48 Hours - Fateful Connection

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Amy Hurst and Wendy Huggy did not know each other, but they both went missing in Florida in 1982. Both cases languished for decades until Detective Lisa Schoneman, a member of the cold case unit, stepped in and a new investigation began. “48 Hours" Correspondent Susan Spencer reports. This classic "48 Hours" episode last aired on 8/16/2014. Watch all-new episodes of “48 Hours” on Saturdays, and stream on demand on Paramount+. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is one of those cases that haunt you. It's about two missing women that disappeared at the same time. In 1982, my sister Amy Hurst and her husband Bill moved to Florida. When I was nine years old, my mother left and I always wondered why. All of a sudden she stopped calling, and when she didn't call my mother on her birthday, we knew something was wrong. The other young woman that went missing was Wendy Huggy. Huggie. She was 17 years old. Wendy's mother, Susan, was a playboy bunny. My name is

Angeline Chester, and I worked with her. She flew on Hugh Hefner's plane. She was a jet setter. So Wendy might have felt rejected by her mother, and they fought a lot. She said she wanted to go to Florida and stay with Grandma and Grandpa, and she knew that they could help her out. She went to a party and disappeared from there. Two women missing for 30 years, where do you start? Now at that time we had a serial killer in the area. His thing was to kidnap women, take him out on a boat, put him in the water alive, tied to a cement block,

and let him drown and die. September 5, 1982. What happened out here? A fisherman found a body floating in the Gulf of Nassau. Mexico. This body was weighted down with one concrete block. Oh boy. You can see how far offshore she had drifted. It had no face. It was badly decomposed and there was no way to identify it. Was this Amy? Was this windy? The body itself was wrapped in a homemade-looking Afghan.

Then there was the Afghan. It had very distinctive markings. This led us to another suspect. One that's still out there, I think we're about to find him. find him. The cases are connected. We couldn't have solved one without the other, and we're not done yet. Someone thinks they got away with murder, no way. My concerns are danger.

More than 30 years after Amy Hurst and Wendy Huggy disappeared, Detective Lisa Shahneman is about to make an arrest. We had received information that he did carry a gun. She's tractor suspect from Florida to Michigan, finally hitting pay dirt here in the backwoods town of Dawson Springs, Kentucky. And her fugitive knows she's here. And he told his friend that if I had pushed him any further, that he was going to take the gun out and shoot.

This doesn't seem to phase you. Well, of course, I'm going to be cautious. I don't want to take any unnecessary risks. But this case means a lot. a lot to Shaughnaman. Why is your heart in cold cases? Because they're the hardest. You know, they're the toughest. When I do bring closure to a family, there's nothing better than that. Unless perhaps it's two cold cases, intertwined. That's what she's juggling now. Two victims, two distraught families, two eerily similar situations, forever linked.

Both began some 30 years ago in Pascolde. County, Florida, Shahneman's home turf. The first to go missing was a 16-year-old girl named Wendy Huggy, who vanished in April of 1982. Wendy Huggy was a beautiful 5-8, 5-foot-9 blonde girl who came to Florida to visit her grandparents and to live here, and she'd only been here for a short time. Her grandparents were going to pick her up at countryside mall. They got a phone call from her, and she said, you don't need to pick me up, Dawn's going to bring me home. Dawn?

Dawn, whoever that is. Unfortunately, we don't know. She never arrived home. And that's the last anybody has seen or heard at Wendy Huggy? Anybody has ever seen or heard. Oh, is my darling girl. Patty Sprague is Wendy's aunt. She was just a girl.

She was just a regular little girl. Patty says Wendy moved to Florida from Chicago, in part, to get away from her mother Susan, Patty's sister. I know she didn't always get along with her mother. I know they fought. Who doesn't? Susan, who died a few years ago, was a single mom and a Playboy Bunny, which apparently aggravated the usual problems

between teenager and mother. Well, it definitely did not involve what people usually thinks it involves. Angela and Chester, who worked with Susan in the Chicago Playboy Club, says Wendy had no reason to object. The job was basically that of a waitress, but in a costume, certainly not the same thing as a playboy playmate. The difference is that a bunny is an employee, we have a uniform, a playmate is nude, and they are in the centerfall.

