A little girl vanishes in the middle of the afternoon. Not at night. Not in some dark alley.

In broad daylight in front of her own home with neighbors watching from their porches and workers eating lunch across the street.

Multiple witnesses see it happen. Not one of them can stop it. And when investigators finally find her 3 and 1/2 days later, she is standing in raw sewage 15 ft underground in a pit toilet in a remote campground, alive, shivering, and asking for Kool-Aid.

She is 3 years old. The man who put her there walks free after 6 years.

And then he strikes again. This is not a story about a cold case that was never solved.

This is a story about a case that was solved. Prosecuted and then quietly systematically failed by the very system that was supposed to protect the most vulnerable among us.

42 years later, Lorie Poland is still fighting. Not for herself, for every child who comes after her.

Stay with us because this story is going to make you feel things you were not expecting to feel today.

We cover the cases that deserve to be heard, the ones that shake you, the ones that change the way you see the world.

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Let’s get into it. It is Monday, August 22nd, 1983. Sheridan, Colorado. 86° Fahrenheit outside, which in August in Colorado feels like the whole world is being pressed against a hot iron.

The kind of afternoon where the air shimmers off the asphalt and everything moves just a little bit slower than it should.

Kids are running through sprinklers in front yards. Parents are watching from porch swings with glasses of iced tea sweating in their hands.

Dogs are lying flat on cool lenolium floors. The neighborhood feels like a painting of summer, warm and lazy and absolutely ordinary.

The Poland family lives on West Bear Creek Drive in Sheridan, a workingclass suburb tucked just south of Denver.

The 3,200 block is the kind of street where you know your neighbors by their first names and their kids by their haircuts.

Front doors stay unlocked during the day. Children ride their bikes from yard to yard without asking permission.

Parents rotate the job of watching because on this street watching each other’s children is just what you do.

It is that kind of neighborhood. It is that kind of time. Inside the small brick house, three-year-old Lorie Poland has just finished eating lunch with her father, Richard.

Her mother, Diane, who is only 25 years old, left for work earlier that morning.

Lorie’s 5-year-old brother is already outside, having pushed through the screen door and let it bang shut behind him as he ran into the afternoon heat.

Lorie is 37 months old, not quite four. She has blonde hair and blue eyes and a gaptothered smile that shows up in every photograph from that summer.

She is the kind of kid who laughs easily and runs everywhere and has not yet learned that the world can be anything other than safe.

She has no idea sitting there finishing her lunch that her life is about to fracture into a before and an after and that the line between those two halves is less than an hour away.

At around 12:45 in the afternoon, Lorie heads outside to play. Her brother is already out there with a handful of neighborhood children, the usual mix of kids that gathered every summer afternoon on this block.

The front yard feels safe because it is safe. There are adults around. A neighbor named Paul Weaver is nearby.

Other parents are visible from their porches. Across the street, workers from a local business are sitting in their vehicles, eating their lunches in the shade, watching the afternoon the way you do when you have nothing urgent to do for 30 minutes.

One of those workers is a painter named Marvin Edler. He is sitting in his pickup truck with a sandwich in his hand, not really watching anything in particular, just taking in the neighborhood the way you do when the windows are down and there’s nowhere you have to be just yet.

Everything is completely normal. And then an orange car pulls up to the curb. It is an older Datson sedan, a 1972 model, four doors painted a faded orange or brown depending on how the light hits it.

It has a black vinyl top, black stripes running down the sides, and letters or markings along the bottom of the doors.

It is the kind of car that stands out if you’re paying attention. The kind that would have been unremarkable in its day, but now has the look of something slightly off, slightly out of place, slightly wrong.

The man behind the wheel is 21 years old. His name is Robert Paul Dyret.

He works maintaining a golf course in Denver. He has a history, though none of the people in this neighborhood know it yet.

There have been other incidents, other attempted kidnappings, other vehicles matching similar descriptions reported in connection with similar situations.

There is a pattern that investigators will later piece together with the kind of sick recognition that comes when you realize something has been building for a long time.

But right now on this street, in this moment, none of that is known. To every person on West Bear Creek Drive, Robert Paul Thyret is a complete stranger with zero connection to the Poland family.

He is also hunting. Thyret pulls the orange Datson to the curb and uses a tactic as old as predators themselves.

He calls out to Lorie. He asks her if she likes candy. Lorie Poland would later describe that moment with a simplicity that cuts right through you.

She said, “Like any sugar-loving three-year-old.” I said, “Yes.” What happens next takes only seconds, but those seconds contain the kind of violence that doesn’t need fists to be devastating.

