On the morning of October 3, 1972, Edna Ruth Callaway kissed her seven-year-old daughter goodbye and left her farmhouse in the Ozarks of Laclede County, Missouri. She was 34 years old, a teacher at the combined third- and fourth-grade classroom at Hark and Township Elementary, a two-room schoolhouse she had taught at for eleven years. She had a 4. 5-mile drive ahead of her on the gravel roads she had known her entire life, and she was expected at school by 8:30.

She never arrived. Her husband, Gerald, was home that Tuesday with a chest cold. He heard the engine of her 1968 Ford Galaxy start in the driveway and thought about getting up to say goodbye, but didn’t. Patsy, their daughter, had already been walked to the school bus stop by a neighbor’s teenager, carrying a lunch box with a picture of Lassie on it.

At the schoolhouse, the children were in their seats by 8:30. By 8:45, the principal, Harold Ferris, stepped outside to look down the road. The Galaxy was not coming. He telephoned the Callaway house at 8:52.

Gerald answered and told him she had left before eight. He was out the door within five minutes. By 9:15, Gerald had driven the full route without seeing the car. He turned around and drove it again, slower.

At 9:34, he found the Galaxy pulled off onto the gravel shoulder at the top of Crane Hollow Road, a quarter mile past the junction with County Road F. The driver’s door was open. The engine was off. The keys were in the ignition.

Her purse was on the front seat. Her gradebook was on the passenger seat, open to the week’s lesson plan, a pencil resting in the spine as if she had set it down for a moment and meant to come back. She was not in the car. She was not on the road.

Deputies arrived at 10:12. They searched the road and the timberline through the rest of the morning. There was no sign of a struggle. No tracks in the gravel that told a clear story.

The driver’s seat had not been disturbed. She had stopped the car herself. Something had caused her to stop. At the base of the shoulder, a deputy named Charles Orr found a small, dark brown button with four holes, the kind found on a man’s work shirt.

It was not from anything Edna Ruth had been wearing. Orr photographed it, bagged it, and logged it. In 1972, that button was the closest thing to a lead they had. Volunteers from the township walked the hollows below Crane Hollow Road in lines, calling her name.

The hills were dense with October undergrowth. Edna Ruth Callaway’s body was found on October 9, six days after she disappeared, in a ravine half a mile below Crane Hollow Road. She had been carried there. The manner of death was ruled homicide.

The investigating officer was Lieutenant Dale Scruggs of the Laclede County Sheriff’s Office, a 38-year-old who had spent most of his career working farm thefts and the occasional bar fight. He had never worked a homicide of this kind. In the first two weeks, Scruggs and two deputies canvassed every farm within four miles of Crane Hollow Road. They built a list of 22 men who had reason or habit to be on those roads before nine in the morning.

Seventeen had clear accounts. Four were persons of interest. The one who rose to the top was a 31-year-old farmhand named Vernon Hook, who had a 1969 arrest for assault on a woman that had been pleaded down to disorderly conduct. He had been on County Road F that morning on his way to a fence job.

His alibi was thin. He said he had stopped to look at a deer for a few minutes. Nobody could confirm it. Scruggs questioned him twice.

Hook answered every question consistently. His boots were examined. His truck was searched. Nothing placed him at the pull-off.

The county prosecutor would not issue a warrant on circumstance alone. By December of 1972, Hook had moved to Springfield. He was gone from Laclede County, but not from the file. Gerald Callaway was doing what men in that part of Missouri did when they had no other way to act.

He asked questions himself, quietly, driving to farms, sitting at counters in diners, listening. He was finding the same silence as Scruggs. The button was sent to the state crime lab in Jefferson City. The analysis came back in February of 1973: cotton, commercially manufactured, consistent with men’s work wear, no useful prints, manufacturer unknown.

It told them nothing they could not have guessed. By spring of 1973, the official investigation had slowed to just above stalled. Scruggs kept the file active on his desk for two more years before it moved to storage. He had not named a killer.

It stayed with him. Gerald never remarried. He sold off some cattle and took a part-time job driving a grain truck to keep the farm going. Every time he passed the pull-off at Crane Hollow Road, he did the same thing: he slowed down, he looked, he kept going.

