Murdered girl's dad opens up after confronting 'person of interest'
Murdered girl Elizabeth Collins’ dad tells of ’emotional rollercoaster’ after confronting ‘person of interest’ on camera
Police have never revealed how the girls were killed or any details regarding the discovery of their bodies, not even to family members.
Their reason for doing so is because those are details only the killer would know, and safeguarding that information may be crucial in later flushing out or snaring the culprit.
For Drew Collins, his more than decade-long wait for answers has been nothing short of torturous.
But he is confident
a break in the case will soon be forthcoming.
His cause for optimism has been buoyed by the release of a new three-part series about his daughter and niece on Max,
Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth?
Collins participated in the documentary and told The U.S. Sun how he even secretively confronted a person of interest in his daughter's murder.
That confrontation will be shown in the series' final episode, which airs on August 22.
Recounting the experience, Collins said, "That was pretty emotional.
"I tried to stay calm when I was talking to him but I remember afterwards I just kind of had a breakdown. It was all just so heavy.
"The whole time I was talking to him, I kept wondering if he's our guy and there was so much I wanted to ask but I also had to try to keep talking and keep control of myself.
"I think that was probably one of the hardest things about this whole experience."
In the years since Collins saw Elizabeth and Lyric alive, other high-profile murder and abduction cases near Evansdale have led to questions about possible connections to the deaths of the girls.
One of those cases is the
Delphi murders, a double homicide of two young girls,
Libby German and Abigail Williams, who were killed in the Indiana woods in February 2017.
Parallels between the two killings were drawn, but investigators never established a link between the crime scenes.
One case to have been closely examined by investigators was the abduction of Kathlynn Shepard, 15, and a 12-year-old girl from Dayton, Iowa, in May 2013 – less than a year after Elizabeth and Lyric’s abduction.
The 12-year-old victim was able to escape, but tragically, Kathlynn’s body was found a few weeks after the abduction.
The man responsible for the abductions and murder, Michael Klunder, took his own life the same day the discovery was made.
Klunder is still considered a person of interest in the Evansdale case and is the central focus of the second episode of Taken Together.
In the final episode, Collins confronts an associate of Klunder's who was living less than a football field's distance away from him when Elizabeth and Lyric disappeared.
According to Collins, that individual is a potential suspect in the case.
"When I found out about him being friends with Klunder, I thought this has to be him," he said. "But police couldn’t place Klunder in Evansdale [at the time], so that’s a problem.
"But it's interesting: you have another double abduction, and it's a guy that you were in prison with that you were best friends with in prison, and you're here living like eight doors away.
"This guy's daughter used to ride the school bus with my daughter."
"I'm not 100% on him though," added Collins. "He's not top of my list.
"I have other people that are more interesting to me than that guy."
https://www.the-sun.com/news/12258169/murdered-elizabeth-collins-lyric-taken-together-hbo-dad/#
