Corey.

She had a place out west of the Scotin and she had some animals and dogs, cats, horses, dogs and all kinds of stuff over there.

This is Greg Thompson, the local handyman who did small jobs for Tolena.

When Corey moved into Teleina's house fresh office separation from her husband, she came with a menagerie of animals, both big and small.

She had to do something with all the animals and all the corrals and everything.

They went with them.

Then here's old Greg.

That's me.

I volunteered to help Corey and we moved all of her stuff over to Chilina's house.

Talina was a huge animal lover and she welcomed Corey's cats and dogs into her home.

The larger animals that couldn't fit were placed with her neighbor and house cleaner named Billy Shieltz.

Billy had a pretty good size yard.

We sent and she put the donkeys in there.

They were a little miniature donkeys and she liked them.

They were cute.

And they had this horse.

It was like thirteen or fourteen years old, super old, and it was like a horse made out of toothpicks in paper.

I mean it was so skinny.

I was like, Corey, what's up with that horse?

And she goes, well, I've had people report me to the law and everything else about that horse.

But I have a vet that says that it's sick, and you know, we're just trying to let it live.

It live its life out.

I don't want to put it down.

You know, we're letting it live and it eats, it drinks, it did everything a horse should have done.

It just looked awful.

A couple of months go by and the old horse finally passes away, and Corey calls me like nine or ten o'clock at night and asks me if I had access to a back and I'm like, no, I don't.

I have a tractor, but it doesn't dig holes like that.

I said, okay, well maybe I can get some help from a neighbor over here.

Okay.

So a couple of days go by, I end up over at Billy's.

I said, what happened to the horse?

We're being up burying it and she goes, well, we didn't end up burying it.

And I'm like, well, what happened to it?

It's not here and she goes, well, Cory, Butcher, that thing, and I'm like what she said?

Yeah, she keut that horse up in tiny little pieces and put it in black trash bag and put it in the back of the Pontiac six thousand and hauled it out to Muskogie and dumped it out for the kyak And I'm like, what, who does that?

And so I've read it to Cory and we got talking about it.

I said, can't you?

And she said it took.

Me a long time.

I was able to do it and said I just thought it was fitting to take it back out there where it had lived all its life and trying to return it back to nature.

And Okay, that's freaking weird, but okay, whatever, And I'm like, who even knows how to do something like that?

From iHeart Podcasts, I'm Melissa Jelson And this is what happened to Teleina Zar.

Just because they're missing doesn't mean anything was nefarious.

All of us wear mass.

How well did I adapt to being property?

Well?

That depends on whether you ask me or master.

Lol.

He would talk and talk and talk, so he'd give us information.

He'd give us names, he would give us phone numbers.

The first thing I would say was, how's your roommate going, and she always answered the best I've ever had.

There's still part of me thinking that maybe someone will just call and say she's sick somewhere.

Most of me is saying that when I get that phone call, it's going to be because someone found her.

I'm supposed to identify her.

Episode four, The Mattress.

We had some meat from a fundraiser that our kids were doing at the school.

It was like shausage meat.

I don't know if you've ever heard of Blue and Gold, but it's kind of a big deal down here in the Oklahoma, Texas area.

It's really good stuff.

Selena had already pre paid pretty items, and I didn't want to keep that even though she was missing.

At this point, about a week after Teleina disappears, her friend Aris stops by her house and meets with her roommate Corey.

The purpose of Aris's visit is twofold.

She's dropping off some meat that Teleina had ordered, and also picking up a mattress of Telena's which had been promised to her son.

She's just moved into a new house and Telena had been instrumental in helping to furnish it.

So we get there we see Corey.

We asked, you know, hey, how you holding up Daddy?

Heard anything?

They're like no, they hadn't heard anything from Teuleina.

Corey meets Aris at the door, but doesn't invite her in.

She's worried that the virus could still be lingering inside and doesn't want Aris to get sick.

She said that to reduce the possibility and exposure there, we should stay.

Outside, standing on the front porch.

Aris asks about the match and learns that it's gone.

The bed that we were going to be given was burned in the backyard.

Corey burned it because the CDC told her to because Telena believed she had COVID.

Burning Teleina's bed in the backyard strikes Eiris as an extreme reaction to COVID, but then again, so is the decision to shut down businesses and schools.

I mean, people were spraying their groceries with lyesol before touching them.

It was a weird time.

Luckily, Corey says there's another mattress she can take instead, and so Aris and her husband loaded up.

Before they leave, Aris brings Corey the sausage meat you want.

