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You're listening to two men finding something they dreaded. A scene from an edgy film, a true story conceived, written, and directed in desperation.
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The director, German filmmaker Christian Bauer. It was like a vortex I didn't want to get pulled into.
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This is his friend, cameraman Alan Ross of Chicago. We're driving along Route 5 here, off in the boondocks.
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Alan and Christian worked on seven films together, exploring their shared fascination with life on the fringe.
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But in this production, Alan would not be the cameraman. This time, the man behind the camera would be the subject.
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Because Alan had suddenly and inexplicably disappeared. Why make a film about your missing friend?
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Because I wanted to find out on a gut level. I had been afraid of approaching this project for a long time.
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And I think this kind of fear accompanied us through the whole project. Fear because 42-year-old Alan Ross had vanished in late 1995.
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and the last years of his life, while seemingly filled with romance, spiritual growth, and an American Gothic-style existence,
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had more truthfully been cloaked in mystery, intrigue, and danger, in the grasp of a shadowy group few could even begin to understand.
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His friends from the film world, Helpless, decided to try to find their friend by making a film called Missing Alan.
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it could have been like simply a couple weeks worth of work who knew i mean i had no idea where
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this all was gonna go joining christian was galan amersian she'd also known alan as a colleague
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beloved by many in chicago's hard scrabbled but tightly knit film community alan was witty and
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charming and he did all of us favors he'd be there with his camera um working long hours working
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hard. Christian, almost in the sense of a Rorschach test, if I say the name Alan Ross to you,
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what are the images, the emotions, the ideas that come to mind? Oh, there's this quirky guy. He looks
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like a college student, horn-rimmed glasses, his own style of clothing from second-hand stores,
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and he has this specific laughter which is so unique to him. He chuckles. I think we inspired
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each other and he was one of those cameramen where you know you're always getting something
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better than what you would have thought of yourself that was on the the technical side
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on the human side alan was a hard worker he worked long hours he never got tired he carried
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around his own equipment alan was an artist he first picked up a film camera as a teenager in
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the suburbs of Chicago, and soon made his mark with the acclaimed Grandfather Trilogy,
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chronicling the last few months of his grandfather's life. We got that, boys? As an adult, he'd moved into a loft downtown and lived the bohemian life, barely scraping
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by, driving a cab when he needed cash. Pursuing his art, Alan met Christian, and their collaboration began, working on films
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that touched on their mutual interest in the odd and unexplained. from a Wall Street broker turned monk to UFO abductees.
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Only one thing, it seemed, could compare with Alan's love for film. It was his love for the city, for Chicago, its people, its action.
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But in 1993, Alan, the artist, the seeker, found a love that seemed to match his love of film and his city.
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Her name was Linda. Alan told me that she was a nurse, that she now was writing books,
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one of those books he had illustrated and he told me that he was very happy what surprised everyone
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was not that alan was in love but that he was leaving chicago he says brad i've never been
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happier and what do you say to your brother then after you he says i've never been happier in my
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life alan's twin brother brad was as shocked as anyone to hear alan was leaving the town he loved
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and for rural oklahoma i just said you know i'm happy for you if you're that happy al then go for
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it if it's oklahoma so be it right if it's alaska i don't care if you're that happy al then uh that's
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all i care about so alan and linda left for oklahoma settling in guthrie a small town about 30 miles
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outside oklahoma city as was his custom alan kept in touch with family and friends by postcard
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trouble was this time the postcards that started arriving from oklahoma were a little odd even for
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Alan? He's sending me little notes, like I seized the opportunity to seek answers for questions I
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had not been able to ask. Sound like Alan? Very much. Not surprising, huh? That's why I liked him,
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you know, because he could be so unusual and quirky. There are some other cards, though,
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some of the postcards that made you wonder what was going on with your friend, huh? Yeah.
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like the masters will shut you up in a pen with others. Then it will be up to you to find a house to enter.
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By 1995, two years after moving to Oklahoma, it seemed all but certain that this time Alan was not coming back.
