The phone rang in a Massachusetts home, and when James Major picked it up, his son Bill was on the line. They had not spoken in months. James had agreed to make this call at the request of a detective who wanted a confession, and he did not plan to waste the opportunity. “I keep getting calls from Lana,” Bill said, “and she wants to know where her mother is so that she can get the bones and put them in a casket and have closure.

”

“Yeah, and put me in jail for life,” Bill added. James pressed him. “At least you could be decent enough to say where you dumped her. ”

“I’ll tell her where the body is if you let me know,” Bill replied, “and then she’s going to bounce it right back on me again.

Then I’ll have them Kentucky cops coming up here to arrest me and take me back down there again. ”

There was no denial in his voice. He was not saying he had not done it. He was saying that telling the truth would put him in prison.

“You have pulled off the perfect crime, haven’t you? ” James asked. “No, I wouldn’t call it perfect,” Bill answered, “because if a crime was perfect, nobody would ever know about it. ”

That was when the detective listening on the line knew they had him.

—

The year was 1980. Four-year-old Lana Major lived in the small town of Verona, Kentucky, with her mother Marlene, her father Bill, and her eight-year-old brother Donald. Marlene and Bill had been married for nine years. To the outside world, the family looked happy.

In reality, the household was unstable, and Marlene and Bill fought constantly. In the early summer of 1980, Bill hired a twenty-eight-year-old handyman named Glenn St. Hir to help around the house. Over time, Glenn became a close friend of the married couple.

Strangely, Bill seemed to encourage his wife and Glenn to spend time alone together. Months passed. The fighting between Bill and Marlene grew worse until one day she threatened to leave him and take the children with her. On the night of October 12th, 1980, Lana and Donald were asleep in their bedrooms like any other night.

Suddenly, Bill woke them up and rushed them to their next-door neighbor’s house. He told them he would only be gone for a few hours and not to worry. The next morning, the children woke up, and their mother was gone. She had not taken her driver’s license or her social security card.

She had nothing with her. It was as if she had completely dropped off the face of the Earth. —

On October 13th, 1980, Glenn St. Hir walked into the police station and spoke to a detective.

He explained that a woman named Marlene Major was missing. The mother of two had not returned home. No one could find her, and her children were worried. The police became suspicious of Glenn immediately.

He would have been a good suspect, and now he was coming in to report someone else’s wife missing. That was a little unusual. The police investigated him and suspected him of having something to do with her disappearance. But they needed more information, so they went to Marlene’s husband, Bill, to hear his side of the story.

Bill told them something shocking. His wife had been having an affair with Glenn. On the night of her disappearance, she had left in her car to go see the young handyman. Bill’s story was believable because one spouse who is unhappy with the other will often take the kids and leave.

All indications were that she had left in her car. The two men’s versions of the story did not add up. Now the police were worried for Marlene’s safety. They talked to the neighbors and possible witnesses, but no one had seen or heard anything.

Detectives searched the immediate area within days of the disappearance and found no indication of foul play, no blood, nothing. They had nothing to go on. They sent Marlene Major’s profile to different agencies to expand the search. Her dental records were faxed all over the United States.

Any time there was a woman of her approximate build and approximate age who was found, her records went out. They were probably faxed at least twenty-five times. Glenn seemed genuinely worried about Marlene and eager to help the detectives find her. He presented what could have been an interesting piece of evidence: Marlene’s secret diary.

Inside, Marlene had written that her children were in grave danger. She could not even tell that horrific secret to her own family, but she had recorded it in her diary—not in specific detail, but enough that you knew what she was talking about. The detectives could not act on what the mother had written. They had all kinds of problems trying to make a case out of vague references in the diaries.

She had not been specific, so there was not a whole lot they could do with it at the time. Even though the diary was compelling, it could not be used to convict anyone, because diaries are usually considered hearsay in court. Unbeknownst to the investigators, that diary would later become vital in solving the case. For the time being, it sat on a police investigation shelf for two decades.

With two potential suspects in mind and zero evidence, the investigators could not go much further. They let both men return home. Only a few days later, Bill took his two children and moved to Pawtucket, Rhode Island. At first Lana thought it was only temporary, but she quickly learned it was not.

