Of 4 hours after Laura Doyle picked Missy Avala up from her mother’s house.
Laura called that same house and asked to speak to Missy.
It was the evening of October 1st, 1985 in Alita, a workingclass corner of the San Fernando Valley where the streets are named after trees and the houses sit close enough that you can hear your neighbors television through the wall.
Irene Avala answered the phone.
She told Laura that Missy wasn’t home, that Missy had left with her with Laura that afternoon.
There was a pause on the line.
Then Laura said she’d dropped Missy off hours ago near a park with three boys in a blue Camaro.
Irene hung up and started making calls.
By midnight, she was calling hospitals.
By morning, she was calling the police.
3 days later, two hikers in the Angeles National Forest found a girl face down in a shallow mountain creek.
45 minutes from the valley with a 100-b log laid across her back and most of her long dark hair hacked off.
Missy Avala was 17 years old.
She was small, pretty, popular, and loved.
And for the next 3 years, the two people who grieved loudest at her funeral, who held her mother’s hand, who swore they would help find the monster who did this, who moved into the Avala family home and slept in Missy’s bed.
Those two people were the ones who had held her under the water.
That is not a story about a girl who got in the wrong car.
That is a story about what jealousy does to friendship and what a lie can live inside of for a thousand days.
And it would take a third girl, one who had stood on that creek bank and watched to finally say it out loud.
But before we get to that, we have to go back to Alita.
Because to understand what was lost, you have to understand who Missy was and who Karen was to her.
The San Fernando Valley in 1985 was a place of its own.
Strip malls and stucco cruising Vanise Boulevard on a Wednesday night.
Big hair and bigger sunglasses.
The radio playing Madonna and Tears for Fears out of car windows.
Every teenager had a boom box and a crush.
The Galleria in Sherman Oaks was the center of the universe.
A Camaro was the car you dreamed about.
And a Camaro with three boys in it was exactly the kind of thing a mother would have no trouble believing.
Mika Ivet Avala Missy to everyone who ever met her was born on February 8th, 1968 and raised in that valley by her mother Irene with three older brothers who treated her like the treasure of the house.
She went to San Fernando High School.
She was tiny, barely 5t tall, long brown hair that she wore down past her shoulders and was known for.
People noticed Missy.
Boys noticed her.
That in the end would be the thing that killed her.
Her best friend was Karen Severson.
They had been inseparable since they were 8 years old.
The kind of childhood friendship where one girl’s house is the other girl’s house.
Where mothers call each other to find out where the kids are.
Karen was bigger than Missy, louder.
And over the years, she developed a habit that Missy’s family would only understand much later.
Karen copied Missy.
She dressed like her.
She wanted the boys Missy wanted.
When Missy broke up with a boy named Randy, Karen started dating him almost immediately.
And Randy, by most accounts, kept trying to get Missy back.
Missy’s brother Mark would put it in six words.
Years afterward, Karen wanted to be Missy.
Laura Doyle was the other friend, 17, part of the same circle with a boyfriend of her own.
In the months before October, Laura had come to believe, rightly or wrongly, that Missy had been with him.
By the fall of 1985, there was a current running under the friendship that Missy either didn’t see or didn’t take seriously.
Karen had a 2-year-old daughter already.
Laura had a grudge and Missy, 17 and pretty and used to being liked, was about to climb into a car with both of them.
Irene Avala would later say she had me reason in the world to suspect either girl.
They were family.
That was the last normal afternoon anyone in that house would have.
Tuesday, October 1st, 1985.
Missy told her mother she was going out with a school friend, Laura Doyle.
Laura pulled up, Missy got in, and they drove away.
What Irene didn’t know was who else would be in that car.
Karen Severson was coming.
So was a fourth girl, Ava Charum Bolo, another member of the group along for the ride, she would always say without knowing what the ride was for.
The four of them drove north out of the valley up beat to Junga Canyon Road into the Angelus National Forest.
45 minutes of switchbacks and chaperel and the smell of hot pine.
They stopped at a pit area near a creek.
None of those spots where valley kids went to drink and sit on the rocks in the shade.
Then the mood changed.
According to the account Ava would eventually give and that a judge would later summarize in court filings.
Karen and Laura turned on Missy.
But they accused her of sleeping with their boyfriends.
They called her promiscuous.
The word they used was uglier.
Missy denied it.
Laura grabbed a fistful of that long hair and cut it off with a knife.
Missy was crying now, begging, small enough that either girl could have overpowered her alone.
They pushed her into the creek.
The water was shallow.
Inches.
They held her face down in it.
Then they dragged a log 5 ft long, roughly a 100 lb on top of her body, and they left her there.
