Ovid

At ten minutes past eleven on the morning of August twenty-third, nineteen eighty-five, a phone rang at a New York State Police desk and asked to speak with a state trooper.

The man on the line asked whether he'd reached the state police in Ovid, and the trooper said he had, and then the caller told him to listen and not to interrupt.

He asked whether the police were looking for the guy who'd taken Kristin, and the officer immediately went on high alert.

He said to look behind a green Chevy on Main Street in Waterloo, about twenty miles up the road, and to open the trunk because what they needed was inside it.

She was studying hotel and restaurant management at a college in Wisconsin and reportedly hoped to work in Hawaii one day.

In the spring of nineteen eighty-five, she went to Florida for spring break and met a nineteen-year-old named James Vermeersch, who was waiting tables on Captiva Island.

He was from Ovid, New York, a village of about six hundred people between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes.

They hit it off, kept in touch through letters and phone calls after they both went home, and by summer he'd invited her to come visit for a week.

This is the unsolved case of the girl in the cornfield.

Odds are you've never heard of Ovid, New York, and that's fine.

You're not alone.

It's a tiny village up in Seneca County, tucked between Seneca and Cayuga Lake, right in the heart of the Finger Lakes region.

Back in 1985, the whole village added up to just about 600 people.

And since then, it hasn't grown a single bit.

If anything, Ovid's actually shrunk.

The most recent census puts it at a little over 500 residents.