I take the sausage out of my car.

I go hand it to her and I say, hey, this is the stuff that Telena paid for.

You know, even though she might not be here right now, I would rather go to the house to pay for it.

She looked at me and said, you guys should go ahead and take it.

Our fread is stuffed full of meat.

Not long after, Greg bumped into Corey in town.

She was filing a missing persons report for Calena.

She had this big mask on like you would use for like painting or something, you know, to keep the fumes up.

We had talked for a minute and I expressed my concern about Helena missing and was asking her do you know where she could possibly have gone.

The two compare notes and theories for a few minutes, and then Corey asks Greg for some help at the house.

She asked me to come over and pick up some scrap metal in their yard, but they've accumulated for haul off trash or something like that.

Later that day, Greg drives over to Telena and Corey's.

So I get over there to pick up Corey's strap metal, and it was Telena's headboard from her bed and what was left of the mattress that I had just put on there.

It had been burnt and all that was left was a metal wire frame that's inside the mattress.

You know, We're loading this stuff up on there, and I'm like, is this Tuena's bed, and shot, oh, yeah, this is the sick bed.

This is where Telena was so sick, and you know, to get rid of the germs and this and that, I just earned it all.

Greg loads his trailer with the metal bed frame and heads towards the recycling center.

I pulled up on the scale and the ladies behind the windows, you know, she's looking at all my stuff and tell me to pull uh.

And she walks out there and she goes, what size of the headboard is that?

I told her I think it's Queen or Keene whatever, and you're you might if I had it.

Then I'm like, I don't care, because my daughter is looking for a headboard and I think that one would be perfect.

I gave it to her, and so I went ahead and got rid of all my strap and went on about my day.

That evening, Greg finds himself recounting this story to a friend.

I'm telling my buddy this as we're sitting in the garage, and he said, do you not think that he just got rid of it edity and a possible crime.

And I was like, I don't know.

I mean, it was just really really weird things were happening.

This is Rachel another Wagner friend of Telena's.

Everybody's you know, reaching out to each other and it's like, has anybody seen Telena or has anybody here heard from Telena?

There was nothing, nothing, And people reached out to Cory have you heard from her?

And Corey like blowing it off and stuff.

No, she's sick, she's up in the woods and whatnot.

And the whole situation was just weird.

But COVID was starting to ramp up and people were starting to get sick and stuff right around that time, and you know, we all tried several weeks to reach out to Corey and Telena and stuff and just never heard anything.

There's a pretty big group of people in Wagner looking for Telena now Rachel airis Greg and his wife Marty aka Wolfe and his wife Lorie, as well as other neighbors, even Telena's hairdresser Kim.

They put up flyers and organize a vigil.

Wolfe had this little get together at our local fire departments.

It was to bring awareness to Helena's disappearance.

I didn't go to it that.

My wife just popped in doctor Wolfe and his wife and some other people that were there, and she noticed that Corey wasn't there.

The thing about Corey is she's a recent transplant.

She's been living with Telina for less than a year.

And the Wagoner friends they start to have the same nagging feeling how well did any of them really know her.

My wife went over to the house and Corey met her at their you know, answered the front door, but just barely cracked it and then came out.

She wouldn't let her in the house.

And Billie sheielded the lady that was cleaning their house.

She went over there and Corey wouldn't let her in.

There was really only one person in town who had a long standing relationship with Corey.

That was Marty Woolfy, that met more than a decade earlier at Gorefest.

Wolfe had called me and asked Kelly a week or two afterwards if I had noticed anything about Corey.

I said no, everything seemed to be business as usual.

I mean, she seemed probably a little too nonchalant.

When more than one person started asking me if I'd noticed anything is when I started to really start to question every interaction we.

Had, with suspicions raised.

Aris looks back over her text messages with Teleina before she disappeared, and she starts to think, some of these messages don't sound like Telena.

Talna had reached out to Aris on March twenty eighth and asked her to swing by for the mattress, but at the last minute Teleina canceled.

We were supposed to go over that morning, and we got a message that said, I have a migraine.

I'm going to stay in you know, abart mission.

Whatever, abort mission.

I've got a terrible migraine.

I've been staying in bed today.

Okay, not in common, but I'd noticed she had packed it differently.

She normally has a pattern of how she types that you know, uppercase, properly, punctuated, grammatically correct, and that wasn't it.

Initially I just wrote it off as she might have a migraine, like, clearly has a migraine, so, you know, not keeping up with the grammar.

