the vast,
inscrutable sky. It was about to hit, hard and fast, upending their lives.
[Music]
LISA: In the last days of September,1991, a Martensville mom, a nurse, notices
redness and broken skin on her child's bottom. The girl is two and a half, and
she's had some diarrhea, but what her mother sees strikes her as something
angrier than a typical diaper rash. She asks her daughter what happened. The
girl says that a stranger had, quote, "been poking her." Later that evening, her
mother asks about it again. The toddler says the stranger poked her with a pink
rope. That was Thursday. On Friday, when her mother asks again, the girl tells
her that the stranger lives at Linda's, Linda Sterling's, where she goes to
daycare. Over the weekend, the parents ask more questions, and the girl
providesmore details. By Monday, they reach out to the Martensville police. The
girl's father explains that, based on his daughter's descriptions, he believes she
has been sexually assaulted by Ron and Linda's adult son, Travis Sterling. 
The parents take the child to a doctor, who sees no signs of abuse, but they remain
convinced.
CLAUDIA: When I tell people, you know, it's a good thing I didn't know what was
coming because I would have run, I would have been gone.
LISA: Officer Claudia Bryden is handed the file on October 1st. She's just a day
into her investigation, when the station secretary hands her a game-changing
little rectangle of paper,
an index card from the station's filing system for old cases.
CLAUDIA: They had a cardex., you know, those little rolly things, and they had
the names of