Thy persuades the little girl to remove her pants. Her small shorts and underwear are found lying on the curb later.

And then Lori, believing she is going with this man to get candy, climbs into the orange car voluntarily.

She has no reason not to. She is 3 years old. She thinks she is going to get something sweet.

The daten pulls away from the curb immediately. Three children who were playing with Lorie in the yard go screaming into the house.

Call the police. Call the police right now. Marvin Edler, the painter eating his sandwich across the street, watches as the car disappears.

He saw the driver talking to the kids beforehand. He saw the little blonde girl get into the vehicle.

He didn’t know what he was watching until the car was already gone. Paul Weaver, the neighbor, has also witnessed what just happened.

And Richard Poland, Lorie’s father, who had stepped inside the house for maybe 2 minutes, maybe less, just enough time to grab popsicles to bring out to the children, walks back through the screen door to find his daughter gone.

The tricycle she had been riding is lying on its side in the yard. One wheel still spinning slowly in the afternoon heat.

Richard Poland stands there for a moment that must have felt like falling through the floor of everything he knew.

Then the children are screaming at him and the neighbor is coming across the yard and the phone is ringing or needs to ring and his three-year-old daughter is somewhere in an orange car being driven away from him.

This is the moment the clock starts. Within minutes, witnesses come to Richard with everything they saw.

The vehicle description is remarkably detailed for how fast it all happened. 1972 Datson four-door sedan, faded orange or brown, black vinyl roof, black stripe down the side, lettering on the lower portion of the doors, and most critically, a partial license plate number.

The witnesses caught part of it. ADV-2 for characters. In 1983, before digital databases and instant lookups for characters on a license plate are still something.

They are a thread and the investigators are about to pull it. Sergeant Lewis Flores of the Sheridan Police Department arrives at the scene immediately.

He takes in the situation with the speed and clarity that good law enforcement brings to the worst moments.

And the Sheridan Police Department makes a decision in the next few hours that given the era is actually extraordinary.

After getting approval from the city administrator and the mayor, they go directly to local media.

They ask for help. They are going to put this story on television tonight. This is 1983.

The Amber Alert system does not exist. It will not exist in Colorado until 2002.

There is no social media. There are no mass text alerts. There are no protocols that have been built and tested and refined through decades of experience.

There is a missing three-year-old girl, a partial license plate, a detailed vehicle description, and television cameras.

That will have to be enough. By evening, Diane and Richard Poland are sitting in front of cameras making the kind of plea that no parent should ever have to make.

Diane Poland looks directly into the lens and says, “She’s my baby.” And the way she says it, those three words, they play on every local station in Denver that night.

They play over and over again. The image of two parents sitting there undone, reduced to begging strangers to help them find their child, lands in living rooms across Colorado like a stone dropped into still water.

People watch, people feel, people start paying attention. And while the cameras roll and the news spreads, the investigation is moving with speed that, given the technology of the era, is genuinely impressive.

Investigators run the partial plate ADV2 through motor vehicle records. The process takes time they don’t have, but they work it, and the records come back with a match.

A vehicle registered with license plate ADV627. The registered owner is a 21-year-old golf course maintenance worker from Denver named Robert Paul Vyret.

The partial plate witnesses caught at the scene ADV-2 matches the first three letters and the number two that appears in the full plate.

But here is where it gets even more significant. That same partial plate and that same vehicle description have surfaced in connection with another reported attempted kidnapping.

Not one prior incident. Two two individuals have come forward with accounts of near abductions involving what sounds like the same car, the same approximate description, the same approach.

There is a pattern here. And by August 23rd, the day after Lorie Poland disappeared, the Sheridan Police Department knows the name of their suspect.

On the morning of August 23rd, FBI agents and Sheridan Police officers drive to Thyret’s residence in Denver.

They pull up and there, sitting in the driveway like it has been waiting for them, is an orange brown Datson with license plate ADV 627.

An exact match to everything the witnesses described. Thy red answers when they knock on his door.

He denies everything. He tells them he was home at the time of the abduction.

He agrees to take a polygraph examination at the district attorney’s office. And that night, despite what the investigators know, despite the matching vehicle and the matching plate and the prior incidents, Thy is released.

He walks out holding a sports coat over his head to block the news photographers who are waiting outside.

He rushes to a car and is driven away while the cameras capture every awkward frame of a man trying not to be seen.

He maintains his innocence, but the police are far from done. Thyret is placed under 24-hour surveillance immediately.

Investigators arranged to have his Datson towed to a storage bay at a towing company on South Federal Boulevard.

With thyroid’s written consent, crime lab personnel from the Arapjo County Sheriff’s Office go over the vehicle thoroughly, looking for anything that ties him to Lorie Poland to the abduction to the day she disappeared from her front yard.