A number of Telena's friends are also questioning the legitimacy of Telena's final Facebook post, like Rachel, who was skeptical about it from the moment she read.

It, but literally just talked to her a couple of days before a messenger and she was, fine.

I'm on day nine of this virus and I am pretty sure it has reached my lungs.

We had talked about COVID.

She didn't seem particularly worried about it.

She didn't seem to be like the sky is falling kind of thing, which is what this post sounded like.

I made the decision at the onset that if it got bad enough, I would not go to the hospital, And.

At the time when I read it, I'm like, that just sounds weird.

That doesn't sound like Telena.

Telena's friends in Wagner are growing distrustful of Corey, and so are the online sleuths.

We all had reservations about Corey, Like nothing she said or did make sense.

Why was she being like so sketchy about everything?

Really, the biggest the biggest one was trying to figure out who Corey was and and her history and you know, where did she come from.

After we found out about the Gorrians, we started deep diving Corey.

So we googled Corey and found out she had a criminal history, a felony.

According to the documents they can access.

Six years earlier, Corey was arrested and charged in Madison, Wisconsin for using someone else's credit card.

Her criminal records will pop up online and it said she had used credit cards at different places.

This discovery is interesting, but the online sleuths know enough from their true crime shows that a past charge for a nonviolent crime doesn't prove anything.

A lot of us said, well, just because she's a thief does not mean she's a murderer.

That doesn't It's not the same thing.

So they keep digging, developing a basic profile for Corey.

They learned that she grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin with her mother, father, and one brother, and since she left home, it seems as though she's traveled a fair bit.

They find addresses for her in at least four states.

We found out she had like thirteen different aliases, and I was like, who the hell needs thirteen aliases?

And then I look myself up and I see I have two different you know, my name is two different times because I had been married.

And then my maid name, and I was like, that makes sense to have one or two, but then thirteen.

So we start googling like her life and we download this app where you can get background checks on people.

We see who she was married to, and then we start reaching out to people she was married to.

Not afraid to cold call strangers, Jess identifies two ex husbands and reaches out first up David Sachs, who Corey married in the nineteen eighties.

His father owned a casino in mob Era, Las Vegas.

Jess has a few conversations with him, and he offers some color about Corey, like the fact she'd once worked in a coroner's office, but he hasn't seen her in decades.

Her second husband is more helpful.

Alexander Adams is a Celtic musician who Corey met in Oregon when she was an event coordinator.

They spent fourteen years together, traveling the country for gigs and releasing music online.

Alexander Adams or Alec as he goes by, is receptive to Jess's questioning.

He's in Wisconsin, but he's heard about Tolina's disappearance and wants to help however he can.

He tells Jess some of.

Their backstory, filling in gaps in her research.

Alec is in the Renaissance festival circuit.

In fact, he'd met Marty slash Wolfe at the annual Oklahoma Renaissance Festival some years back.

Alec tells Jess that Marty loved his music and asked him to come to his private event, Gorefest.

Corey went too.

He invited Alec back to Gorfest to perform at the festival, and he invited them back, like, hey, come perform for us.

You know it's going to be great, and they went.

It's here at Gorfest in the early two thousands where Telena first meets Corey.

The online sleuths are developing a better picture of who Corey is from their conversations with Marty, Corey's ex husbands and the research into her past, and then they find something huge.

She used eBay to make a living.

She'd sell stuff on eBay and that's how she'd make money.

And that gave us the idea to look on eBay to see what she's been selling.

We'd all take turns kind of creeping on it every day, like checking to see if anything was up that was weird.

One day, Nicole Telena's friend in Tennessee notices that Corey is selling things that had been in to Lena's house.

Looking at old pictures of her house and you would see that she was selling things off.

Little by little.

You could see clock in the background of a picture, and then it was there on her eBay.

We had seen her selling Telena's stuff, some clothes, these metal like lawn flowers that she had gotten, I guess Nicole had said.

Telina was very excited about these lawn flowers.

They're like metal.

She had bottomed a flea market or something, and she loved them, and we just we were all like, what is going on here?

Why is she selling this stuff?

Aside from just some trinkets and collectibles, they saw some of Telena's most treasured belongings for sale.

Her wedding ring to Tom was on there, and she would never ever ever sell that wedding ring.

And when I saw that, and I saw his medals he was awarded in the Army, I knew that there was no way that she would have sold those things.

Nicole comes up with a plan to get the items back without Corey catching on.

I contacted my cousin and I asked her just to buy them that I would pay her for them.

She lived in another state in Louisiana, and so I thought that she would not knows me.

