Regina and Jerry marvelled at the longevity of the suffering: their parents, them, their kids, probably even their grandkids. “It’s just crazy how many people your parents have affected down the generations,” Regina said. “Yeah,” Jerry replied, “it’s like a domino effect.” He told Regina that he now counted only his son and brother as kin. Regina said that she clings to family as much as she can. She has her sister and father, who understand what she’s been through, plus her entire extended family. The Steffenses hold a reunion every other year.

Still, Jerry was mostly struck by how alike he and Regina were. “She’s like the female version of me,” he said, after hanging up. “Damn skippy.” For a while after the phone call, he slept better. He stopped obsessing about his parents quite so much. He added Regina as a Facebook friend, and they “liked” each others’ posts on occasion. Jerry went through a bad breakup, and Regina sent him love advice.

Regina still felt restless and haunted. Her father, Van, who’d been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis a few years before, wasn’t doing well. In July, 2018, with a mind to arrange his affairs, he gave Regina the purse that her mother had with her on the night that she died. It was a red clutch with copper clips at the top. Inside were a pink billfold, stamps, fifty-year-old toothpaste, eye makeup. There was also a banana-pudding recipe, handwritten by Elizabeth’s mother. Regina studied the items like an archeologist, trying to understand what they might tell her about whom she came from.

I tried to dig up more records and information for Regina. I wrote to Carl Taylor, in a Colorado prison; he sent a polite letter refusing to comment. I called and wrote to Ginger McCrary, but she did not respond. I interviewed former law-enforcement officials and relatives of other victims, and I requested publicly available information in the case of Elizabeth Perryman. These requests were met, initially, with what struck me as bureaucratic stonewalling. But then, in June, 2019, the records arrived in the mail. I sent word to Regina. The Steffens reunion was happening the next month, during the July 4th holiday. She suggested that I come.

I met Regina, surrounded by her family, at a motel in Lubbock, a five-hour drive from her home in Oklahoma. Deeply tanned, with platinum-blond hair and dense eyeliner, she helped her grandkids into their bathing suits with the ease of a parent who’s raised two generations, and escorted them all to the pool. Then she and her son Nathan, her sister Tonette, and Tonette’s daughter Kelsea sat on the motel suite’s fraying sofa to read, on my laptop, the official record of what happened to Elizabeth. The police file contained crime-scene reports, interviews with suspects, newspaper clippings, court transcripts, even poetry that Taylor wrote in prison. I noted that law-enforcement records weren’t the gospel truth. Still, after so much misinformation, Regina was eager for something authoritative. She began clicking through PDFs.

The documents provided a detailed account of what happened the night her mother disappeared. Around 9:20 P.M., Elizabeth called the taxi company where Van worked as a driver. She asked the dispatcher to relay a message to her husband to pick her up at a Toddle House coffee shop, where she had been waitressing to save money to attend Texas Tech, up the street. When Van arrived, half an hour later, the place was locked. He searched for his wife all night. The next morning, restaurant staff discovered that $86.25 was missing from the cash register and that Elizabeth’s purse was still in the restaurant. The grill had been scrubbed, but the coffee urn hadn’t been cleaned and the floor was only partially mopped. Van filed a missing-persons report.

A separate file contained a copy of Taylor’s videotaped confession. Regina and Tonette decided that they wanted to watch it. Taylor, who frequently lied to law enforcement, made the sordid claim that Elizabeth went along with her own kidnapping, even welcomed it. “You lying motherfucker,” Regina said.

The next day, the Steffens family gathered at a pavilion by a lake. Elizabeth’s siblings Billy, Irene, Dorothy, and Sharon decorated the walls with patriotic streamers and flags. Sharon, now retired and in her sixties, is red-haired and gregarious. In 2003, she went to work as a receptionist at the Lubbock County District Attorney’s office. When a victim or a victim’s family came in, Sharon told me, she would sit with them while they waited to see a prosecutor. “No matter what you do to a criminal, the victim is never the same,” she said. I offered that, in other circumstances, criminals can be victims, too, but Sharon was having none of it. She showed me old photographs of Elizabeth, whom they called Betty Jo. She told me that Regina reminded her a lot of Betty Jo. Her sister Dorothy chimed in, from across the room, to say that mother and daughter shared the same mannerisms, the same hands, the same lips. “It’s been fifty years,” Dorothy said. “So it’s hard for me to remember her unless I look at Regina.” They began to reminisce about their sister, the pranks she liked to play, the things she liked to cook, a wig she sometimes wore. They also talked about the people who killed her, repeating some of the myths promulgated by “Death Roads” and the docudramas on TV.

After a potluck dinner, the youngest Steffens generation staged a talent show. Elizabeth’s great-granddaughter Vanessa—the child of Regina’s daughter Liz, whom Regina named after her mother—wrapped it up with a song. Vanessa’s bleached-blond hair dripped lake water onto the ground as she mumble-sang a ballad by Halsey, closing with the lines “Someone will love you / someone will love you.” When she finished, the family burst into applause.

After the pandemic hit Oklahoma, Regina worked as a nurse on a COVID floor at a local V.A. hospital. She contracted COVID but recovered, then decided that she needed to quit her job to take care of her ill father. We fell out of touch for the most part, and I also didn’t hear from Jerry for a while. I became worried and texted his childhood best friend, who informed me that he hadn’t been able to get a hold of Jerry since September, 2020. “I just hope he’s alive,” the friend wrote. Later, a local sheriff’s deputy explained that he had spoken to Jerry, who was doing fine, he said. Jerry said that he had decided to move away and cut ties with his previous life.

In June, Regina called to tell me that someone was working on a podcast about the McCrary murders—a Hollywood producer, she said, who was hoping that she’d participate. In exchange, she told me, the producer would try to connect her to Taylor, through a detective in the Denver case, whom he’d interviewed. The producer, Alan Wieder, later told me that the podcast was for Wondery, the network behind “Dirty John” and “Dr. Death,” which was sold to Amazon for a reported three hundred million dollars. Wieder has worked on the development side of reality TV for decades. His credits include “The Apprentice” and “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé.” He told me that he wanted the podcast to address classic true-crime subjects, such as what drives serial killers—the “why” question, as he put it—and that he hoped it would be entertaining. (The podcast, which becomes widely available this month, is called “Families Who Kill: The Donut Shop Murders.”)

In July, the Steffens family got together again, this time at a resort and R.V. park just off the interstate north of San Antonio. I stopped by to chat with Regina. She was still weighing whether or not to participate in the podcast. Over barbecue, she asked Sharon for her opinion. Sharon harrumphed and turned back to her plate. Later, Regina told me that she had turned the podcast down. For a long time, she said, she had dreamed about her mother, an idealized woman she would never know. Some of the details she’d been able to learn within the past few years were upsetting, but they filled in the picture. “She’s more real to me,” she said. “She wasn’t just who I made up.” Regina felt, for the moment, like she knew enough.