At the same time, a massive volunteer search operation is spreading out across the Denver metro area.

Hundreds of people are combing through neighborhoods, parks, fields, and wilderness areas. Police have made casts of tire tracks from the scene near the Poland home.

They are working every angle they have. Day one passes. Day two passes. By day three, the energy of the search has started to shift in the way that search operations always do.

When time keeps passing and nothing is found, hope doesn’t disappear, but it changes shape.

It becomes something quieter and harder and more desperate. By day four, the investigators and the volunteers and the families who have joined the search are all carrying the same terrible weight.

Most of them have stopped expecting to find Lorie Poland alive. And then on the morning of August 25th, a couple from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who have absolutely nothing to do with any of this, take a wrong turn.

And that wrong turn saves a life. It is Thursday morning, August 25th, 1983. Three and a half days have passed since Lorie Poland was taken from her front yard.

Steven and Cynthia Goolan are visiting the Denver area from Pittsburgh. They are bird watchers, the kind of people who wake up early and drive to parks with binoculars and move quietly through trees, listening for calls they can identify by ear.

On this particular morning, they are in Jennese Park, a large open space near the Chief Hosa exit of Interstate 70, approximately 15 to 20 m west of Sheridan where Lorie lived.

They have been wandering through the park for about 2 hours when they find themselves approaching an outhouse at a campground.

It is a pit toilet, the kind you find at remote campsites, a small structure built over a deep hole in the ground.

Steven Goolan does not want to stop. He drives right past it. “Absolutely not,” he tells Cynthia.

“We are going to keep driving.” About a mile up the road, Cynthia insists they turn around.

She cannot wait. So, Steven turns the car around, drives back, and parks near the outhouse.

It is the wrong turn that saves a life. That is how Steven Goolan will describe it later.

Those exact words. Cynthia goes inside the outhouse and while she is in there she hears something coming from below.

It is faint at first, a sound she cannot immediately identify. Then she realizes it is crying and then she hears words.

Mommy, I want some Kool-Aid. Cynthia Goolan freezes. Steven comes to the door. He has a flashlight.

He shines it down through the hole of the pit toilet, down into the dark, down into the sewage pit that goes 12 to 15 ft below the floor of the outhouse.

And in that flashlight beam in the darkness at the bottom of a sewage pit in a remote Colorado campground, he sees a small figure.

He calls down to her. He asks what she is doing down there. And three-year-old Lorie Poland, who has been standing in raw sewage in the dark for three days and three nights, who has been surviving on nothing in the cold and the methane and the filth, looks up at the light, and answers him with the most heartbreaking sentence imaginable.

I live here. She thinks she lives there now. She has been down there so long and survived so much that somewhere in her three-year-old mind, that pit has become her world.

The golems do not waste a single second. They run to a phone booth at the Chief Hosa campground and call for help.

The Highland rescue squad is summoned. Volunteer firefighter Steve Becker and Joanne Greenberg from Jennese Fire Rescue respond to the scene.

The opening to the pit is agonizingly small. Getting a person down into it and back out safely is going to be difficult.

But Steve Becker goes down on a harness without hesitating. What he finds when he reaches the bottom stays with him for the rest of his life.

Lorie Poland is standing in sewage wearing only her underwear. She is shivering violently. She is disoriented.

Her legs are severely infected, the skin discolored in ways that make Becker’s stomach drop when he sees it.

Her feet are badly swollen from days of standing in liquid waste. She has been breathing methane gas and hydrogen sulfide for 72 hours in the cold and the dark.

She is 3 years old. Whoever lowered her into that pit did not put her there to be found.

They put her there to die. Becker reaches for her. She was just looking for something warm to hold on to, he says later.

As soon as I touched her, she grabbed me and held on until I pulled her out.

Lorie Poland remembered that moment clearly for the rest of her life. The words, “Hold on.”

The feeling of not wanting to let go. She is brought up out of the pit into the August sunlight and rushed by ambulance to St.

Anony’s Central Hospital in Denver. When the doctors examine her, their initial concern is devastating.

The infections in her legs are so severe, the circulation so compromised from 3 days of standing in toxic liquid that they fear amputation may be necessary.

But Lorie Poland, who has already survived something that should have killed her, keeps surviving.

By Friday, August 26th, her condition has been upgraded from fair to good. She makes what her doctors call a miraculous and rapid recovery from her physical injuries.

She is discharged from the hospital within days and the hospital announces that it will not charge the Poland family a single dollar for her care.