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In fact, Alan and Linda had found a new home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Yet Alan continued working with Christian, making films,
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and in the fall of 1995 just as filming on a documentary on the Mississippi River was wrapping up in New Orleans guess who showed up unannounced It was the mystery woman Linda who had whisked Alan out of town before his family and friends had even met her
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She was not what I had expected her to be. What was her demeanor at that appearance?
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She was very demanding. She was very controlling. She was not the caring kind of woman I had imagined her to be
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when I saw her on the picture the first time. In fact, Alan seemed embarrassed by her presence.
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When she mugged for his camera, Alan panned away. He's telling her, stay away from us.
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But she follows the camera, and then she dances. He wants to get away from it, and he continues his pan,
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and she just disappears out of the frame. Two years into their partnership was the bloom coming off the romance between Alan and Linda.
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Christian would never get the chance to ask his friend about it. He would never see Alan again.
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For Alan's brother, too, after the shoot in New Orleans, something suddenly changed.
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Alan had stopped sending postcards or returning Brad's phone calls. He would never miss a holiday, never miss a birthday.
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So when Thanksgiving came and we didn't hear from him, that was just like unbelievable.
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Weeks later, Christmas. Yeah, then Christmas was the real turning point because we knew Al wouldn't miss Christmas.
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What had happened to Alan? His family and film world friends were about to discover that Alan's life had in fact taken a far more sinister turn than any a scriptwriter could imagine.
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By early 1996, it had been weeks since filmmaker Alan Ross had spoken to his friends or family or been seen in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
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His friends in the film world, Christian Bauer and Galan Amersian, tried unsuccessfully to reach him.
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But they also remembered Alan chit-chatting once about how easy it would be to simply vanish and establish a new life and identity.
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Maybe that's what this was all about. I was hoping that by some bizarre chance I might get a phone call and he'd say, you know, I don't want you to find me. Just lay off.
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Alan's twin brother, Brad, in Chicago, had also attempted to reach Alan. He'd also called the Cheyenne police looking for some reasonable explanation why his brother had seemingly disappeared from the home that Alan had shared with a mysterious Linda, the nurse and author who was his common law wife.
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Did you ask the police to go over to the house and ask some questions? Yes. What did they say to that?
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Well, you know, they didn't really take me too seriously. But Cheyenne police finally did make a move three months after Alan's disappearance.
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They'd received a call out of the blue from a man who said he was Linda's ex-husband, a man named Dennis Green.
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He made the stunning claim that Alan wasn't missing, but dead, murdered by Linda,
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and buried, he told, police in the basement of the couple's home. Linda's ex-husband said, look in the basement and what happened?
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They looked around and they found nothing. Alan's friends and family breathed a sigh of relief.
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They couldn't bring themselves to believe that he was truly dead. And they couldn't find his common-law wife, Linda.
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So they asked themselves, had they somehow missed a message in those cryptic postcards that Alan used to send?
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Maybe he vanished on purpose, gone undercover perhaps to shoot a film. The family hired a private detective, even psychics, but still no answers.
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In hindsight, there's almost universal regret that they didn't do more. Didn't go out to Wyoming to look for him, but they didn't.
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In fact, it wasn't until 1999, four years after Alan's disappearance, that the filmmakers' friends and family formed a partnership to try to find Alan.
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With the family doing the research, the filmmakers the legwork. and the project would take a form that Alan would have loved,
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a film that would be part mystery, part ode to the man they all missed. So you're using your documentarian camera almost as a searchlight
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to show it into some dark places, huh? I had been missing him for four years and there was no way that there was going to be an official investigation.
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The case was closed, more or less. The only way to find out something about him,
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about his disappearance, about his fate, was to mount this documentary and to start looking for him with the camera.
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This is Linda's handwriting. And almost as soon as their work began, their fax machine was jammed with documents,
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including a letter, it seemed, written by Linda herself. After Alan was shot, he was dragged perhaps downstairs.
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I saw Dennis carry two sacks of concrete, which were by the back door downstairs.
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The mysterious Linda, it appeared, was now confirming that Alan was dead. But in her version, she turned the tables on the man who'd accused her of murdering Alan.
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Linda said the real killer was, in fact, her ex-husband, Dennis Green. Information, it turns out, Cheyenne police had received by facts from Linda as well.