It doesn't make them bad, it just means that that's the difference. In any case, Susan soon was promoted. to flight attendant on Playboy founder Hugh Heffner's private plane. That meant lots of travel and even more problems with Wendy. The fact that she was gone, maybe she thought that she didn't care about her. But Angie says Susan was in fact a devoted mother. She was always concerned about her. In Chicago, Wendy often stayed with Susan's parents.

And when they moved to Florida, the 16-year-old who had dropped out of high school, was quick to follow. She just wanted, I guess, come down here and start over. She was going to go back to school, and she was very excited about going to work. Her new job in a fast food restaurant was to have started on April 8, 1982. She disappeared the day before.

Two days later, the grandparents got very concerned. And they came here to the sheriff's office and reported her missing. The Pascoe County Police investigation turned up neither the friends from the mall nor the mysterious Don. But it did stumble across one fact that stopped the investigation cold. Wendy Huggy was married. Under the criteria, that made her an adult.

If you're an adult and you want to go missing and there's nothing to lead us to believe that you're a harm to yourself or somebody harmed you, you can go missing. This is a teenager. Who cares if she's married? She's still missing. I agree with you. For whatever reasons, he took her out of the system. With the case, in effect closed, neither the husband nor anyone else was actively investigated.

That infuriates Wendy Huggy's uncle, Robert Richards, but as a former cop, he understands why. I don't think they had a whole lot to go on. Florida has a pretty high transient population. People come and go, and the people that make people disappear can come and go. What seemed to be the handiwork of one of those people surfaced not long after Wendy went missing. Here off the Florida coast in the Gulf of Mexico, about five months after Wendy Huggy disappeared, a fisherman spotted something odd in the water. He soon realized to his horror that he was looking at a dead body.

He left it right where it was and immediately called the Coast Guard. When I first saw the body, all you could see were blue jeans and bare feet. Greg Stout was on the Coast Guard boat sent to the scene. The body itself was wrapped in a homemade-looking afghan and a real bright green bedspread. Was this the body of Wendy Huggy? The teenager so excited about her future and her new life? Whoever it was, her killer probably had been confident

she would never be seen again. Then there was rope around the waist of the body, and then you could look down, clear water and you could actually see a concrete block floating below. The body found in the Gulf of Mexico in September of 1982 was 27 miles offshore, carried out by the tide. It's kind of floating like a court. The Coast Guard couldn't pinpoint where the body went in, but theorized it might have been near what's now the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. It had been in the water about a week, rising to the surface,

as it decomposed, despite the concrete block tied around the waist. The medical examiner was pretty sure that there was blunt trauma to the back of the head. They also thought that she was actually alive when she was tossed in the water. Was there any way, if anybody had known who the relatives were, could they have identified this person? No, not at all. If you put a body in water over a period of time, it's really the worst condition that you can find.

worst condition that you can find a body. Still, the victim's family might have recognized personal effects, as well as that green bedspread and that distinctive Afghan. Which was she wrapped in first, the bed spread or the... The bed spread first, and then the Afghan was on the outside. Wendy Huggy had gone missing about five months before this body was found. Is there any indication at all that an attempt was made to determine if this might be Wendy Huggy?

Not that I'm aware of. There was, remember, no ongoing investigation. So Wendy's family never saw the bed spread, Afghan, or the jewelry, never even knew a body had been found. An oversight that decades later would help solve a crime. The unidentified body ended up here in this Tampa Cemetery in the Potters Field section, in an unmarked grave known only as Jane Doe 8212.0. It would be years before Jane Doe's true identity was known, and then only because of the heartache of another family, a family some 1,200 miles away.

