The image you see here is of Brad Garrett standing on the bank of an industrial lake behind a cement factory.  Brad wanted to bring me there for a very simple reason. “I have seen terrible things,” he told me.  I have seen the very worst that people can do to one another, but there is only one case that haunts me, one case that still wakes me up at night, and it happened here.” A little backstory: April 1996, a man is fishing in the lake.  He sees a thirty-gallon trash can float to the surface, the lid having been wired to the can and now having come loose.  All he sees are two heads looking back at him, one a young woman, another a small child. The bodies were identified as a Vietnamese mother and son – she was thirty-five year-old Kieuoanh Thi Nguyen, he was Ryobi, her two year-old boy.

Back in November of the previous year they were believed kidnapped, and the resulting search for them involved 150 Federal agents and local law enforcement officers, fake ransom demands from a relative and detectives pursuing leads in Vietnam. 

Little known to those involved in the case but the mother and child were already dead, had been for many weeks, and even now, thirteen years later, no-one knows what really happened.

Even as we stood there Brad became pensive and quiet.  He said little after having explained to me what happened, and we walked away – myself, the camera crew, the producer, the researcher and my editor.  It seemed like he needed a few moments to gather himself, to pay his respects perhaps, to make another wish that the truth would be revealed and someone would be brought to justice for this terrible, terrible crime.