“We got told that we were going to live there,” she later remembered. “We had no idea, and we were completely taken aback about it. ”

—

It was now late October 1980. Lana and Donald were finally given an explanation about their mother.

Their father sat them down and coldly said that their mother had abandoned them, run away with a boyfriend, and that they would never see her again. He told them she was a drug addict, an alcoholic, a prostitute who really did not care about them, and that she had run off with another man. Lana did not move. She had not yet fully grasped what her father really meant.

In her confusion, only one thing stayed clear in her mind: with their mom gone, who would protect them against their father? Meanwhile, back in Kentucky, the police investigation came to a standstill. “I couldn’t even call the case a murder case because I had no evidence to show that she was dead,” one investigator recalled. “We had nothing.

It’s not that I gave up. I never gave up. You’re always hoping something will pop up. But up to this point, things were looking pretty bleak for us.

”

Months went by, but Lana could not stop thinking about her mom. Even though she believed her mother had abandoned them, the little girl missed her and dreamed that she would come back one day. “There’s that fuzzy moment where you’re starting to wake up and you’re not quite awake but you’re not totally asleep either,” she said. “And there was a lot of days that I would hit that moment and I would stop and I would listen, and I just knew that there was going to be a knock on the door, and it was going to be her.

”

—

The family had been living in Rhode Island for a year by 1981. From the outside looking in, nobody had any clue what was going on inside that household. The five-year-old girl still had not heard from her mother. Whenever she asked her father about her whereabouts or whether he had received news from her, he suddenly lashed out and became enraged, even violent toward her and her brother.

The violence escalated over time, to the point where going to school had become difficult for the siblings. They constantly needed to cover up their injuries. “I’ve seen him beat my brother to the point Donald could not pick himself up off the floor,” Lana remembered. “You would miss school because you had bruises.

”

But that was not the worst part. The little girl’s father started to force her to do things no child should ever do. His favorite threat was: “If you don’t do what I tell you to do, if you don’t do what I want you to do, I’ll kill your brother. ” And he would turn around and tell her brother: “If you don’t do what I tell you to, I’ll kill your sister.

” He used their feelings for each other, their love for one another, against them. —

The Kentucky police still had no new evidence in the missing person’s case of Marlene Major. Without a body, they had no way to convict anyone. In 1984, three years had gone by.

Lana was now eight years old. Her mother was still missing, and there was no new information about the case. But someone out there knew where she was. One day after school, things took a turn for the worse.

Donald was off with some of his friends, and Lana was alone with her father. “I was outside in front of the trailer playing in the yard,” she said, “and he grabbed me by the back of the hair and he threw me in the trailer, and he took a gun and he shoved it in my face, and he told me that if I did not learn to keep my mouth shut, he would blow my head off. ”

Lana was left alone, paralyzed by fear. She had learned to keep quiet about what was really happening inside the house.

In 1985, the father remarried. His new wife, Pauline, became stepmother to Lana and Donald. From the outside, the newly blended family appeared normal. But life in the Major household had not changed.

Lana continued to stay silent, protecting herself and her brother. Then one day, while they were alone in a room, Donald—now thirteen—walked up to his younger sister and told her that from this day on, their life would change forever. “Donald said to me, he said, ‘It’s over. He’s not going to hurt us anymore.

’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about? ’ He said, ‘I told Pauline, and she called the cops, and they’re going to arrest him. ’”

Lana’s first reaction was: “We’re both dead. ” She paced nervously across the room.

Now that her brother had spoken up, it was unclear how their father might react. His violent outbursts had always been unpredictable. —

It was August 10th at around 7:00 p. m.

The whole family was at home when someone knocked on the Major’s door. Lana was petrified. She and Donald hid behind the corner. Suddenly, policemen ran onto the property.

The children watched in disbelief as their dad was taken by officers and put into handcuffs. “I can remember watching them put the handcuffs on him,” Lana said, “and he turned around and he looked down that hallway at us, and I was just like, we’re dead. I’m like, if they don’t keep him, we’re dead. ”

Bill Major was sentenced to only fifteen years behind bars, with the possibility of parole.