Nichole's cousin wins the bid.

Corey packs up the wedding ring and some of Tom's military medals and ships it off.

Niicole's cousin then forwards the package to her.

Armed with this evidence, Nicole contacts the cops, so does Jess, but the response they get is not as enthusiastic as they hoped.

At first, it was like, Okay, thank you, we're getting a lot of tips, you know, thank you.

We appreciate it.

And we were really hyped up about the eBay thing.

I was like, hey, this is huge.

It's been twenty two days since Telena's cryptic Facebook post.

From the perspective of the online sluice, the cops aren't doing anything.

I was mad.

I think all of us were mad.

We were like, what the hell, it's plain's day, what she's doing?

The Jess and the others aren't privy to what's going on behind the scenes.

On April twenty ninth, Detective Joel Webber and a colleague go to Telena's property a brown, rustic lake house set back from the road.

Corey invites them in and gives them a tour.

It's the first time law enforcement has gone inside the house.

She shows them around the living areas and the bedrooms where she and Telena slept.

Here's how Detective Weber later described his visit.

In that initial kind of walk through of the house, there was several things that kind of, I guess stood out a little bit.

One of the things was in the office room, there was a map on the wall that had a lot of arrows on it.

They weren't drawn on the map.

It came like from the distributor or whoever, with those arrows on it, and it said like the missing four one one on it or something like that.

And I asked Corey what that was or what it was for, and Corey said it was just all of the arrows indicated people that had gone missing in national forests around the United States.

I thought that was significant.

I made a mental note.

There was a map of missing people on the wall, and I'm there looking for a missing person.

It seemed unusual.

I think I went into I think I went into every room and then also in the yard.

Corey shows Weber around the yard, the garage, and then he leaves.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff's office is being inundated with tips from friends, locals, psychics, and the online sleuths, and a large number of them point at Corey.

About a week later, Detective Weber asked Corey to come back into the station to address some of the rumors that have been circulating.

Here's a recreation of parts of their conversation.

Okay, good, I forgot a pen, So all right, just had some fallow up cues from we talked about before.

Yeah, you probably.

Already know that people on the internet are already talking and saying lots of things.

And there's one gal online that you know, between some misinformation and some fabrication.

It's unfortunate, right, everyone wants to be a detective.

Yeah, it seems that Corey knows about Jess and the fine to Lena's our Facebook group, she's been lurking online.

Okay, so.

I'm getting told a lot of random stuff and a lot of and I'll be completely honest with you, a lot of people are pointing suspicion at you.

Detective Weber starts asking Corey about some of the tips his office has received, beginning with questions about Corey's criminal record.

All Right, somebody brought up at some point that you were charged with something and I don't remember what state, Okay, Wisconsin or in Wisconsin Wisconsin?

Yes, so what happened in a nutshell?

My husband?

Corey explains that a number of years ago, she and her then husband, Alexander Adams, the Celtic musician, moved to Middleton, Wisconsin, where her mom lives.

My husband and I spent every penny we had to move to Wisconsin, and we went through a tough time where we didn't have much money.

Corey tells Detective Weber that she became good friends with a man who lived next door, and one day this neighbor gave Corey his wife's credit card to use so she could get some groceries and gas.

He said Corey could pay him back later.

Well, the wife was jealous of him and I for no reason, and she had a canary and she pressed charges.

Corey says, at first she was booked for a misdemeanor, but the wife was making a lot of fuss and so they elevated the charges to a felony.

Ultimately, she says it never went to trial.

She got two years probation.

It was all a big misunderstanding.

No probation violations during the two years.

None, No, they move on.

Okay, Well, one other thing came up, and that was the allegedly somebody thinks you're selling things on eBay that belonged to Tom, that belonged to Tolena, that were her deceased husband's.

Stuff, and that is very possible.

But there are things that Telena has been giving me of Tom's for the past two years, okay, to sell online, So there's nothing sold that shouldn't be sold.

And quite frankly, as her executor, she told me, when I'm gone, do whatever you want.

With everything, and I haven't.

I mean, there's most stuff is still there.

Corey reminds Weber that legally, she's in charge of Telena's a state in the event of Telena's death.

Weber responds that it's really too early for her to be taking on that role.

Well, and I don't maybe it's not even my place to say anything, but I don't want you.

What can make you look worse or look bad to some people is that she's not she's not been found.

Uh huh, She's not dead as far as we know, so doing things as an executor before we know she's dead is presumptuous.

I like to imagine that.