Just outside Flint, Michigan in 1982, the family of a woman named Amy Hurst was coping with her sudden disappearance. Amy Hurst also went missing in Florida about the same time and in the same county as Wendy Huggy. The two women's descriptions were similar, but Hearst was older, 29, and a mother of two. Oh, gosh, Amy was full of energy. She was a wonderful mother. Laura Champine was Amy's niece. She just loved her kids to pieces and was very devoted to them. Which made it all the more shocking that spring when Amy announced she and her new husband, Bill, were moving out of state, leaving her kids.

with her ex-husband. She just came up to the house and said that she was going to Florida, and we would be able to go down there and see her. She'd be back to visit us. Amy's son, Jeff, was eight, her daughter, Lisa, then 10. I can remember her, like, talking about us coming down for Christmas and for Easter and stuff like that. She just said by and she left.

I didn't care much for Bill. Amy's sister Sharon blamed the move on Amy's second husband, Bill. He drank a lot. And Bill was abusive. When were you first aware that there was actual domestic violence involved here? I saw the bruises, and there was one incident that I witnessed where he hit her in front of me. I never understood with Amy why she stayed in that kind of a relationship. She didn't need to.

Amy and Bill settled in Newport, Ritchie in Pascoe County, Florida. Bill got a job as a truck driver. Amy worked in a grocery store. At first, she kept in close touch with her family. I had a whole shoebox, as a matter of fact, full of letters. And Amy always called her mother on her birthday, until that year. When my grandma's birthday came and went, and Amy didn't call. My grandma got on the phone to all of us, and, you know, something's wrong.

And that's when I called the Pascoal County Sheriff's Department. They called me back the next day and said they went out to check and Bill was there. They asked him about Amy and he said that they got in a fight three days earlier and she left. They contact to work. They find out that she's not been to work. Nobody's heard from her. Nobody's seen her. Bill Hurst was a suspect in Amy's disappearance from the very start.

Everybody knew that he had something to do with it. His actions only seemed to confirm it. They did ask him if he would take a lie detector test, and he said he would. But when the police showed up the next day, he was already gone. He left in the night. And just as in Wendy Huggy's case, the Hearst investigation stalled before it even began. This time, because of a clerical error involving her maiden name, Amy Rose. And when her sisters reported her missing, they reported her as Amy Rose, not Amy Hurst.

Her sisters contacted police, but no one ever changed the records, a simple mistake that had disastrous results. We kept making inquiries over the years and, you know, really getting the run around, not really getting any answers. And did you at any point just acknowledge even privately that in all probability we're not going to see Amy again? Yeah. I knew Amy would not go that long without talking to her kids. That is not Amy. As for Bill Hurst... At one point, they had found traces of him in one of the New England states.

And then after that, it just kind of fell off and nobody did anything about it. But 20 years later, a new suspect surfaced. Unfortunately, there was a lot of female bodies that were being recovered in this area. Were Amy Hurst and Wendy Huggy both victims of a serial killer? For years, Amy Hurst's family clung to the hope

that as long as no body had been found, there still was a possibility Amy was alive, somewhere. Amy's son, Jeff. I always thought for the longest time that she started a new life, maybe. And then one day she would just show off. Amy's sister, Sharon, was sure of it. I remember one time I was driving

and I looked in my rearview mirror and I could have swore the person in the car behind me was her. I opened my car door and jumped out of my car, and I thought, how stupid, you know. But, you know, you always hope. It was much the same for Wendy Huggy's family. Her uncle, Robert Richards, says that in the decades after the 16-year-old's disappearance,

her distraught mother, Susan, barely could bring herself to mention her daughter's name. I think she had some of the guilt of, you know, maybe I could have kept her here. Maybe I could have changed jobs sooner and been at home more. It was not something that she liked to talk about. Wendy's aunt, Patty Sprague. It was devastating. But I would think at any sort of family gathering, this is sort of the elephant in the room, right?