Patsy graduated from high school and went to college in Springfield. She came home for summers and holidays. Gerald Callaway died in January of 2014 at the age of 77. Patsy brought a photograph of her mother to the funeral home and asked them to place it with him.

The case had been cold for 51 years when a cold case investigator named Ren Dellinger, working out of the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Unsolved Homicide Unit, pulled the Callaway file for a funded evidence re-processing initiative in the spring of 2023. Dellinger had been with the patrol for 17 years, the last six assigned to cold cases. She read the file twice, once for facts, once for feeling. On the second read, she got to the evidence inventory.

Item seven: button, dark brown, four hole, recovered Crane Hollow Road shoulder, 10-03-72. Latent print analysis inconclusive. No DNA extraction attempted. Technology unavailable at time of collection.

She filled out a biological evidence reprocessing request and walked it to the evidence unit herself. The science that followed is called low copy number DNA analysis, a technique developed to extract a genetic profile from the smallest possible biological samples, including the skin cells or oils transferred when a person handles an object. A button touched by the person who lost it may carry enough biological material for a modern laboratory to build a full DNA profile. In 1972, that concept did not exist.

In 2023, it was routine. The button had been in a sealed evidence envelope for 51 years. The lab had preliminary results within eight weeks. A DNA profile had been successfully extracted.

It did not match anyone in CODIS, the national criminal database. But Dellinger authorized a secondary comparison against a network of voluntary genealogy registries, the public family history databases where ordinary people upload saliva samples to find long-lost cousins. The match came back on a Thursday morning in September of 2023. The genealogy match traced through two lines of second and third cousins back to a family with deep roots in Laclede County.

A family whose name had appeared quietly at the edges of the 1972 investigation without ever stepping into the center of it. The family name was Simcox. Roy Simcox, the cattle farmer who had lived down the road from the Callaways, had died in 1998. But he had a son, a son who had grown up in Harkin Township, who had worked his father’s farm in 1972, who would have been 19 years old in October of that year.

His name was Curtis Simcox. He was 70 years old. He still lived in Laclede County. Curtis Simcox had spent 52 years being the kind of man small communities don’t think to question.

He had taken over his father’s farm after Roy died and run it respectably. He served two terms on the Laclede County Soil and Water Conservation District Board. He was a regular at Harkin Baptist, where his family had worshipped for three generations. His younger sister had been one of Edna Ruth’s students.

He had sat in the same church pews as Gerald and Patsy for decades after the murder, including at Gerald’s funeral in 2014. That fact, when it emerged, was the one that took people in the township the longest to absorb. Investigators collected a discarded coffee cup from a diner in Lebanon, where Simcox ate breakfast two or three times a week. The DNA extracted from the cup was run against the profile from the button.

It was a direct match. The probability of error, according to the Missouri State Crime Laboratory’s formal report, was less than one in 80 billion. An arrest warrant was issued on November 18, 2023. Curtis Simcox was taken into custody at 7:08 on a Monday morning at his farmhouse on the same road where his father had lived when Edna Ruth Callaway drove past it on her way to school in October of 1972.

He came to the door when they knocked. He looked at the badge. He looked at the warrant. “I knew this was coming,” he said.

He said nothing else. Simcox was charged with murder in the first degree by the Laclede County Prosecuting Attorney in December of 2023. He entered a plea of not guilty. His defense has challenged the DNA evidence on collection and chain of custody grounds.

At the time of this recording, the case is proceeding toward trial. He remains held without bond. Ren Dellinger drove back to Jefferson City after the arrest was processed. She called the number she had found in the file for next of kin.

Patsy Callaway, 60 years old, answered on the third ring. She told a reporter later that she did not cry immediately. She said her first thought was of her father, of the Sundays he had driven County Road F and slowed down at the pull-off and kept going without saying anything. She thought about what he had carried for 41 years before he died, and she wished, more than anything, that Dellinger’s call had come in time for him to receive it.

Her second thought was that she needed to call her own daughter. That, she said, was how she knew she was going to be all right. Edna Ruth Callaway had a gradebook open on her passenger seat on the morning of October 3, 1972. She had a pencil in the spine.

She had lesson plans for the week written in her careful handwriting. She was driving 4. 5 miles to a classroom where 14 children were waiting for her, and she intended to arrive, and she never did. A man who lived down the road from her knew every day afterward exactly why.

The button gave it back.