was living at the Cordova Apartments. It was Waukazo.

Waukazo continued to deny that he had killed Melissa and Barbara, and prosecutors stated in a court filing that the evidence was insufficient to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. When Waukazo pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on May 14, 1974, for killing the Kuehl sisters, Hennepin County Judge Edward J. Parker dismissed the charges against him in the murder of Melissa and Barbara.

Waukazo received an “indeterminate sentence” of up to 40 years at Stillwater state prison for the 1972 murders. He was paroled on May 23, 1986, two years earlier than his target release date; though the records are incomplete, Dan Cain, former chair of the state Sentencing Guidelines Commission, said he likely got out early for good behavior.

Under the terms of Waukazo’s release, he was required to attend a residential treatment program and avoid violence, and was forbidden to have contact with the families of his victims. He was discharged from parole on Jan. 13, 2000.

Waukazo, now 79, lives in northern Minnesota and has not been charged with any crimes since his release from prison, according to court records. He declined numerous invitations to be interviewed for this story.

Any material evidence that might shed light on the 1963 murders apparently has long since disappeared, thrown away before DNA emerged as a forensic tool. When deputies in 1973 sought to retrieve evidence in the case from the Minneapolis police property room, they couldn’t find anything.

At the request of the Star Tribune, the property room was recently searched, but again nothing was found. Officials with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said the agency would have returned whatever evidence it had to Minneapolis police.

Joy Roney, Melissa’s aunt, is retired in the Atlanta area and still trying to understand what happened to her childhood playmate. She tracked down Waukazo’s phone number in 2005 and called him to ask about the case. “Wayne talked to me over 30 minutes,” she said. “He was very nice.”

Waukazo insisted to Roney that he had not killed Melissa and Barbara, she said. But he suggested someone who could have been involved: “A man named Snake,” he said, according to Roney.

Rick Zimmerman, the Minneapolis police commander, said the case has never been closed. But no one has worked on it for decades, he said, “because there is no viable suspect or evidence.”

When the Star Tribune told him about Roney’s 2005 conversation with Waukazo, Zimmerman drove to northern Minnesota last fall to interview him. Zimmerman said that he could not discuss publicly with the Star Tribune what transpired in the interview because the case is still open. However, Zimmerman did call Roney to tell her about the interview.

According to Roney, Zimmerman told her that Waukazo said he had not been involved in the murders. Waukazo said “Snake” was a nickname for Mike Olson, the juvenile who had escaped with him from the Red Wing correctional facility. Zimmerman said that Waukazo didn’t know if Olson had killed the two little girls, according to Roney, but Waukazo added that Olson was “capable” of it.

Olson’s name shows up in several investigative files having to do with the murder of Melissa and Barbara, though not the nickname Snake. Police don’t seem to have considered him a suspect, according to records.

A few days after the girls’ remains were found in October 1963, Olson was interviewed in the Goodhue County jail in Red Wing, where he was being held on auto theft charges. Olson said that after he and Waukazo fled the Red Wing facility, they stole two cars on the way to Minneapolis and “bummed around town together for a couple of days.” He said they then stole a black car in the Medicine Lake area and parked it outside Minneapolis Vocational High School, which was a few blocks from the room he and Waukazo rented.

Olson said he left the apartment and went to stay with his parents in White Bear Lake on Sept. 6, returning to the apartment on Sept. 9 — the weekend that the girls were abducted in Minneapolis. A police report confirmed Olson’s account but didn’t explain how they had done the verification.

Both Olson and Waukazo went on to serve time for stealing cars following their escape from Red Wing. Olson eventually moved to Georgia, where in 1967 he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to a prosecutor’s report.

More than 60 years later, it is impossible to say with certainty whether investigators overlooked other potential suspects. Based on the Star Tribune’s review of thousands of pages of investigative files, Melvin Leverett seemed “a logical suspect,” as Assistant County Attorney Omodt noted. He had a temper, was hostile to Melissa, and angry that she had wandered off and upset his plans to attend the wrestling match. And he was familiar with the area where the bodies were found.

“If he wanted to go to the match and something would come up, he would get mad as hell,” a friend of Leverett’s told police at the time.

But after police questioned Leverett extensively and the BCA ran tests on his truck, nothing was discovered linking him to the murders. Nor did authorities find any incriminating evidence in the black Comet that Olson and Waukazo stole near Medicine Lake.

Jim Lee, Melissa’s biological father, was living in Georgia with his second wife when Melissa was killed. Now 85 and a retired minister, he said in an interview that he had put the tragedy behind him. “It was so hideous and awful when it happened,” he said.

“I had to forgive whoever it was who killed my daughter and the other little girl, whoever was responsible for their deaths,” Lee said. “If the man who did it did not get saved before they died, they are already in the fire, but I forgive them for what they’ve done.”

Lynn Foshaug, Barbara’s older brother, was living in a nursing home in Duluth when he was interviewed last year. He remembered little about what happened on Sept. 7, 1963, other than his mother’s admonition that day to look after his younger sister.

“I was outside playing with my friends,” he said. “I was supposed to be keeping an eye on her and she disappeared. I don’t know where she went.”

Foshaug, 68, died Dec. 11 of heart failure. “He’s with Barbara now,” said his daughter, Colleen Duden of Sioux Falls.

Barbara’s death affected the way Lynn protected Duden when she was growing up, she said. He would meet her at the bus stop when she came home from school and didn’t let her go to friends’ houses unless he knew the parents well.

“I had to go to work with him on days when I didn’t have school because he didn’t want anything to happen to me,” she said. “It definitely set a fear in him of something happening, because I was his only kid.”

Barbara is buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, beside her mother and father, and Melissa is buried at Westview Cemetery in Atlanta next to her paternal grandparents. The spot where their bodies were found is today part of French Regional Park in Plymouth, part of the Three Rivers Park District.

Roney recently reached out to Three Rivers officials to see if they might consider some type of memorial for the two little girls. Park Superintendent Boe Carlson told the Star Tribune that the district has decided to install a memorial bench near a playground, across the street from where the bodies were found.

“The idea is that someone could be sitting at the bench and observing kids safely at play,” Carlson said.

Walking last year in the woods near the site where the bodies were found, Duden spoke of her sadness.

“Being here and seeing it, it hurts my heart,” she said through tears. “I love Barb and I still to this day communicate with her and talk to her. She’s very much a part of my life.”

For Roney, Melissa’s death has caused her endless years of anxiety for which she underwent therapy and counseling.

Melissa “could have been my twin,” Roney said. “She needs to be remembered, her and Barbara — little baby darlings.”

John Wareham of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed research for this story.