Ava watched.
She did not help Missy.
She did not help them.
She got back in the car.
On the drive home, the story was agreed on.
Laura had dropped Missy off with three boys in a blue Camaro.
That was it.
That was all any of them knew.
At the OA house, the phone rang 4 hours after Missy left.
Laura asking for Missy.
Irene said she wasn’t home and the lie began.
It’s 3-year life.
October 2nd.
Irene reported her do missing.
October 3rd.
Nothing.
October 4th, 1985.
Two hikers walking the creek in Bid Tujunga Canyon came across the log and what was under it?
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide detectives were called up the mountain.
Missy was identified.
Her hair was gone.
Her face was bruised.
The cause of death was drowning.
And one detail from that scene would quietly shape everything that came after.
There was no sign of a sexual assault, no robbery, nothing that looked like a stranger.
Whoever did this had wanted to humiliate her first.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department ran the case the way a stranger abduction gets run.
The blue Camaro went out to every patrol car in the valley.
Detectives interviewed Missy’s ex-boyfriend’s boys at San Fernando High.
Anyone with a reason and a car.
Laura Doyle was interviewed naturally.
She was the last person to see Missy alive and she gave the Camaro story and held it.
Three boys, a park.
She didn’t know them.
She wished she could help more.
The Camaro story had a problem detectives couldn’t solve.
There was no Camaro.
No boys ever surfaced.
No one at the park remembered a thing.
The lead went nowhere, and every other lead went nowhere behind it.
Meanwhile, a second story was unfolding in the OA home, and it would become one of the most disturbing details in California true crime.
Karen Severson arrived the day the body was found.
She cried with Irene.
She came to the funeral and wept at the casket, as did Laura.
In the weeks after, Karen was at the house constantly.
She brought her little daughter.
She talked about Missy for hours late into the night sitting up with Irene.
She vowed again and again that she would help the family find the real killer.
She spent Thanksgiving at the Ovelar table.
And then she moved in.
Karen Severson and her 2-year-old daughter took up residence in the OA house.
And Karen slept in Missy’s room.
She covered her own bedroom walls and newspaper clippings about the case.
She visited the grave constantly.
She pointed fingers at ex-boyfriends, at other kids, at anyone who could absorb the suspicion.
Irene would later say that Karen had her sons fooled, her daughter-in-law fooled, everyone fooled.
The family’s grief had a companion, and the companion had killed the girl they were grieving.
For the detectives, the first year ended with no suspect, a dead-end Camaro, and a case file that was thickening without going anywhere.
A teenager murdered in a national forest by somebody who knew her and nobody in her circle was talking because three of them had made a promise to each other on the drive down the mountain.
1986 came and went.
Then 1987, Irene Avala did not move on because mothers don’t.
The clippings in Karen’s room yellowed.
The log still lay in the creek.
Missy’s brothers grew into men who had learned to say their sister’s name in the past tense.
At San Fernando High, the class of 1986 graduated without her, and the class behind them barely remembered the girl with the long hair.
In the valley, the story faded into the general hum of a city where terrible things happen every week.
The sheriff’s case didn’t close.
A murder file doesn’t.
But it stopped moving.
Detectives rotated.
The blue Camaro became a line in a report nobody mo.
Karen eventually moved out of the OA house.
The friendship with Laura, the only two people who could destroy each other, held in the way that shared guilt holds, tightly, silently.
And then there was Eva.
Eva Chermbolo had not touched Missy.
She had not planned anything.
She had stood at the edge of a cite and watched two girls she knew drown a third.
And then she had gone home and said nothing for nearly 3 years.
What that does to a person, only Eva knows.
But by the summer of 1988, she couldn’t carry it anymore.
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Now, let’s get back to Missy.
Because in July of 1988, a phone rang at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and on the other end was the one witness nobody knew existed.
Picture a detective who has had the Avala file on and off his desk for almost 3 years.
The Camaro, the park, the hair, the log.
He has interviewed every boy in Alatair.
He has watched a dead girl’s best friend sobb in a courtroom hallway that never got a trial.
And now a young woman is sitting across from him saying, “I was there.
There was no Camaro.
There were no boys.
It was Karen and Laura.”
On July 26th, 1988, Ever Shirrombolo told police what she had seen on October 1st, 1985.
The confrontation, the accusations, the hair, the creek, the log, who did what.
In one afternoon, a case that had been frozen for 1,029 days thawed completely.
There is no DNA in this story, no forensic breakthrough, no technology that didn’t exist in 1985.
The break was a conscience.
It’s worth saying plainly for anyone who’s ever wondered how long a secret like that can last.
