he . well, he let it be known almost immediately that he wanted sex. reporter: linderholm said i that didn t happen. instead they talked for an hour or so and then she left. couple of days later, she said, she called paige. it s carol, where the heck are you? reporter: got no response. at first i thought she was just busy and she couldn t call back. then when i heard on the news that the kids actually went to the police department about it, that s when i knew something terrible had happened to her. paige, this is carol. oh, i hope you re all right. i hope this isn t rob. oh, my god. reporter: linderholm mentioned paige s second ex-husband, rob dixon, because o she knew paige was afraid of him.n, then the next day linderholm heard about paige s car and the fire. i wanted to go over and look at it and i arrived just in time for it was put on a platform on a trailer and it was being
it just it hit me. reporter: then of course she had to know, was that wild story about a decapitating accident in new jersey just coralluzzo s excuse to run from what he had done to get out of town? i scoured the internet and made phone calls. reporter: scoured the internet looking for evidence of a big traffic accident. didn t find uh-huh. nothing there. reporter: so who did you phone? i called their local gazette newspaper, talked to a reporter. nothing happened. i called the coroner. nothing. so newspaper, coroner, hospitals. nothing. reporter: but meagan was able to locate coralluzzo and passed that tip on to lead investigator beverly jarrell, who would end up playing a key role. you ll hear more about her later. jarrell caught up with coralluzzo in new jersey. grilled him for five hours. but coralluzzo denied everything. more important he was in new jersey when paige s car was set ablaze so jarrell let him go.
my mom said she asked him what was he doing. and he said, looking for your daughter. reporter: lester ralph jones was convicted of assault and kidnapping and served three years. but now he was out and remarried and the by the fall of 2007, a pile of circumstantial evidence connected him to paige birgfeld s disappearance. why didn t you just go arrest him? our job is to gather the facts and then present it to the district attorney s office and they make that determination. you wanna add cause he had to fight that battle constantly for years. oh, i think you hit it hit it right on. reporter: meaning they were ready to pick up jones, but d.a. hautzinger was not. why didn t you decide to pull the pin on lester ralph jones? i didn t have a body. and that was the defining absolutely, that was really i mean, there are lots of no body cases that go to trial. not a lot of no body cases where the victim has a double life and has been lying to her family and friends
everything, that there really are interests that are competing in north korea and the united states, and that undermines it. then when he comes back to the united states, you know, you realize that he can t just will there were certain things you just can t will reality to be what you want it to be. and in both of these cases, whether it s trying to sort of through the force of your personality and charisma decide the relationship between the united states and north korea is going to be different than it s been for decades, or whether it s coming back to washington and realizing the situations are actually going on and you just can t stop it. the relationship didn t get him a deal, but the president putting the value in the relationship, does it warp his thinking sometimes in little sense that this is the president talking about, is kim jong-un responsible for what happened to otto warmbier? young american imprisoned in north korea, released only when the north koreans realized h
you wanna add cause he had to fight that battle constantly for years. oh, i think you hit it hit it right on. reporter: meaning they were ready to pick up jones, but d.a. hautzinger was not. why didn t you decide to pull the pin on lester ralph jones? i didn t have a body. and that was the defining absolutely, that was really i mean, there are lots of no body cases that go to trial. not a lot of no body cases where the victim has a double life and has been lying to her family and friends. because of her double life the possibility that a defense attorney could throw out there that she ran off with some rich client and is living on a beach in brazil or something reporter: and as the years passed, paige s story went from the front of the paper to being filed away on microfiche. where was she? they were about to fipd out, and it would transform the case. now we need to make a critical decision.