Last Seen in the Twilight Zone

Scott Wright Jr. was only nineteen years old when he was shot and killed on July 4, 2015.
Nineteen.
It's an age that almost exists in its own category of life. You're old enough that people begin asking what you're going to do with your future, but young enough that the future still feels almost limitless. Graduation has just happened. College is on the horizon. Careers exist mostly as ideas rather than realities. You begin imagining where you'll live, who you'll become, and what your life might look like five or ten years down the road.
Scott was standing at exactly that point.

There are some cases where investigators know exactly how a person died—but have no idea who was responsible.
This is one of those cases.
On February 17, 2024, 29-year-old Tyler Beschorner was struck and killed on Route 363 in Binghamton, New York. Someone driving that night knows exactly what happened. They drove away. And more than two years later, Tyler's family is still waiting for the person responsible to come forward. But this case carries another unimaginable tragedy.
Today, we're telling Tyler's story

If you've spent any time in Central New York, there's a good chance you've passed through Cortland.
Maybe you were headed north toward the Adirondacks for a weekend on the lake. Maybe you were driving Route 81 on your way to Syracuse. Maybe you stopped for coffee, filled the gas tank, and continued on without giving the city much thought. Like many other small communities across the Southern Tier and Central New York, it's easy to appreciate Cortland for what it is today without realizing just how many remarkable stories unfolded there throughout history.
One of those stories changed American literature forever, more in particular, American crime literature.
Raise your hand if you ever read An American Tragedy or seen A Place in the Sun, from 1951 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. It's widely regarded as one of the greatest American films ever made, winning six Academy Awards and cementing itself as a classic of twentieth-century cinema. Both of those works tell essentially the same story.
A young factory worker falls in love with a woman of modest means. She becomes pregnant. Faced with the prospect of scandal and the loss of social ambition, he convinces her to accompany him on a boating trip into the Adirondacks. Only one of them comes home.
Millions of people know that story. Very few know the young woman who inspired it.
Her name was Grace Brown.

It was a Sunday evening in March of 1964 when 12-year-old Mary Theresa Simpson disappeared from the streets of Elmira, New York. Mary had spent the evening visiting family. Nothing about the night seemed unusual. She was a quiet young girl described as friendly and responsible, and at some point that evening, she left to walk home alone — something that, in a small city like Elmira in the 1960s, probably didn’t seem especially dangerous.

32 year old Brandon Williams was last seen on March 5th 2019. It’s always been said that his last sighting was at the Speedway gas station on Route 26N in the town of Maine, NY. He was dropped off in the town of Maine by his parents where he was picked up at that Speedway by a female acquaintance. And while that story has always been widely reported, anyone local who speaks about this case hears that the last place people saw Brandon Williams alive was a party that evening. A party he attended with the female acquaintance that picked him up at the Speedway and other “friends” . It was on March 22nd that Brandon’s parents requested assistance from the police to find their son who they hadn’t or heard from since theyleft him in Maine on March 5th–17 days earlier.

In July of 1991, 48-year-old Diane L. Hoppert left her home in Owego, New York, planning to
travel east on Interstate 88 toward Albany. She was headed to New York’s capital city to attend
a work-related seminar. The route would take her through quiet rural stretches of upstate New
York—past towns like Oneonta, Cobleskill, and areas near Howes Cavern and Schenectady.
At the time, Interstate 88 was a relatively quiet highway. Long distances separated exits, and in
the early 1990s there were no cell phones to quickly call for help if something went wrong.
Unfortunately, something did.

I lost Robert in 2003, but I never really lost him. I’m sharing my story because I know so many others out there are grieving someone they love. I also that someone out there has been feeling crazy because they can still sense their loved ones with them, long after they’ve passed. 
To this day, my guardian angels still find a way to have my jaw dropping to the floor. I know others out there have stories similar to mine—I’d love to hear yours! Email us at lastseen607@gmail.com to share it with us!
 
Hope you enjoy.

Welcome to Season 2 of Last Seen In The Twilight Zone. We’re starting off this season with an incredible and very clarifying conversation we got to have with Bethanie Dougherty’s brother, John. 
We’re deeply appreciative of John and the story he shared with us about his sister who’s been missing from Killawog, NY since April 2nd 2008. 

First and foremost we just wanted to give a huge THANK YOU to all of our listeners and Patreon supporters. Having your support truly means the world to us. We're going to batch our episodes into seasons, with this episode being the last for season 1.
We will be back releasing episodes on Monday June 1st and we'll be back even sooner, here on Patreon recording those episodes live.
We love the live recording feature, it means that even though our episodes aren't hitting the airwaves until June 1st--you all get to join us LIVE while we record season 2 and get the juicy sneak peak! Of course, those LIVE recording won't be released until each episode airs--so you've gotta catch us live to be in on the action.
We took this episode to catch you all up on our plans for the spring and to tell you all about the JUICY gossip we've recited from our amazing listeners. Since our very first episode, we've had listeners reach out to us and give us the inside scoop. We always have questions and you guys always seem to have the answers. So enjoy this little special episode, join us while we record season 2 over these next 10 weeks and season 2 drops June 1st 2026.

Today, we go to a small rural town in upstate New York. 
Tucked into the rolling hills of Dryden, the town was founded in 1797 on land that was once part of the Central New York Military Tract — territory taken from the Onondaga and Cayuga Nations and later granted to veterans of the Revolutionary War.
Some people like to frame that kind of history as the beginning of a curse, taking land from the Native Americans, But Dryden didn’t grow out of tragedy — it grew into a quiet, hardworking community. Over the decades, it became the kind of place families moved to for stability. By 1936, the town had its first official high school, Dryden High School — a sign that the town was putting down roots.
For generations, Dryden felt safe. The kind of safe where doors stayed unlocked. Where kids walked home from school. Where everybody knew everybody.
Life moved in an easy, predictable rhythm… until 1989.
That’s when the town’s sense of security began to crack.
I’m not going to dive deep into every case from that period today — this episode is about the two young cheerleaders. But it’s important to understand the backdrop. Because what happened to them didn’t land in a vacuum. It landed in a town that, in just a few short years, would be forced to face more loss than most communities see in a lifetime.
We’ll come back to some of those other stories another time.