After their dad’s arrest, nine-year-old Lana and thirteen-year-old Donald moved back to Kentucky to live with their maternal grandmother. The siblings tried to grow up like normal kids, but something was still deeply wrong at home. Everyone avoided talking about Marlene. She had been gone for five years with no one actively looking for her.

Lana struggled to accept that her mom would not come back. She missed her greatly. One day, Lana was alone with her grandmother. It was the perfect opportunity to ask, for the first time, about her mom’s disappearance.

“We were sitting in the parking lot in front of a department store,” Lana recalled, “and I said, ‘Well, do you know where my mother is? Have you seen her or have you heard from her? ’ It was just like ten seconds of absolute silence. And she looked at me.

She said, ‘Honey, your mother’s dead. She’s been dead. Your father killed her. ’”

Lana was shocked by her grandmother’s secret but could not fully accept it.

All her life, her dad had told Lana and Donald that their mom ran away and did not love them. Now her grandmother was saying it was not the truth. It was possible Marlene had been a victim of Bill. But no one had looked for her in years, and there was no evidence.

Lana was forced to take matters into her own hands. She got a composition notebook that cost her about ninety-nine cents at Walmart. Whenever she talked to somebody, she wrote down the date, the time, and what the conversation was about. She gathered as much information as she could get her hands on.

With a cold case, the resources were limited, but this did not stop her. —

In 1997, the investigation took a dangerous turn. Her father, Bill, was suddenly released from jail on good behavior, having served only twelve years behind bars. “When he finally got out of jail, I was terrified he was going to hunt me down,” Lana said.

“Even after all that time, if there was a way he could get to me, he would. ”

More anxious than ever to solve her mom’s disappearance and find evidence to put her father in jail for life, Lana went to the police station and demanded access to her mom’s files. They had been untouched for over seventeen years. The file included her mom’s diary, which had been held as evidence by detectives and never seen by Lana.

Now that she was of legal age, she was granted access to the whole police investigation. For the first time in her life, Lana read her mom’s diary. One entry read: “I got up early this morning and went to get Donald up for school and caught Bill with him. He tried to hide what they were doing, but I know what I saw.

I told him not to touch me ever again, and if he touches Donald, I’ll kill him. ”

Lana was in a state of shock. Her whole life, she had believed her mom ran away and never loved her. Now she realized that all along, her mom had known about her father’s abusive behavior and was prepared to fight for the safety of her children.

She soon discovered another disturbing piece of information inside her mom’s file. In 1981, a year after her mom’s disappearance, a man had discovered a skull on a farm in Boone County, Kentucky, about a mile from the Major’s old home. At the time of the discovery, in the 1980s, science was not advanced enough to test bone material for DNA. In order to identify a body, they needed teeth to compare to dental records.

But unfortunately, that was not possible. “He would have manipulated her head to pull her teeth out and to remove her lower jaw,” Lana said. “Remind you of horror movies that you watch on TV. There was no face, there was no jaw.

It was just the top of the skull that had a distinct bullet hole right in the top of it. ”

Lana decided to go back to Boone County and search for herself. If she found the rest of the remains, identification would be possible, and it would be one step closer to finding out what really happened to her mom. When she arrived at the site, she took out her shovel from her car and dug.

“I was really, really, really, really hoping to find something,” she said, “because I was like, if I could find something, if I could, that would be something more than we have now. If I could find the rest of her body. But at the same time, it was constant terror that I would find something. ”

Despite all her efforts, she did not find anything.

Lana was exhausted and stopped searching for the night. Then a break in the case happened. Lana received the news that with new lab technology, they now only needed a small sample from the skull to create a DNA profile. The one thing that was holding up prosecution—finally getting justice for her mom, being able to get closure for her family, being able to lay her to rest—hinged on that DNA test.

The test came back. It was her. The skull belonged to Marlene Major. The missing person’s case of Marlene Major had officially become a murder case.

“Learning 110% she’s gone, no coming back, no chance,” Lana said. She was crushed by the confirmation. But despite her broken heart, her fight was not over. —

Lana realized her last option was to confront her own father and try to get a confession out of him.