The reunion between Lorie and her parents is captured on camera and broadcast on television to a nation that has been holding its breath.

The image of Richard and Diane Poland holding their daughter, that small blonde girl alive and back in their arms after everything, plays on living room televisions across Colorado and beyond.

More than 20 stuffed animals are delivered to her hospital room. Frontier Airlines and First Financial Securities Corporation announce an all expenses paid trip to Disneyland for Lorie, her parents, and her 5-year-old brother.

By Friday, Lorie is smiling. She is laughing. She is singing Jingle Bells, her favorite song, in her hospital bed.

But the trauma is not gone. It is not even close to gone. Thursday night, Diane Poland is sitting with her daughter when Lorie wakes from a nightmare.

She sits up in the dark and screams in a voice that no three-year-old should have.

Get me out of here. Get me out of here. If you are still watching at this point, drop a comment right now that says, “I am still here.”

We want to see who is truly following this story because what comes next, the investigation, the trial, and the moment the justice system looks the Poland family in the eye and lets them down, that is the part that will stay with you longest.

Don’t go anywhere. Now, while Lori is recovering in the hospital and the nation is exhaling with relief, the Sheridan Police Department and the FBI are not resting for a single moment.

They have a name. They have a vehicle. They have witnesses. And now critically, they have Lori herself.

Because Lorie Poland, three years old, 37 months, a child who still sings Jingle Bells from a hospital bed, is about to do something that grown adults twice her age, struggle to do under pressure.

She is going to identify her attacker. Investigators use an age appropriate process to show Lorie a photo lineup.

They show her a series of photographs and ask if she recognizes anyone. Lorie looks at the photographs and she points to Robert Paul Dyret.

She identifies him not with hesitation, not with uncertainty. She identifies him with the kind of directness that only a child is capable of, the kind that hasn’t yet learned to second-guess itself or soften what it knows to be true.

That is the man. Thy rat is arrested and charged. The case against him begins to take shape.

Built on witness testimony from multiple adults and children who were present in the yard that day.

Built on the vehicle match, the plate match, the prior incidents, and the identification made by the three-year-old girl he left to die in a sewage pit.

The trial that follows becomes a flash point. It draws national attention not because of its complexity, but because of what feels to the people watching like its absolute clarity.

There is a child There is a suspect with a matching vehicle and a matching plate and a documented history.

There is an identification. There are witnesses and the community watching this trial believes they know what justice looks like.

But the courtroom is a different world than the one most people live in. It operates by rules that exist for important reasons.

Rules that protect the innocent as well as catch the guilty. And in those rules, there are gaps.

And in those gaps, things fall through. One of the central questions in the case becomes the issue of Lor’s identification.

How reliable is an identification made by a three-year-old? How suggestible are children that age?

Defense attorneys raise these questions because it is their job to raise them because the law requires that every accused person have their innocence tested and their guilt proven, not assumed.

[clears throat] These are not corrupt arguments. They are the arguments that the system is built to hear.

But the effect on the Poland family is not abstract. It is very specific and very personal.

Watching the reliability of your three-year-old daughter’s account of her own abduction be challenged in a public courtroom is not a legal exercise.

It is something else entirely. There are additional challenges in the case as well. Physical evidence from the Datson, while examined thoroughly by crime lab personnel, produces results that defense attorneys contest at multiple points.

The prosecution works to build the strongest case possible from the materials available. And the community watches with the expectation that what they know happened will be reflected in what the verdict says.

The jury hears everything. They deliberate. And when the verdict comes back, it is not the complete unambiguous slamming of a door moment that the Poland family and the watching public have been waiting for.

The legal process grinds forward. Thyret is convicted. He is sentenced, but the sentence is 6 years.

6 years for abducting a three-year-old child from her front yard. 6 years for leaving her to die alone in a sewage pit in a remote campground.

6 years for the nightmares that wake her up screaming in her hospital bed. For the infections that almost took her legs.

For the three days and three nights she stood in the dark asking for her mother.

6 years. The public response to the sentence is one of furious disbelief. The Poland family who have endured everything, who have sat through the trial and the testimony and the cross-examinations and the legal arguments now have to absorb this as well.

The man who changed their daughter’s life forever will walk out of a prison in six years.

And he does. Robert Paul Thyret serves his time and is released. He walks out of prison and back into the world.

And almost immediately, what investigators and advocates and the Poland family feared, what they warned about, what they tried to use the original case to prevent comes to pass.

He strikes again. The specifics of what Thyret does after his release, the additional victims, the additional crimes, the second time the justice system has to look at this man and decide what to do are documented.

They are part of the record and they represent in the starkkest possible terms the cost of the sentencing decision that was made in the original Lorie Poland case.

