Murdaugh Murders Podcast - Presenting: The Final Hours with Sarah Turney and Kourtney Nichole

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Today, we’re sharing a preview of The Final Hours, a true crime podcast from Crime House, powered by PAVE Studios. Hosted by Sarah Turney and Kourtney Nichole, The Final Hours examines the moments just before a person disappears. The routines. The timelines. And the small details that often get overlooked, until it’s too late. Sarah is an advocate for missing and murdered victims whose sister disappeared in 2001. Kourtney is a true crime storyteller and investigator who witnessed firsthand how crime can change a family forever. Together, they bring lived experience into every case, looking not only at what happened, but what led up to it. Listen to and follow The Final Hours on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes are out every Monday. Listen and follow here: https://pod.link/1872821250 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey y'all, it's Mandy. If you're enjoying True Sunlight, I've got another podcast you should check out. It is the Crime House original podcast, The Final Hours, hosted by Sarah Turney and Courtney Nicole, all about the last moments before someone goes missing. You might already know Sarah from her podcast Voices for Justice and Courtney from her popular True Crime Instagram account, Crime with Court, with Sarah having lived through the pain of her sister going missing, and Courtney having seen firsthand how crime can impact a family, The two come together to bring lived experiences into every case,

looking not only at what happened, but what led up to it. Each episode of the final hours examines the moments just before a person disappears, the routines, the timelines, and the small details that often get overlooked, because every disappearance has a moment where everything still feels normal. A text that doesn't raise concern, a routine that goes unchanged, a door that closes, just like it always has, until it doesn't. The final hours puts those moments under a microscope. In this preview of the final hours,

Sarah and Courtney are examining the 2016 disappearance of 29-year-old mother, Crystal Reisinger, who vanished in Colorado, leaving behind a mystery that still haunts investigators today. And if you like what you hear, follow the final hours on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts to the full episode. Crystal Anne Reisinger spent her whole life searching for a community. When her family couldn't care for her, she found surrogate parents.

When she struggled in the big city, she moved out to a small town. Then, just when she thought she'd found her place in the world, she vanished from it entirely. But is Crystal really gone, or did she find a new life, maybe somewhere off the grid? Well, before we explore where Crystal may have ended up, let's talk about her journey there. When people describe 29-year-old Crystal Anne Reisinger, they always mention her piercing blue eyes and wild, infectious laughter. She's curious, compassionate, intense, energetic, and cool. Her bleach blonde, dreadlocked hair, tattoos, face piercings, and bohemian fashion stand out in a crowd. She's spiritual, connected to the earth, and supposedly clairvoyant.

Crystal was born on November 18, 1987 in Phoenix, Arizona. Her mom was still a teenager when she had her, and they shared a bedroom in the family home together with her Aunt Jennifer. Her mom was schizophrenic, which often made it difficult for her to parent effectively. but Crystal's grandmother took care of her, especially while her mom was in treatment. Other times, she would stay with her aunt Jennifer in whatever state she lived in at the time, California, Florida, Colorado.

Then after Crystal's grandma died, the state entered to Denver, Colorado, to live with her sister Jennifer full time. But when they had a falling out, Crystal no longer felt she had a stable place to stay. Then along came the Irvin family. Yeah, so this period is a bit murky and full of ups and downs.

But around this time, 15-year-old Crystal met a boy. His name has been kept private, but we know he and Crystal became good friends and dated for a while. And her boyfriend's parents whose names we do know, Rodney and Debbie Irvin, took a liking to Crystal, which was why they offered to take her in after they learned about her situation. They gave her a room in their newly finished basement, got Crystal to school, bought her clothes, and fed her. She even became a best friend and sister figure to their biological daughter, Amy. But at some point, tragedy struck. Rodney and Debbie Lawyer their son to suicide, which in a heartbreaking way brought them even closer to Crystal.

For those of you listening, if you're ever struggling with thoughts of suicide or have lost someone by suicide, you can call her text 9-88. They offer amazing resources to help get you through this time in your life. Sooner or later, though, Crystal had to move on. After she graduated high school, she took classes on and off at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, 200 miles southwest of Denver. Crystal got straight A's. She liked a party, but she didn't get in trouble either. Crystal was living the life most college kids do. Eventually, she did move back to Denver, though.