You're always aware that she's not there. You know, when you have Christmas. and birthdays. And birthday, yes, birthdays. In 2001, Wendy would have celebrated her 36th birthday. About that time, some 20 years after she went missing, a Pascoe County cop decided to take a fresh look at this very cold case. His name was Robert Hamm.

He became fascinated with it. And then to the point of obsessed, I mean, he was determined to find. windy. Ham soon unearthed the 1982 report of the body found in the Gulf. In his heart, he knew he was on to something. Now at that time, we had a serial killer in the area of a Chandler. His thing was to kidnap women, take him out on a boat, put him in the water alive, tied to a cement block, and let him drown and die. And I thought, oh my gosh, it has to be windy. He was convinced that she had been kidnapped and she was another victim of his. But from death row, Oba Chandler refused to talk to Bobby Hamm, and eventually Chandler was executed.

His silence didn't stop Ham. He retrieved Wendy Huggy's dental records and asked the medical examiner's office to exume the body. The grave is right over here. Yes. So the exhumation takes place. Everybody thinks that they know who this is already. Oh, Bobby was so sure. He was telling everybody, this is Wendy.

I've done it. I found her. It's going to be her. And unfortunately, it wasn't. He kept trying until he passed away. He kept trying to find her. He didn't give up. I mean, he was devastated.

He was discouraged, but he continued to try. And after he was gone, I've continued to try. But for all their efforts, the identity of the body dug up from Potter's field remained a mystery. But there's a good side to that story. Because she was assumed now, we can get DNA. Well, the medical examiner did some DNA testing, and they had a recreation of her, what she may look like done, and placed her on the Doe network. As in John and Jane Doe. The network is set up to locate the missing,

and identify the dead. Information about the exhumed body, information Bobby Hamm dug up in his failed search for Wendy, sat there unnoticed, until years later, when Amy Hurst son, Jeff, went online, searching for clues about his mother. He was having a really hard time his whole life, not knowing what happened to his mother,

and one day decided, that's it, I've got to do something, and I've got to know I tried. I've got to know what happened. happen. In 2009, 27 years after his mother Amy disappeared, Jeff stumbled across the Doe Network website with its description of the body in the Gulf. The artist's rendering didn't look familiar, but something else on the website did. What did you see on there that piqued your interest right away? The bedspread. Jeff and his sister Lisa had loved bouncing on it as children. The bed spread. Anything else?

Turquoise jewelry. The Afghan really hit home. Afghans are a big part of our family. My grandmother made everybody Afghans. My mom made them. My aunts made them. Everybody made them. And one of them had been wrapped around the body in the Gulf. Amy's sister was sure of that. The second she saw the description on the website. It's made of multicolors. It's basically white, but my mother would take all her leftover pieces of yarn. and she would make the little squares out of them.

And we have numerous Afghans that we all have still today, and all those same colors are in this Afghan. This is the Afghan that Amy's mother made for her, and that was wrapped around the bed spread, that was wrapped around her body. You can see why that's something that you would recognize. Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's very distinctive. Yes.

And each of the sisters had one of these? Yes. No one in Amy Hurst family needed any more evidence. When I saw the Afghans next year that I was 100% sure. We knew that it was her. Despite their certainty, the Afghan and jewelry didn't prove this was Amy Hurst. For that, Shahneman needed hard evidence, and she would find it, in, of all places, Pottersfield, where, faithfully, the Hurst and Huggy cases would intersect.

The body dug up in 2001, the body that was not Wendy Huggy. Would DNA prove it was Amy Hurst? Tests and analysis to match it to Jeff's DNA took two years. I would have thought you'd be pretty frustrated. I was. Why did it take so long? There's so much backlogged DNA, and it just waited and waited and waited and waited. In July of 2011, an excited Detective Shahneman called Jeff with the results.

She just says, are you sitting down? I was like, do I need to be? And she says, I don't know if she usually might want to. It's her, Jeff. We found her. It's her. It wasn't good news at all. I mean, but it was good news for me to know that we found, we knew where she was at.