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The filmmakers knew now that they not only had to reach her, they had to learn as much as they could about this perplexing woman Alan loved.
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They discovered her legal name was Linda Green. In the 1980s, she was a registered nurse,
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featured in a 1980s news story about an innovative Oklahoma hospice where she worked.
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Linda had also been married, not just twice, but five times. and she wasn't just writing books,
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sometime actress and poet When she met Alan she was leading an esoteric group that Alan had only dropped hints about a group known as the Samaritan Foundation When did you first hear the name
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Samaritans? You know, we heard it when he left. Did you have a sense of what they were about?
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You know, we always knew Al would do different things, but he always would go and come back.
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Linda's Samaritan Foundation had perhaps 50 to 60 followers from all walks of life.
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What held them together was the belief that Linda could answer the great mysteries of life by dowsing,
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using swaying pendulums to give them answers. This was more than the dowsing that might come to mind, say a person using a forked twig to locate water.
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This kind of dowsing involved moving a pendulum over objects, and the pendulum gave the Samaritans guidance in making the biggest and smallest of decisions.
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They used a pendulum to decide to relocate from Oklahoma to Wyoming. They doused a roadmap and packed up.
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But Linda was more than a simple believer. She was writing books the Samaritans were sure would revolutionize the world to their way of thinking.
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Can you see your friend Alan drawn into this insane obsessiveness? At one point, Alan sat me down and showed me a pendulum, and I just didn't get it.
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I didn't see what the reaction was for him. This wasn't just a parlor game, the way he was treating it.
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He definitely gave me the impression that he thought that this meant something. And the bits and pieces that filmmakers learned about Linda's group were becoming more troubling.
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It turned out that dowsing was just one element of their beliefs. There was also an obsessive fear of telephones and government agents, obscure teachings about zombies, far-out stuff.
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Linda, the nurse, the wife posing by their little house, was a leader of a cult.
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I had absolutely no clue. And I wondered, why did my friend not tell me about it?
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Having beer some nights, I heard this interesting thing has come into my life. What do you make of it?
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He never told me anything. You talk that candidly, certainly, about the subjects with the UFOs and other offbeat interests.
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So it would have been quite normal to mention that to me. But he did not. And I later learned that Alan had doused the question, should I tell Christian about it?
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And the dousing rod or the pendulum told him, don't tell him. So doors were closing in your relationship and you weren't aware of it.
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Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, when I learned about when Elm disappeared and there was no sign of life from him, it was like I had to find out what's behind this wall, which he didn't allow me to cross. And that's why I had to start my investigation, too.
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What was the lure of the cult to the followers? What is the lure of any cult might be a good question.
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I think we have people who are looking for a meaning in life, and they don't have any answers.
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I think that was what was happening with Alan, too. And Linda had answers and texts and the path to go.
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And she chose him as her mate. Could Alan's mate have murdered him? The filmmakers didn't know where Linda had gone.
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And the Samaritan she'd led from Oklahoma to Wyoming had scattered to the wind. And the filmmakers weren't learning much from the followers they had been able to find.
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How sensitive a task was it to try and find out who the Samaritans were and what they knew?
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Well, sensitive isn't the word. It was difficult because people just didn't want to talk.
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But the filmmakers soon found evidence that raised more questions. The Cult Awareness Network told them if Alan was with the Samaritans, he was in serious danger.
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And the friends learned that just months after Alan vanished, another member of the group had thrown herself in front of a train in Oklahoma.
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Linda, they were told, had declared the woman to be evil. There was this feeling that something evil was surrounding us.
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Did you have reason to be afraid? as you went along in this? Sometimes you don't need a real reason to be afraid.
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Despite their fears, the filmmakers pressed on. To find out what had happened to Alan,
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they'd have to return to the places where Alan and Linda had lived as man and wife.
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Nobody has looked for Alan in Oklahoma, the home state of the Samaritans. And Oklahoma would quickly bring a major discovery.
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You got the camera, I checked the serial numbers. It's Alan. You know how I know it's Alan? There's a card inside that says Alan Ross.
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The filmmakers found the first tangible trace of Alan in the spring of 2000. His film camera and other belongings found in a garage near a home in Oklahoma City.
