Now comes the weirder part. In 1994, Melinda’s mother Shirley gathered the rest of her now grown children and told them that police had found their sister’s remains. Melinda was dead, she assured them, even though there wasn’t any attempt at a funeral.
But Shirley was lying, as the Creech siblings discovered almost a decade later, in 2003, when the mother, described as an abusive parent, passed away. Among her belongings they found reports that stated the remains Shirley had said were positively Melinda had been ruled out as being hers with dental records. Even more baffling, the reports were from 1990, 4 years before she told the others about it.