her birthday, my birthday, my grandmother, we d get calls. and just silence on the other end? yeah. what did you do? we d say, carol, we love you. we hope you come back. we felt like she was finding a happier life somewhere. and understood that to make that successful, she might have to make a complete and total break? yeah. reporter: almost three months after carol vanished, the detective handling her case put it in the inactive file. in his report he wrote no foul play involved. i remember thinking about her all the time, and i used to play records over and over that she liked. just thinking where is she? when is she coming back? reporter: eventually mike started dating a 19-year-old named carrie, brought her into the fold. we were happy that mike was going on with life. reporter: and so they did all go on with life. and many years went by. until the morning in a whole new millennium when a torrance
machine. how much of this was true? after the polygraph, the test was done, he confronts him and says you didn t pass. now the defendant changes his story and he says, okay, i punched her in the head. and i punched her hard. but he said only one time. reporter: then he told lewin what he did with carol s body. after he killed her, he put her in the garage behind some carpet. he took her car the next morning to the red onion parking lot, dumped it there. at some point she was placed in the trunk of mr. lubahn s vehicle. reporter: and then he said he took her to the ocean, put her on a raft, paddled out to sea and dropped her down, a cinder block tied to her body. it was a shock, of course, a big shock. for so long the family, or most of it, believed mike. and now in this very public way,
in my father s for sure. what would you see there? a lot of emotion, a lot of sadness. i m going to cry thinking about it. reporter: 1987, almost six years after carol vanished, the torrance police department revisited the case and time seemed to have altered mike s memory a little. a few more details had come back to him. remember soon after carol vanished, mike said they argued, he went to sleep alone, woke up in the morning early and she was gone? but in 1987, he remembered they argued, went to bed together, she got up at 5:30 in the morning to go to the bathroom. she woke up, drifted back to sleep and woke up to the sound of a car engine starting and driving away. odd. but memories do play tricks. anyway, it didn t seem terribly significant, so the case went back into the file and got colder.
onion was. i know she was going to the red onion. i never went there with her so i don t know what she was like. she had another corner of her reporter: and then that night in march, kids off to bed. their son, mike jr., was just a boy, 10 years old. i was in bed. i had just got a new stereo for my 10th birthday and was listening to the headphones. reporter: from his bed, he could see something happening out in the hallway. i remember them getting into an argument, which was unusual. because they just didn t? not that i knew of. i remember her marching past and going out the front door and slamming the door. you heard the slam? i heard the slam of the front door, i know that. and the next morning we got up and she wasn t there. reporter: mike sr. told carol s dad that carol had demanded he sign papers to sell their house and he didn t want to, and she got mad and they argued. he went to bed and when he woke up in the morning, she was just gone.
it s like another nightmare on top of the first nightmare. this was a case where i think the family would have been more than happy to believe that carol is still out there somewhere, she s not dead, and their beloved son-in-law is not a killer. reporter: but of all mike sr. s family members, perhaps no one was as torn as his name sake first born son, mike jr., who loved his father unreservedly. followed him into the family painting business, worked side by side with him for decades, and who had confessed to detectives that, like his aunt terri, he too had doubts about his father. doubts that had taken root shortly after mike sr. s second wife left him. he talked about my stepmother constantly, for years, nonstop. and why was that so significant to you? because he never talked about my mother.