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The people next door, strangers, had simply dropped it off without explanations.
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They just gave it to me and told me to get rid of it or sell it or whatever I wanted to do with it.
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the woman who had the camera also had an important detail and who gave it to you
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some blonde lady i don't know who she was about this tall she's short yeah is this the woman who lives next door yeah that's what i didn't next door the woman in the photos
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was linda she'd lived next door for a short time after alan's disappearance but the discovery of
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alan's camera was troubling his friends said he'd never be willingly separated from it
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And it was just the first ominous sign they found in Oklahoma. In an old building that was once the Samaritans' headquarters,
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the filmmakers found more indications that Alan was almost certainly dead including his abandoned car We called Brad Alan twin brother and told him what we found
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Within days, Brad arrived, hoping to finally find his brother's body. Holding his breath, he searched the car.
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No thing in all. Thank God for that. I appreciate you doing that. Then inside the headquarters, Brad and Christian searched the basement,
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where one of the rooms had been suspiciously covered with fresh concrete. What were you expecting?
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I wanted to find him and bring him home. That's what I wanted to do. You know, he's my only brother that way.
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I might have one other, but I wanted to get him and bring him home. That's what people need to do.
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But Brad would not find his brother there. The filmmakers then followed Brad as he scoured the town for any sign of Alan.
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Like I said, he was even sick and he still got word to me. And we have not gotten one Christmas card, one birthday card, nothing.
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But the emotional search had been fruitless. All the evidence seemed to indicate not only that Alan was dead,
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but that Linda had to know what happened. They simply had to find her. And when they did, this story of missing Alan would take another bizarre turn.
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Well, you'll be looking a long time for him. It's not pretty, Christian. By the spring of 2000, it had been more than four years since cameraman Alan Ross had last been seen in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
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Had he been killed, as the evidence seemed to indicate, by his common-law wife Linda or her followers in the cult-like Samaritan Foundation?
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To the filmmakers, Alan's friends who'd set out to find him, it seemed that Linda was on the run.
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They tried unsuccessfully for months to reach her, until one day, she found them.
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Linda, it turned out, the former nurse, amateur actress and author, had reinvented herself again.
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Calling from an unknown location, she now called herself Genevieve. And although she'd sent out faxes claiming that Alan was murdered by her ex-husband,
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in a series of conversations with the filmmakers, Linda changed her story again.
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I read a fax by you saying that Dennis, your ex-husband, had killed Alan. No, he buried him.
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He buried him? Yes. So who killed him then? The specialist. Once they go too far in the mind control, they terminate him.
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That's all I'm allowed to say. It's top secret. The whole thing doesn't make much sense.
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You hear the story, Elm is subject of a mind control experiment, and that the mind control experiment went out of hand,
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and that the specialists had to kill Elm because he was not longer under control.
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The new story she told was odd, but maybe not so odd for her. It turned out Linda's family had had her committed to a mental health facility for a few weeks shortly after Alan disappeared.
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She warned us to stay away from the whole story because who was involved? The government, the CIA.
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So this conspiracy theory. And after that point, we are not able to get hold of Linda anymore.
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The filmmakers were devastated. After months of work, they hadn't found Alan at all.
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only his camera his abandoned car and a few possessions with little hard evidence in hand
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the filmmakers returned to the last place alan was seen cheyenne wyoming and met with the police
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you know my fear is that you know i dismembered alan either in the bathtub in the in the cheyenne
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We tried to give them everything we found, all the information we have. Found his camera, undisturbed bank account, relationship with this woman, the odd group that she's shepherding.
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They listened to us intently, but they also told us that what we had brought to them would not be enough to take any further steps.
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To a prosecutor, to a jury. And for us, it was important to get them back to the house.
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We wanted them to take the house apart. to look for evidence. But Cheyenne police had already searched the house
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where Alan, Linda, and the Samaritans lived four years before. So the filmmakers left Wyoming
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and headed back to begin to put their documentary together, hope once again fading that the mystery of missing Alan might be solved.
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Until Alan's brother Brad stepped in and made one last desperate plea to a Cheyenne detective.