Weber takes a dramatic pause here, looks Corey in the eye, has a little staring contest, then looks down at his notes.

Weber switches gears, brings up something his deputies mentioned.

They said there was some sort of travel trailer or a trailer of some sort in the driveway.

Oh, a white cargo trailer.

Yeah, I think it was.

It's sold.

It's sold.

Yeah.

And so the reason I ask is because someone brought that up and I said, I didn't see a trailer when I was in the driveway.

No, we sold that.

Okay.

When when did that sell?

Oh?

I think it was either mid March late March, March a couple of months ago.

I don't know.

Well, at some point the deputy saw this trailer, as my understanding.

Okay, maybe it's sold in early April.

Would you do you do you know when he saw it.

I'd have to I'd have to go back and chat.

Okay, on the date, Corey says she sold it to a friend of a friend for one thousand dollars.

Weber asked if she has some sort of receipt, and Corey says she's sure she signed something, but he gave her cash.

And actually, trailers don't have to be registered in Oklahoma, so there's no official paper trail.

What was a trailer got to do with it?

Was mine, it wasn't Telena's.

So okay, Well, the only reason it has to do with anything is just because my understanding he was there one day and now it's not.

And so I'm just trying to Yeah, I'm looking at anything that's, you know, seems unusual.

Yeah, it doesn't mean it's anything.

It just means I'm answering questions ahead of people asking him.

What I'm getting from all these questions is that people online have already made up their mind because they can't find resolution somewhere else.

Corey seems frustrated by the line of questioning.

Why is Weber cow telling to these nosy internet hacks with nothing better to do.

I'm asking questions because they're throwing suspicion on me, and it would be dumb of me not to ask because I need to.

I need to be able to honestly say I've done everything we can do yes.

We've checked everywhere we can check.

Yes.

And if I don't ask these questions, someone's going to go why didn't you ask that?

I want that too.

Detective Weber adds if the online sleuths start hassling her, she should reach out to the sheriff's department for help.

He too, seems a little fed up by their persistence.

You're not going to solve it online.

Nobody's gonna find her on Facebook.

But by god, there's plenty of theories.

So and I told Nicole last time I talked to her, and I haven't talked to her.

Probably a week.

But I said, these crime junkies with their miss information, and there are little bits of information that aren't enough to make an intelligent you know, jump from point A to point B.

You're probably going to do more damage than good.

Because you're going to divert focus from maybe where it needs to be.

Uh huh.

So I said, prove me wrong.

Have your crime junkies finder prove me wrong.

During the interview, which lasts more than two hours, Corey agrees to do anything to help clear her name, including allowing the sheriffs into the house to test for bloodstains, So there's this.

There's a fear going around that and just being completely honest with you, yes, please, people think you killed her in the house and so and that's and again nobody has any reason to think that.

It's just they feel something.

My thought was, we have a we have a chemical.

I don't know if you know what luminol is, but it's something similar to that, where luminol is just sort of a mist.

We can squirt on the floor or something, uh huh, and it will illuminate blood and that kind of thing.

Uh.

And so my thought was, we can come, we could spray the floors and you know that would help us.

I guess, you know, if that's what you have to do.

And without prompting, she also offers to take a polygraph to rule her out as a suspect.

So let's whatever we have to do to get to that point.

Okay, I mean, I'll.

Take a lie detector test.

You guys can bring the canines.

I don't care what you have to do.

Next episode on What Happened to Tolenazar, the amateur investigation starts to take its wole on Jess.

And lied to a lot of people, a lot friends, of Telena's friends of Marty's.

Sometimes I felt like I was in over my.

Head and the police obtain evidence that throws the timeline of Telena's disappearance into question.

This final post appears suspicious and unlikely to have come from Telena or her cellular phone.

What Happened to Telenazar is a production of iHeart Podcasts.

It's written, reported, and hosted by me Melissa Jelson, with writing and story editing by Lauren Hansen.

Our executive producer is Ryan Murdoch.

For iHeart Podcasts, executive producers are Jason English and Carl Catel.

Fact checking by Savannah Hugley.

Zoey Denkla is our associate producer.

Jeremy Thal is our editor.

Original music by Aaron Kaufman with additional music by Jeremy Thal and Gideon Crevische.

Additional sound designed by Marita Spee.

Episodes are mixed and mastered by Carl Catle.

Voice acting by Lizzie Gore, Chris Ferry, Stephanie Frame, Pete Monica, and Molly Maslin.

Our logo is designed by Edo Moore.

Thanks so much for listening.