It lasted until the weakest link in it decided she’d rather face the truth than keep living inside the lie.
Detectives moved immediately.
Karen Severson and Laura Doyle were arrested that July and charged with first-degree murder.
Irene Avala got a phone call.
The girl who had slept in her daughter’s bed, who had eaten Thanksgiving dinner at her table, who had sat up with her night after night, swearing to find the killer.
Irene learned all at once what Karen had been doing in that house.
Years later, she would still be trying to understand why her family would describe it as being fooled by everyone all at once.
Eva was not charged.
Prosecutors judged that she had not participated and that without her there was no case at all.
That decision would sit uneasily with some people for decades.
But it was the price of the truth.
Now the two girls who had held Missy under had to face what they’d done in front of 12 strangers.
The trial opened in early 1990 in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Karen Severson and Laura Doyle, by then in their early 20s, sat at the defense table.
The two best friends who had walked into Missy’s funeral arm in arm.
The prosecution’s case was built on Eva Chiro’s testimony, and the defense attacked it the only way it could.
She was there, too.
She waited 3 years.
Why believe her now?
But Eva’s account fit the physical evidence in ways a lie wouldn’t.
The cut hair, the shallow water, the log, the bruising, the absence of any stranger.
It also fit something the jury could feel.
The motive, jealousy over boyfriends, a pretty girl who got attention, and two friends who decided she’d pay for it.
The two defendants turned on each other, as codefendants do.
Laura would eventually admit years later at a 2002 parole hearing that she had coaxed Missy to her death and she would say Karen masterminded it.
Karen would insist she had only meant to torment Missy, to scare her, to humiliate her, and that it got out of hand.
Decades after that, in interviews, she would reduce it to three words: I pushed her.
In March of 1990, the jury returned its verdict.
Both women were found guilty of secondderee murder.
Each was sentenced to 15 years to life in state prison.
For the Avala family, it was the end of one nightmare and the start of a different one.
Because seconddegree murder with a life tale means parole hearings.
And parole hearings mean that every few years Irene Aer would have to stand in front of a board and describe again what Karen Severson had done in her home.
The Valley absorbed the story the way it absorbs everything.
But this one stuck.
It became a book, Missy’s Murder by Karen Kingsbury, who covered the case as a reporter before she became a novelist.
It became a 1992 television movie, A Killer Among Friends, with Patty Duke playing Irene.
The detail that haunted audiences wasn’t the creek.
It was the bed.
The best friend who moved her to the dead girl’s room.
Karen Severson was parrolled in December of 2011 over the objections of Los Angeles prosecutors.
After more than 20 years inside, Laura Doyle followed a year later.
In December of 2012 after 22 years and then Karen Severson wrote a book picture Missy Avala on a Saturday in the summer of 1985 17 long hair down her back catching the valley sun.
Three be brothers around her.
A mother who thinks she hangs the moon.
A best friend she’s known since she was eight sitting next to her on the curb.
She is, as her family would always say, the kind of girl people noticed.
And she liked being noticed the way any 17-year-old does.
She had a whole life in front of her that belonged to her by right.
Think 2014, Karen Severson published a memoir about the murder and began talking about a documentary and a film.
The Aila family found out and in Missy’s sister-in-law Siobhan’s words, it felt like a sock in the gut.
Fighting for Missy’s life all over again.
The family sued Severson in superior court to stop her from profiting.
Then they went to Sacramento.
In 2015, the governor of California signed a law to ensure that convicted criminals in the stake could not profit from their crimes.
It is called Missy’s Law.
Irene Aila, asked by a reporter what she’d say to the woman who had slept in her daughter’s bed, gave the shortest answer she could.
So, here is what remains after 40 years.
A girl who was drowned by her two best friends for the crime of being liked.
A mother who was deceived in her own home by the person she leaned on hardest.
A witness who waited 1,029 days and then finally didn’t.
Two convictions, two parles in a law with a dead girl’s name on it that exists only because her killer wanted to be paid for the story.
Maybe the lesson is the obvious one that the people closest to you can be the most dangerous, but there’s a quieter one underneath.
Eva Chiro Molo could have stayed silent forever.
There was no evidence pointing at her.
No detective was coming.
She told the truth anyway.
3 years late and 3 years late was enough.
So, we’ll leave it with you.
Do you believe Eva should have been charged or was her testimony worth the price of her freedom?
What disturbs you more, the murder itself or the three years Karen Severson spent inside the Aila home?
And do you think 15 to life with parole after 22 years was justice for Missy?
Justice came from Missy Aila after 3 years.
Stories like hers remind us that truth, however late, finds its way to the light.
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Thank you for watching.