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He said, well, I'll go in the house one more time. He told us later, he said, Brad,
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basically that was it well if we would have gone in the second time and found nothing
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the case was going to be pretty much closed what did the detective see in the house he said he saw
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like a something just sticking out of the ground in the crawl space you know he said by the grace
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of god it was just it was just by luck unbelievably it was a black sneaker a converse high top footwear
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of choice for mavericks and nonconformists like Alan Ross. When police chipped away a thin layer
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of concrete, they found the body. Alan was no longer missing. You really do want to find part of your family.
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You know, you really want them back. You know, I really feel for the soldiers that are missing in action, that they can't go get them and bring them back.
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There's a real sense about that, being able to bury your family. Brad Ross would finally be able to lay his twin brother to rest.
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An autopsy showed that Alan had died from a single gunshot wound to the head, and that his body had apparently never left the house,
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found where it had been concealed more than four years before in a crawl space. Police who had searched the house earlier had inexplicably missed it.
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What do you think about the professionalism or the intensity of the Wyoming investigation?
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I think about all the evidence we might have been able to find if the police had found the body in 1996.
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we might have the person who killed Alan Ross now in jail. The search for justice put the filmmakers back on the trail of Alan's common-law wife, Linda.
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And in the spring of 2001, they finally caught up with her in New Orleans, and she agreed to her first on-camera interview.
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It's beyond my framework of reality, how somebody could do something so terrible.
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no longer the vibrant charismatic leader the years were now showing on linda and linda returned to
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the story that alan had been murdered on the day before thanksgiving 1995 by her ex-husband dennis
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during an argument in the house where the body had been found he killed alan ross he killed him
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and then he said he would kill me and my son if i opened my mouth while linda's tenuous grasp of
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reality made it hard to hang a murder charge on her word, some detectives thought her theory of
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the motive for the murder did make a certain amount of sense. People who commit murder usually kill for
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love, money, or revenge. In this case, Linda accused her ex-husband of killing Alan in an
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argument over money made from selling Linda's books. Did you think she was telling you the
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truth, what she was saying? It's hard for me to fathom what the truth is as far as Linda's
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concerned because she had so many different versions she rattled off during the course of
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the interview. Although authorities in Cheyenne questioned Linda, her statements led to no charges.
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And a year later, in 2002, the actress, author, cult leader, and murder suspect died of liver
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failure. Her family says she died from excessive drinking to quiet the voices in her head.
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Linda's death, it seemed, threatened the investigation. With no physical evidence that her ex-husband had killed Alan, would the case die?
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Not yet, because after Linda's death, a new mystery woman came forward. Sometimes at night I lie in bed and I just say, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
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Her name is Julia Williams. For years, she was one of Linda's most dedicated friends and a follower.
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In the years after Alan's disappearance, she, like Linda, was repeatedly questioned by police.
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She told odd, often conflicting stories pointing to various suspects, but never to Linda.
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Claiming to have knowledge of where the gun was buried, but no gun was ever located.
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And when Dateline found Julia in Cheyenne, she was ready for the first time to give what she says
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is an eyewitness account to the events surrounding Alan's killing. and to publicly acknowledge her role in the cover-up after.
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Julia, do you know who killed Alan Ross? Yes, sir. Who was it? It was Dennis Green.
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And what happened that day, Julia? I was upstairs when I heard the first shot And I came downstairs and I heard the second shot And then I went into the room Dennis Green had a gun and shot to death Alan Ross
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Yes, sir. I went into the room, and he was there with the gun and Alan. Over the body?
00:28:12
Yes, sir. He said if I reported the murder, that I would be the one to be accused.
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He made a direct threat to you that you would be implicated? Yes, sir. First Linda, then Julia, accusing Dennis Green of the murder.
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Julia saying she was willing to take the witness stand against him. While Cheyenne police had publicly identified Green as a suspect,
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saying they could put him in the house the day of the murder, and Dateline obtained documents showing that Green had failed a lie detector test,
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Green denied to Cheyenne police any involvement in the murder. Can I talk to you? I'm Dennis Murphy with Dateline NBC.
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We're investigating the murder of Alan Ross. When we caught up with Dennis Green in May 2004, he was unwilling to speak with us.