This is not a story about whether the system worked or didn’t work in some vague theoretical sense.

This is a story about a specific man being given a specific sentence for a specific set of crimes, being released, and then committing more crimes.

The line between those two things is not abstract. It is direct. It is causal.

And the people who live with it know it. Lorie Poland knows it. She has spent decades knowing it.

She was 3 years old when Robert Paul thy put her in that pit. She was a child when she sat in front of investigators and pointed to his photograph without hesitation.

She was a little girl during a trial where her account of her own abduction was treated as something that needed to be tested and doubted and challenged by adults in suits.

She watched the verdict. She grew up with the sentence. She was there in whatever way a child can be there when he was released.

And she has never stopped. She has never stopped talking about what happened to her.

Never stopped showing up in rooms where people have the power to change things. Never stopped putting her name in her face and her story into spaces where it could do some good.

Where it could shift a policy or strengthen a law or help a child somewhere who doesn’t yet have the language to say what happened to them.

Lorie Poland is not fighting for revenge. She has said this clearly and repeatedly. She is not looking for Robert Paul thyret to suffer.

She is looking for the system that failed her to be better than it was.

She is looking for the children who will face what she faced to have a better chance than she had.

She has worked with child advocacy organizations. She has spoken publicly about child safety, about the importance of teaching children body autonomy and what to do when an adult approaches them in a way that feels wrong.

She has pushed for stronger sentencing guidelines for crimes against children. She has used the fact that her name and her case are known to open doors that would otherwise be closed.

Think about who she was when this started. 37 months old, wearing no pants on the curb of West Bear Creek Drive because a predator told her to take them off and she didn’t know yet that some adults cannot be trusted.

Standing in a sewage pit in the dark, talking to her mother who wasn’t there, grabbing the arm of a firefighter who came down into that hole on a harness and holding on with everything she had.

And now think about who she is today. A woman in her mid-40s who has turned the worst thing that ever happened to her into a tool, not a wound to display, a tool to use.

Something that when held the right way in the right rooms with the right people listening can actually change things.

That is not a small thing. That is not a simple thing. That is the kind of survival that asks more of a person than any person should ever be asked to give.

The Lorie Poland case sits at the intersection of everything that is both right and broken about the way society handles crimes against children.

The response from law enforcement in 1983 was fast and impressive given the tools available.

The community response, the media, the volunteers, the couple from Pittsburgh who turned their car around because one of them needed a bathroom was everything a community should be.

The rescue was extraordinary. The medical care was immediate and compassionate. The investigation led quickly and correctly to the right person.

And then the system that was supposed to take all of that and turn it into permanent protection for Lorie Poland and for every child who might otherwise have become thyroid’s next victim.

That part failed. It failed in the sentencing room. It failed when the door opened after 6 years.

It failed again when thy found another victim. The question that the Lorie Poland case asks 42 years later is the same question it has always asked.

What is a child worth? What is the number of years that accurately represents what was done to her?

What is the calculation that the justice system is making when it looks at a three-year-old girl who was abducted from her front yard, sexually assaulted, and left to die in a pit, and arrives at 6 years.

Lorie Poland does not have a simple answer to that question. She has something better than a simple answer.

She has her life, her voice, and her willingness to keep showing up. She is still here.

She has always been here. She was here in the pit when the goleans heard her voice in the dark.

She was here in the hospital room singing jingle bells when the doctors thought she might lose her legs.

She was here when she pointed to the photograph of the man who took her.

She was here when the sentence was handed down and the door swung open and he walked out.

And she is here now telling this story to anyone who will listen. Making sure that what happened to her continues to mean something.

Continues to push something forward. Continues to keep some other child from standing in the dark asking for their mother.

That is who Lorie Poland is. That is what this case is. And it is not finished.

It will not be finished until the systems that let Robert Paul Thyret walk out of prison after 6 years and hurt someone else are changed.

It will not be finished until the children who come after Lorie Poland have better protections than she had.

It will not be finished until the question of what a child’s safety is worth finally has an answer that reflects the actual weight of the thing.

Lorie Poland has been carrying that question for 42 years. The least we can do is carry it with her for the length of a video.

This has been cold case solved. Thank you for watching the full story of Lorie Poland, one of the most remarkable survivors this channel has ever covered.

If this case moved you, if it made you angry, if it made you want to do something, then do something.

Start by sharing this video, put it somewhere it can be seen because stories like this one only have power when people know them.

And right now you know it. Hit that like button. Leave a comment below telling us what moment from this case hit you the hardest.

Was it the tricycle with the wheel still spinning? Was it the words I live here?