Cold Cases · Spotify Studios

Party At The Gravel Pit

May 15, 2023·42 min·2 clips

Police learn David Licken knew Cheryl and Pamela, and a witness recalls him saying, 'some girl that is buried on the farm.'

1. Cold Cases: "Party At The Gravel Pit" follows the disappearance of Pamela Jackson and Cheryl Miller after a May 29, 1971 trip in Vermillion, South Dakota. 2. Host Carter Roy frames the episode around Pamela Jackson, Cheryl Miller, and the false comfort of a case going cold before a later break changes everything. 3. The episode asks what happened after the girls left in Cheryl's 1960 Studebaker Lark for a gravel-pit party outside town. 4. Cheryl Miller lies to her sister Rita about going roller skating, borrows her grandfather's Studebaker, and picks up Pamela Jackson at 6:30 p.m. 5. Pamela tells her parents Adele and Oscar that she is visiting Cheryl's grandmother Pearl in the hospital, then heads toward the party with Cheryl. 6. At a church parking lot, three boys direct the girls to a party at a nearby gravel pit and tell them to follow. 7. The caravan misses a turn, the Studebaker disappears, and the girls never arrive at the gravel pit with the other teenagers. 8. Adele notices the kitchen light still on at 4 a.m., and the Jackson family realizes Pamela never came home. 9. Cheryl's mother Helen and her grandparents call repeatedly, and the Vermillion Sheriff's Office tells the families to wait 48 hours before an official investigation begins. 10. Police later search the gravel pit and the Missouri River, then publish the girls' photos in the Sioux City Journal after those searches turn up empty. 11. A neighbor reports overhearing a party-line phone call in which Pamela speaks with a boy named David and mentions a hangover and a hurt hand. 12. The episode details how rural party lines let neighbors hear conversations by picking up a shared phone line in Vermillion. 13. Police also examine a runaway theory tied to 1960s counterculture, but Pamela's medication, her glasses, and both girls' uncashed paychecks argue against it. 14. Cheryl's grandmother Pearl dies within a month, and Rita Miller says that is when the disappearance starts to feel final. 15. Detectives later focus on David Licken, a University of South Dakota student who lived near the gravel pit and later became a rape and kidnapping suspect. 16. In 2004, a state cold cases unit searches the Licken farm with ground-penetrating radar, digs for four days, and finds a red purse, bones from a septic tank, and a Bible with hair and newspaper clippings. 17. A witness named Nancy Bell says she saw Cheryl and Pamela in a car on the farm and later saw her family digging a large burn pit. 18. Aloysius Black Crow says David confessed, but the tape is later exposed as fabricated, wiping out the murder case and devastating the Jackson and Miller families. 19. The episode uses a mournful, procedural style with long timeline leaps, archived details, and careful scene-setting around the town, the farm, and the creek. 20. Listeners who like long-form cold cases with family testimony and rural detail will want this; listeners who want fast resolution may skip it.

As heard by us

A restrained cold-case episode about two missing girls, a contested runaway theory, and the family details that keep doubt alive.

Cold Cases follows the disappearance of 17-year-olds Pamela Jackson and Cheryl Miller as a case shaped as much by doubt as by evidence. The girls leave in a ramshackle Studebaker in 1971 with no belongings, Pamela without her medication and glasses, and both paychecks still…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a 1971 disappearance where uncashed paychecks make the runaway theory wobble.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Cold Cases