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Family just wants to know the story here. With the fingers seeming to point to Dennis Green, the family of Alan Ross was hoping for an arrest.
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But in November 2004, almost nine years to the day after Allen's disappearance, authorities in Cheyenne would finally take someone to court in the case.
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Please be seated. And it would not be Dennis Green. I was extremely shocked by it.
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By 2004, authorities in Wyoming had come to believe that on the day that cameraman Alan Ross was shot, killed, and buried in the basement of a Cheyenne home, three adults had been in the house.
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Alan's wife, Samaritan Foundation leader Linda Green, now dead herself, Linda's ex-husband Dennis Green, and Linda's best friend and follower Julia Williams.
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And in this tangled web of a case, you'll recall Linda and Julia had accused Dennis Green of the murder,
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while Dennis Green said he'd believe Linda was the killer. District Court is now in session.
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But in November 2004, nearly nine years to the day after Alan Ross' murder, a trial would finally begin in Cheyenne, the first in connection with the killing.
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And in the defendant's chair sat only Julia Williams. It turns out that Julia Williams had come forward to police after Linda's death in 2002
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Telling essentially the same story she told Dateline, but with more detail Not only naming Dennis Green as the killer
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But also admitting that she helped carry Alan Ross' body to the basement for burial
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And cleaned up blood to conceal the murder Now Julia found herself in the odd position of being charged as an accessory
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Even though no one had been charged with the murder itself this defendant is charged as an accessory after the fact and as cheyenne's prosecutor began his
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case watching from the gallery were the two men still feeling alan's loss most intensely
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his filmmaking partner christian bauer and alan's twin brother brad the two who had waited years for
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answers were for the first time in the same room with the defendant whom prosecutors claimed was
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intimately involved with Allen's murder. When I'm in the courtroom, I'm only seeing the back of her
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head, and I want to crawl into that head. I want to find out what's in there, the images. I'm
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frightened of the images, but I want to know the truth, and she knows what happened. I want to make
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her tell us the real story here And the story that prosecutors had settled on was stunning to many who had followed the case That Julia Williams was still protecting the real killer who the DA had concluded after years of investigation was not Dennis Green but in fact his ex the cult leader Linda
00:32:10
The turn of events caught Allen's brother off guard. I was extremely shocked by it.
00:32:15
The surprise was just that they had eliminated Dennis completely. And the surprises continued when the state called its star witness.
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Would you state your name, please? Dennis Green. Dennis Green took the stand for the prosecution, the man named by both Linda and Julius the
00:32:33
killer, once named as a suspect himself. But now prosecutors were asserting that the man on the stand was innocent, simply a person
00:32:41
in the wrong place at the wrong time. Linda was the writer. And Dennis Green began by supplying a possible motive for Alan's murder, testifying that in the weeks before Alan disappeared, Julia had complained that money from a company set up to sell Linda's books was being embezzled.
00:33:00
Did she identify to you who she thought was doing that? Yes, she suspected Alan Ross.
00:33:06
Green said that when he left the home in mid-afternoon on the day that Alan was killed, November 22, 1995, Alan was still alive and well.
00:33:15
but in the following days and weeks green said linda began making ever more bizarre excuses for
00:33:21
alan's absence that he'd left town that he'd run off with a new lover but green said linda soon
00:33:28
made a new accusation when her family had her committed to a psychiatric ward when she was in
00:33:33
the mental hospital she accused me by a fax and by a phone call of killing alan which was horrifying
00:33:41
to me scary and at that point that's when i began to think well perhaps alan didn't run away perhaps
00:33:50
they killed him and that was a horrifying feeling green said linda also once told him that alan had
00:34:00
been murdered and buried in the basement of their home and he says that's when he contacted cheyenne
00:34:05
police to ask them to look for the body. A search, as we know now, in which the body was simply missed.
00:34:12
State your name, please. I'm Dan Green. Then to bolster the state's claim that Linda, not Dennis,
00:34:18
was the killer, the couple's son took the stand. A boy of nine at the time of the murder, now an
00:34:24
adult of 18. He testified that Linda always carried a gun in her purse and once used it in front of
00:34:31
She told me to hide behind a rock, and she blew the lock off. It freaked me out, you know, but she got the lock off.