And I just started shaking, just shaking, shaking, shaking, shaking. He called me, and we cried together. You were glad to know that you had an answer, but then it was permanent, you know. It was like she just died because you just found out to you she had just died. After 30 years, there was no longer any question Amy Hurst had been murdered.

And for Amy's family, no question, who did it? We knew absolutely it was Bill. But we have no way to prove it. I thought he would get away with it. What's up, Little Psychos? I'm Investigator Slater, host of the Psychopedia podcast. Psychopedia is a true crime podcast delivering raw, real, and absolutely gripping episodes every single week.

I dig deep to uncover fascinating details of heinous true crime cases while exploring criminology and psychology theories. I take you into the absolute darkest corners of the human psyche, my favorite territory, and present cases like you've never heard them before. Follow and listen to Psychopedia everywhere you get your podcasts. Amy Hurst's killer had gone unpunished for 30 years, only to be tripped up by a very stupid mistake. When we confirmed that she was murdered and where she was found,

it could be nobody but bail, especially when she was found with the blankets off her own bed. You don't go off with somebody that kills you, and then they bring you home and wrap you in your own blankets to dispose of your body. You were at home when you were murdered, and it doesn't take a great detective to figure that out. Now all this detective had to do was find him,

Did you at that point know where Bill Hurst was? I thought he was in Michigan. I went to see his sister, who still lived up there. And she told me where he was at. She even agreed to call him. She said, Bill, the police have been here, and they found Amy's body. What did you do? You wanted to make him nervous.

Of course. What happens when you get nervous? You make mistakes. Yes, you do. Hurst had been living here in Dawson Springs, Kentucky, a small town in the western part of the state, once the home to the imperial clans of America. But if he thought his neighbors would stick up for him

in his time of need, he was sadly mistaken. Elmer Cruz, a retired tool-and-dye maker, was a close friend. What did you think of him? What was he like? I just thinking like one of the guys, you know. I mean, he drank a lot, but so would do a lot of people, you know. Did he tell you he'd been married? He told me that he had a girlfriend named Amy, but he said just all of a sudden she got up and left. After his sister told him the cops were on his trail, Hearst called Elmer.

Yeah, he sounded really, really down and really bad, and so I went over there. And heard a shocking admission. My past has finally caught up with me. He said, I'm going to go to jail for the rest of my life if they don't execute me. I thought I'd got away with it. But he said, evidently, he said, I think they found the body. And then I thought, whoa. I get to town. I contact the local police department, which were great.

Not a lot happens in their town, so this really excited them. Turns out Captain Craig Patterson already had his eye on Hearst for allegedly selling prescription drugs. But the idea that he had murdered somebody and put their body in the Gulf of Mexico was not something. No, no, that was not. anything that I would have guessed in a hundred years. So where did the break in this come? The break came when Elmer Cruz walked into the police department here

and said Bill Hurst told me he disposed of a body a long time ago and it had caught up with him. We knew here's our break. We've got to go now. They hatched a plan to trick Hurst. Elmer would go back up to his house with a surprise. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Elmer agrees to wear a wire?

Yeah. Why do you think he did? Because he said it wasn't right to kill somebody. I would not let anybody get away with murder. It's that simple. 48 hours obtained the tape of their extraordinary conversation. I'm not worried about it too much. They're trying to say I took this body out and knew of the Gulf of Mexico and dumped it.

I didn't have access to a boat. Well, all the middle of them. The Gulf of Mexico would have never been found anyway. Hurst is nervous and wants reassurance. Like I said, if they had any higher evidence, they arrest me when they came to the door. But they don't, so they have no way of proving that I had anything to do with anything. There's no eyewitnesses.

You know, I made sure of that. Based on Elmer's tapes, a grand jury indicted William Hurst for first-degree murder a few weeks later. It had been 29 years since the murder, and now it was time for an arrest. Schoneman was leaving nothing to chance. Hurst had become a recluse, hunkered down in his house.