She called him and asked about her mom’s disappearance. “Just tell me what you did with her body so we can bury her, and I’ll leave you alone,” she said. “I won’t force the issue, won’t try to get you prosecuted. ”

He laughed at her.

“If you think I’m going to tell you where your mother’s body is,” he said, “you’re crazy. ”

“Okay, fine,” she told him. “It’s on. ”

Lana was determined to get a full confession from her dad—the only way to prove him guilty.

Her drive to solve her mom’s murder inspired a new detective, Todd Kenner, to work on the cold case. Detective Kenner came up with a plan. He asked James Major, Bill’s father, to call his son and have the police record the conversation in an attempt to get a confession. The recording captured everything.

Bill’s father asked him why he would not tell where he had buried Marlene. Bill talked about Lana wanting the bones and putting them in a casket and having closure. The detective heard enough. After the phone call, James Major spoke his mind about his son: “I don’t have any kind of conscience about anything.

I think that a son I raised could do such a thing. They’re no good, son of a bitch. I’d hang myself if I could get my hands on him. He don’t deserve to breathe the air.

”

—

With the DNA matched on the skull and the incriminating phone call, police had enough to arrest Bill for the murder of Marlene Major. On June 25th, 2001, in Fair Haven, Massachusetts, Bill was arrested at his home for murdering his wife. On the way back to Boone County in the back of a police car, he openly confessed about what really happened twenty-one years earlier. It was late at night on October 12th, 1980.

Marlene and Bill were fighting downstairs. The conversation ended with Marlene threatening to leave him and take the children. She exited the house and got into her car. He followed her.

“She was screaming at me,” he said. “I couldn’t take it anymore. That’s when I shot her. ”

After he shot her in the head, he cut her head off, knocked her teeth out with the butt of the gun, and removed her jaw.

Then he cut her up into little pieces and spread her remains throughout the state. He got rid of the gun in a pond and left his wife’s skull in his sinkhole. He pushed her car into the Ohio River. “I think the crime scene was probably contained to the vehicle,” an investigator noted.

“The body and all the evidence of the crime remained in that vehicle. So when he got rid of the vehicle, he essentially got rid of the crime scene. ”

During the next few days, despite intense searching, police were unable to find the gun, the car, or Marlene’s remains. However, the prosecution possessed sufficient evidence—including positive DNA testing and Bill’s confession to his father—to successfully indict the killer.

—

On July 28th, 2003, Bill Major was tried for the murder of his wife Marlene and for tampering with physical evidence. Glenn St. Hir, the family’s handyman and alleged lover of Marlene, took the stand. He described how Bill Major seemed to push him and Marlene to be alone together and encouraged him to have a romantic relationship with his wife.

Both Lana and Donald were there to make sure justice was served. They testified about the abuse they had endured growing up. Lana described how Bill threatened to kill her if she did not keep their secret. The court stayed silent as they listened to the harrowing tales of the siblings.

It took the jury less than an hour to find him guilty. “When the verdict came back, I just almost dropped,” Lana said. “If my brother hadn’t had hold of me, I would have collapsed. ”

Bill was sentenced to life without parole.

During the final remarks, officers noted how much Lana truly loved and cared for her mom. “Lana had been driven for a long time to bring closure to this and to bring her father to justice,” one said. “It was obvious. You could see the passion for this in her eyes, the way she talked.

Even though she didn’t really know her mother that well—she was just a child when all this occurred—she had a lot of love for her mother. ”

After confronting her dad and finding out the truth, Lana proved that her mother never abandoned them. Marlene had done the opposite: she gave up her life trying to protect her children from the monster they called Dad. “I have spent so much of my life absolutely terrified of that man,” Lana said.

“And now, honestly, I don’t feel anything for him. I finally felt a sense of peace that day, that she finally could rest. ”

Throughout the years, Donald kept supporting Lana. Together, they broke the cycle of abuse created by their father.

Even though it took years for Lana to heal from the wounds her father had inflicted, she became living proof that even after tragedy, there is a life worth living. “Ultimately, she died to protect us,” Lana said. “She was trying to get us away from him, to get us out of that situation. She was trying to protect her children.

”