00:34:38
Do you know what kind of gun it was? It was a 9mm. I remember that. A 9mm. The same caliber of gun that killed Alan.
00:34:48
Prosecutors were claiming that Linda had all the elements for murder in her possession.
00:34:52
Means, motive, and opportunity. And that's where I heard the gunshot. Next, the prosecution played a video interview with Julia Williams, in which she admitted carrying Allen's body to the basement for burial and cleaning up blood in the house.
00:35:11
But how did the murder actually occur? In closing, prosecutors presented evidence that suggested Allen was in fact planning to leave the group, to leave Linda and return to Chicago.
00:35:22
That's why they said Linda made up the story that Allen was embezzling money and convinced Julia it was true.
00:35:28
And on the day of the murder, the state claimed that after Dennis Green left while Julia was upstairs, Linda confronted Allen and demanded to know the truth.
00:35:37
Was Allen staying or going? She reaches into her purse. Now you stay still. I'm talking to you.
00:35:45
He goes to leave. She shoots. Wounds but not kills Julia hears what is that she starts down the stairs And as she gets down to the first floor area
00:36:01
there's a second shot. And down the stairs, they drag Allen's body. Drag him down to the crawl space.
00:36:09
Drag him back in there and start scooping out the dirt. But if the prosecution's theory of the crime
00:36:16
was a surprise to some, so was the case presented by Julia Williams Defense. When prosecutors in Cheyenne, Wyoming, rested their case against Julia Williams, all eyes
00:36:40
turned to the defense table. Would Julia now tell her story from the witness stand? What
00:36:45
evidence would her attorney offer to clear her client, charged as an accessory in the murder of
00:36:50
Alan Ross. The answers came quickly, because when Julia Williams' team was called upon,
00:36:57
the defense elected to call no witnesses, to present no evidence. Instead, her attorney simply
00:37:06
claimed that Julia had consistently told police that Dennis Green was the real killer,
00:37:11
that prosecution theories were not proof and that in the end there were still no concrete answers in the case.
00:37:18
Do you know who killed Alan Ross? Could it have been Linda Green? Could it have been Dennis Green?
00:37:30
And if you answer yes to both, it could have been both. You cannot convict my client.
00:37:36
But when the jury returned after just an hour of deliberation, Ladies and gentlemen, have you reached a verdict?
00:37:44
The news for the defense was dreadful. We find the defendant, Julia Williams, guilty.
00:37:51
Guilty. Julia Williams had been convicted of helping to cover up a murder for which no one, it appears, will ever be charged.
00:37:57
Because the person authorities believe killed Alan Ross, his wife Linda, had already died.
00:38:02
A relief for Dennis Green, who had lived for years under a cloud of suspicion. The defendant was led away to prison, where she served 18 months.
00:38:11
After the mistake by the police, the futile years of investigation, the filmmakers were left with little satisfaction.
00:38:18
Even though, as in a true crime movie, all loose ends had apparently been tied up and the credits were ready to roll.
00:38:25
Filmmaker Christian Bauer. I'm not happy. It's a sad moment, actually. Much sadder than I thought it would be.
00:38:32
At the beginning, I missed to have the opportunity to call him up and tell him, hey, Al, I've got this great project. Do you have time? Can we do it together? And he would always say yes, except for one instance.
00:38:44
and to be able then to go on a journey. It was always an adventure to shoot with him
00:38:53
and he was so involved in the stories that we were making. It was not like work.
00:38:59
It was like fun, like exploring something together. Our interview with Christian Bauer took place in 2003.
00:39:07
Just six years later, the filmmaker himself would be dead. Heart attack. For Brad Ross, there are still questions
00:39:13
and knowing that answers may never come, he desperately yearns for the chance to speak to his twin brother, Alan,
00:39:20
the man behind the camera whose fascination with life on the fringe cost him his life.
00:39:26
I miss his love. Because you know what? He let me be who I am. And in turn, I have to let him be who he is.
00:39:36
So he can't roll the movie backwards. He's always going to go to Oklahoma. I wish he hadn't.
00:39:41
I don't know if he ever get over it. you