She was there in October 2011 when a mutual friend introduced her to a guy named Elijah Gawna. Sparks flew, and they fell in love instantly. They moved in together and Crystal got pregnant. In 2013, she gave birth to a daughter at the age of 26. After that, Crystal's friends noticed a glow about her. She ate vegan and hardly drank. She rarely went out. Her main focus was being a mom.

Rodney and Debbie took on the role of the baby's grandparents. And while things didn't work out between Crystal and Eli, they happily co-parented. By 2014, Crystal was back in school studying psychology and sociology again at Western Colorado University. She also taught independent study courses on taro and spirituality. Crystal was looking for religious enlightenment, studying Hinduism and Buddhism. She was focused on awareness and living a peaceful life. Her motto was, do no harm,

and she felt like living in a big city wasn't in line with that ethos. She believed they were toxic and wanted to get in touch with the earth and her spirituality. So during a break from school, Crystal decided to take a trip about two hours away from campus to check out Crestone, Colorado. Yeah, so let me give you a little bit of context on this place. It's located at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near the Great Sand Dunes, so visitors flood the area in the summer to enjoy the outdoors. But typically, it's a tiny town of only 132 people. At 0.2 square miles, it's about three blocks by three blocks.

There's not much more than an organic grocery store, coffee shop, ice cream parlor, gas station, and a brewery that serves food. Among its residents, you'll find a few kinds of people, off-the-gritters and spirituality seekers. There's also a select group of trust fund kids who have some bad habits on their parents' dime, because while Crestone is small, it has a big drug culture, but Crystal was attracted to it for other reasons, mainly because of Preston's reputation as the new age religious capital of the world.

It all started in 1977, when a Canadian power company tycoon and UN diplomat named Maurice Strong bought a 200,000-acre plot of land next to Crestone. While his wife Hanna was visiting, a local mystic named Glenn Anderson showed up at our front door. He told her that he predicted a foreigner would come and build an international religious, religious center, and he believed Hana was that person. The Strongs were planning to build a retirement community on that land, but Hauna ran with the new direction.

Instead, she and Marie set up the Manitou Foundation to grant land and money to religious groups who wanted to establish centers in the area. There are now over two dozen spiritual centers in and around the Crestone area and several thousand truth seekers, people dedicated to discovering the deeper depths of reality. But long before the Strongs arrived, the Navajo, nation have considered the area around Crestone to be sacred ground. And that's what really drew Crystal in. She was fascinated with indigenous American traditions, and their beliefs about land

were significant to her. Crystal seemed to find her place in Crestone. She briefly went back to Gunnison for classes, but she came back shortly after, rented an apartment, got a job at a local brewery, and started singing with a band. Her daughter usually stayed in Denver with Eli, where Crystal would visit. But sometimes Crystal took her daughter down to Crestone with her. Crystal was trying to settle in and lay down route so she could have her daughter join her full time. And when they weren't together, Crystal spoke to her and Eli on the phone nearly every day.

However, the move created a lot of other changes in Crystal's life that it seems she wasn't expecting. Unfortunately, Crystal was hoping to go down to Crestone to sort of cleanse and ground herself. Instead, she kind of gets caught up in the heavy party scene there. By 2016, Crystal's experimenting with drugs. harder substances than ever before. Part of the reason why is because it overlaps with the spirituality seen there. In June, she moves into a studio apartment

in the center of town by herself. But surely after getting the apartment, she loses her job at the brewery. She has to rely on government assistance, and the situation just keeps escalating. A week or two later, several tenants complained to Crystal's friend and landlord Ara McDonald.

They say sketchy people have been coming and going from her unit, making noise at all hours. Then in mid-June, there's a shift. Crystal puts her partying on hold because she claims she had a premonition, a feeling in her gut that something very bad is going to happen to her and Eli, and it's going to happen soon, so she calls him to let him know. And she turns out to be right.

Two days later, Eli is walking home when suddenly everything goes black. He wakes up in a hospital with almost every bone in his face broken, including his eye sockets. As he recovers, he learns what happened. A mugger stabbed him in the face and beat him nearly to death. So Crystal goes back to Denver to take care of Eli. But she only stays for a few days. On Wednesday, June 22nd,

Crystal texts Debbie Irvin to say she's back in Crestone. But the trouble Crystal predicted isn't over yet. Thank you for listening. To check out the rest of the episode and so much more, make sure you follow the final hours with Sarah Turney and Courtney Nicole. Just search for the final hours wherever you get your podcast. There's also a link in the description. New episodes drop every Monday.