He wasn't coming out, you know, he was barricading himself in there. And he was heavily armed. He had a 45 that he had bought, a pistol, and they had bought a 380 and a couple of rights. You'll always have to worry about that, but you can't let it stop you. If I let that stop me, I'd never make an arrest, and, you know, I just have to be prepared for it. A SWAT team was hiding outside, almost ready to pounce, when Hearst Dog did them a huge favor. You know, he cared enough about the dog when it got tangled and couldn't reach its water,

that he left the seclusion of the house to come out and untangle him. And that's when they grabbed him. Yes. Yes. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law. You can decide at any time to exercise these rights and not make any statements or answer any questions. Do you understand those rights?

48 hours was at the station when Hearst was questioned. He did not ask for a lawyer. I have a reason to arrest you for your wife's murder, but I would like also to hear your side of the story. Do you want to tell me that your side of the story? Well, all I can tell you is I didn't kill it. If you didn't kill her, how'd she die and how'd she end up in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico? That's about as much as I want to say right now. He still doesn't specifically ask for a lawyer, and Detective Shahneman plows right on.

And I know you were there when she died, and I know you got rid of her body. I'd like to know why. Hurst tells her, blaming Amy for what happened. She went to kick me. Uh-huh. And when she kicked me, her foot slipped and she fell and she hit her head on the back of the concrete floor. Was it just the one time she hit her head? Did she bleed or did she, what happened?

I didn't notice any bleeding, and I panicked, and I didn't know what to do. All just a terrible accident, he says. And I rolled her up in the blanket and I disposed of the body. I'm guilty of. Well, where did you use a boat to do it? No. Up, Sunshine Sky Bridge. Why do you just call the police, Bill?

I don't know. I just panicked out. I don't know why. I know I should have done that, but I don't know why I didn't. I just wigged out, and I didn't know what to do. So I couldn't, for the life of me, because that woman I loved was all my heart, I couldn't bring to bear the fact that she had passed. Hurst almost seems to think he deserves sympathy.

They're going to release me to go back to my house or the what? Oh, no, Bill. You're not to arrest about it. You've been charged for a street murder, and you're going to be staying in custody. With Hearst behind bars, Shahneman makes the call she's been looking forward to for years. To Amy Hurst's son, Jeff. Jeff, guess what?

It's over, dude. It's all over. He's in custody. He's been charged with your mother's murder. That was a great call. I didn't tell him I was going. I didn't tell him what I was doing initially because I didn't want him to be disappointed.

Please be seated. This is State of Florida versus William Hurst. But disappointment may be coming. Before trial, a judge rules that most of Schoneman's interrogation can't be used as evidence, all because of one sentence. I'm about as much as I want to say right now. The judge found that because he said he didn't want to talk about it, he had implied his right to remain silent,

so he didn't allow my conversation to be hurt by the jury. But without Hearst's candid admissions of how Amy died, how he rolled her body in the Afghan, how he dropped her off the bridge, what would a jury decide? It's been 30 years since both Wendy Huggy and Amy Hurst disappeared. Wendy's fate is still unknown. But in searching for clues about Wendy, Detective Lisa Shahneman solved the mystery of Amy. The final chapter now about to be written in a Florida courtroom. Ladies and gentlemen, just like every good book has a title, this story has a title. The title is I almost got away with it.

So begins the prosecution's case against William Hurst, charged with first-degree murder in the death of his wife Amy. For Amy's family, the trial is a necessary but painful ordeal. in that courtroom, you know, 20 feet from this guy. That was hard to do. I couldn't look at him when I was on the stand. I didn't look at him either. I stared at him the whole time I testified. I had to look him in the eye.

Laura Ann Champine. Amy is my aunt. Family members recount hers physical abuse of Amy. Amy and Bill were arguing back and forth, yelling. Bill told her to shut up, and he back handed her across the face. black eyes, fat lips. I saw him hit her with an iron skillet. He threw and threw a shower enclosure into a bathtub

and down a flight of stairs. You recall this as a kid. That was one that you don't ever forget. Did you ever recall, Mr. Hearst threatening to kill your mom? Yes. Hearst's defense is not a surprise. This death was an accident. She tried to kick him.

