The unsolved 2012 murders of two young Iowa cousins still haunts this town
Exclusive: Cousins Elizabeth Collins and Lyric Cook-Morrissey went out for a bike ride in the summer of 2012 in their sleepy Iowa town. Elizabeth’s father Drew Collins talks about his grief at the pair being tragically snatched and murdered, with their killer still at large, James Liddell writes
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Drew Collins says his eight-year-old little girl Elizabeth and niece Lyric Cook-Morrissey, 10, were like any other Midwestern girls their age.
They loved spending time outdoors, singing, dressing up and would often choreograph dance routines together to face their neighbors.
“They were like sisters,” Collins told The Independent.
But unlike most other little girls in the sleepy town of Evansdale, Iowa, Elizabeth and Lyric never got to grow up.
One summer afternoon in 2012, the cousins went for a bike ride together near a lake in northeast of the town.
Then, the girls vanished.
All that was left behind were their bikes and Collins’s purse with her cell phone inside traipsed over a fence.
Months of worry descended into a parent’s worst nightmare: their bodies were found by hunters 20 miles from where they were last seen playing together.
More than a decade later, the cousins’s deaths are still shrouded in mystery and treated as a double murder. Collins said he’s unable to escape the summer of 2012.
Despite a conflated effort between local and federal law enforcement, the victims’ families and Evansdale locals, the killer has never been found.
Now, their case has been placed under the microscope in new three-part Netflix documentaryTaken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth?
Dylan Sires’s series set out to do something which authorities have, as of yet, failed to do: track down the little girls’s killer.
‘It’s a trap’
Evansdale was home to about 4,000 people which placed community at its center. Nevertheless, Collins said he’d never let his 8-year-old go on a bike ride without an adult.
Elizabeth and Lyric were dropped off at their grandmother Wylma Collins’s house in downtown Evansdale on the morning of July 13, 2012 to be minded while their parents — Collins is a busy tree surgeon — were at work.
The grandmother, who took a more laissez-faire approach to parenting, let the girls go out on their bicycles. They pedalled away at about 12.15pm after their grandma told them to be home “soon”.
After an hour, the girls were still not home.
The cousins were last sighted alive between 12.30pm and 1pm by Gilbert Drive, next to Meyers Lake – a favorite amongst anglers. It was about five foot deep and filled with algae, Collins recalled.
Almost three hours had passed, and Wylma alerted her daughter, Heather, who rushed home from work before, finally, calling the police.
Father’s heartbreak
Collins, Elizabeth’s father, had just got in from work when his wife, Heather, told him that the girls were missing.
“They'd gone, evaporated into thin air,” Collins said.
Upon their search, authorities and the family found the bikes, along with Collins’s cell phone inside her purse at the lake’s southeast corner. The area was surrounded by eight foot fences; Elizabeth’s purse was found strewn over one of them.
“When we found the purse over the fence, I started to really get nervous,” Collins said.
Days passed and local volunteers flocked in their droves to assist the family and police in the search for the two little girls.
The Sherriff’s Office joined the search by Saturday, shortly by the FBI and Department of Criminal Investigations.
Police drained Meyers Lake as the FBI sent their divers into some of its deeper underwater pockets.
Candlelight vigils and press conferences conferences were held, yet still there was no sight of Elizabeth and Lyric.
Collins was stuck in a nightmare, but he still had to put food on the table.
“I would just go till I broke, and then I would let myself completely fall apart, break down, cry, or whatever I had to do, scream, and then I would get back up and go till I broke again,” he said.
Cold case
After five nerve-shredding months, the phone rang.
It was December 5, 2012, and the family minister told Collins to come down to city hall due to a major break in the case of the missing girls.
Two girls had been found dead more than 20 miles away.
A day later, Chief Deputy Rick Abben with the Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the bodies belonged to to Elizabeth and Lyric.
“It tears your heart apart. In one way, you're relieved because they were found and you don't have to worry anymore. But then you're like, feel guilty,” he said.
Collins then broke down.
“You feel guilty because you just felt relief because you knew where they were, but they're dead. And you're like, ‘how can I feel relief when they're gone,’” he said.
“It really f**** you up, man.”
‘It doesn’t go away’
Collins still can’t wrap his head around how on the middle of the day on a Friday, “nobody saw anything”.
By 2017, authorities had interviewed more than 1,000 people and investigated over 300 sex offenders.
Twelve years have passed since the girls were murdered, but that just means over 4000 days where Collins has grieved, trapped in purgatory.
“It’s all consuming,” he said. “It doesn’t go away. You’re stuck in 2012 wondering what happened to your kids.”
“What were their last moments like? What did they do to my daughter?”
Collins knows that the killer is still out there. He believes that it is very possibly they still live right under his nose in Evandale.
“Unless you were from the area,” the dad said, “you’d never even know” that the fenced-off spot were the girls bikes were found existed.
While heartbroken, the dad has never lost faith that the killer will come to justice.
Collins hopes that the Netflix documentary might urge someone with knowledge to step forward.
“They might even think they got away with it all together. And you know, I'm not going anywhere. I know the police ain't going anywhere,” he said.
He takes comfort in the killer’s discomfort: knowing each day could be the day that the police come knocking at their door.
“That's the hell they live,” he added. “One of these days is gonna be the day, and the police are going to be knocking on their door.”
Elizabeth and Lyrics’s family members and family friends set up the Elizabeth Collins Foundation: a charity to provide funding to assist in solving cold cases of missing persons.