She fell. She hit her head. She died accidentally, and that is not a murder. There were two gashes to the back of the head. They're right here and here. On the left side of her head, there was another marked contusion somewhere over here. But to medical examiner Dr. Russell Vega, the multiple injuries indicate that Amy's death was no accident. Would you expect to see those types of injuries when someone falls and hits their head?

Not three injuries, no. My opinion of the cause of death is unspecified homicidal violence. But proving murder could be a problem for prosecutors because the judge has ruled that they can't use the tape of Hearst's incriminating interview. I can't remember if she died instantly or if she was just knocked out because it was like three days between the time that it happens at the time I disposed of the body.

Detective Seanaman admits she wanted the jury to hear that. Were you completely confident in your own mind that you would be okay without it? You're never completely confident. You know, you don't know what the jury's going to think. He had his elbow on his coffee table, had his head in his hands. But the jury does hear Elmer Cruz's chilling testimony. So he said, I got rid of the body the way you're supposed to get rid of a body. He said I wrapped it up in plastic, tied a concrete block around it, and took it out and dropped it in the water.

This is what he uses. Perhaps the most damning evidence of all, the secret audio tapes Elmer Cruz made, in which Hearst brags about his crime. They have no way of proving that I had anything to do with anything. There's no eyewitnesses. You know, I made sure of that. Thank you, sir. You may step down. You're free to go.

What was that like for? for you. It was a new experience that's the first time I'd ever done anything like that. But see, when you tell the truth, you don't have to worry about what's right. My wife tells me every day I get done it a good thing. The defense calls no witnesses. This is a case of a tragic accident. And William Hurst does not take the stand.

I'm upset about that. Really? Why? I want to know. I want him to tell me what happened. You still want to know exactly what happened. Absolutely. This defendant, William Hurst, is guilty of first-degree murder.

Thank you. What was your frame of mind when the jury went out? At that point, I just wanted to go home. But they said sometimes it could take eight hours, sometimes it can take 20 minutes. In fact, the jury is out a mere three hours. I understand the jury has reached a verdict. Yes, please rise. State of Florida versus William Hurst.

Verdict. The defendant is guilty of murdering the first degree as charge in the indictment. So say we all this fourth day of people. Can you describe your feelings when you heard those words guilty? I had something to me that I didn't know it was even there. What do you mean? I just gasped out and started crying, and my cousin was sitting next to me, and we both just cried and cried.

Mr. Hurst, you are well and truly an evil man. I sentenced you to life in prison. Life with no chance of parole for 25 years. Did you want him to get the death penalty? Mm-mm. We don't want the death penalty, because that's the easy way out. Amy's family gathered at Elizabeth Lake in Waterford, Michigan, where Amy had often spent family vacations.

Her ashes were spread on the water, and they had roses on it, and they had rose petals out there, and it was absolutely beautiful. It's been 30 years. Time heals. But as we stood there on that boat, and I thought to myself, It's just like she died yesterday.

Her kids in so much pain, they've had to live all these years without their mother. I drive by there all time. I always look at the water. But it gave you a sense that maybe she's at peace. Right, yeah. Amy's family acknowledges that peace would not have been possible, were it not for Wendy Huggy.

What would you have to say to the Huggy family? Don't give up. Never give up. Something could still happen. Do you think there's any hope that you'll ever know what happened to Wendy? Honestly, no, I don't. It's really, really a long stretch. It's a beautiful 17-year-old girl who just disappeared.

Where is she? What happened to her? But Cold Case Detective Lisa Shahneman is not about to give up. Just came across the couple the other day, but it wasn't her. But you're not going to stop her. Oh, no. No, I'll keep looking. I'll find her. I'll find her.