Bone Crusher. Linda Rosencrance

I sent her back to Peoria. We still remained friends, and I understood what she was going through.”

      But through it all, Linda still tried to do the best she could for herself and her family.

      “She still tried to keep herself up, and I know she tried to take care of my dad while she was down in Peoria,” Beverly said. “She’d always check in on him or go to see him. But everybody knew about her drug habit, and it got to the point [that] when she needed things, they’d rather buy those things for her than give her the money.”

      Beverly recalled a scary incident that happened to Linda before she met up with Larry Bright.

      “There was this one tavern she would always frequent, and that’s where she’d hang out and run across people with drugs. Sometimes Linda would hook up some of the guys that were there with people who sold drugs, and she would get something out of it, like smoking the drugs with them,” Beverly said. “One time she was in a car with a Caucasian male who choked her and pushed her out of the truck while it was moving, and she was afraid. She talked to the police about it (the description of the guy didn’t match Larry) and they wanted her to stay in a shelter for her safety. So she went. What happened to her kind of upset me, so I talked to her and asked her to come up my way. I told her I knew about a facility that was real nice that I could put her in, to help get her off drugs. I knew she did get into selling her body for drugs. I think she was probably arrested once or twice for prostitution. I didn’t like her living that life, and that’s why I tried to get her to come here.”

      Linda agreed, and her plan on the weekend she was murdered was to wash her clothes and have her dad put her on the train to Chicago. Larry Bright, though, had other plans, and that’s when she came up missing.

      “She hadn’t called me about coming to Chicago, so I started calling down there asking, ‘Where’s Linda? Hasn’t anybody seen her?’” Beverly said. “They said she left the shelter. So I figured she must have gone out to get that last high before she got on the train to come see me. It made me mad to think that. Then when I heard that they found her body, it was devastating. It just broke my heart.”

      Beverly later explained how she first heard her sister had been murdered.

      “Initially my stepmother called me and said they found Linda, and I said, ‘What do you mean “they found Linda”?’ That’s when she told me she was dead, and they found her in Tazewell County,” she said. “From there, I heard it on the news, and they had no clue about who did it, and then they tried to connect all these other prostitutes’ deaths. Linda was a fighter. She didn’t take anything from people, male or female. She was known to carry her weight. I was kind of surprised when the police said, according to Larry Bright, she didn’t fight back. I was thinking she had to be really stoned or high and couldn’t fight back.”

      Beverly cried for weeks after Linda died.

      “It was tough. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it,” she said. “It was like I was so close to getting her out of there. That’s the only thing I kept thinking of—I almost had her, if she had just washed her clothes and come up here. But she just had to go out that night and get that last high in. That’s what killed me—knowing I almost had her. It was devastating. Larry Bright must have felt like these women were expendable. They were nothing on the street. They wouldn’t be missed, that their families didn’t care. Little did Larry Bright know. There was a family who loved Linda and would know if she was missing.”

      Mark, too, was devastated when he learned about his sister’s death.

      “My stepbrother called me when she first came up missing,” Mark said. “She wasn’t known not to keep in touch with her family, even when she had been on a binge for two or three days. We’d lose contact with her then, but after she came down from that little binge, she would call and let us know she was safe. Then he called and said, ‘They found Linda.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, where’s she at?’ Then he told me she was dead, and I don’t remember any more than that. I fell into my closet doors and I passed out. A few minutes later when I came to, I could hear him yelling in the phone. And my girl came running into the room, asking what was wrong. I picked up the phone and I just asked to talk to my dad, because I knew it had to be killing him to lose a daughter. That’s all I remember about it.”

      Mark said he still thought about Linda all the time.

      “I still deal with her death every day now,” he said. “I look at her pictures and remember all the good and the bad, and I still love her. I don’t condone what she was doing, but I still loved her—no matter what problems she had. Months before she was killed, me and my girlfriend were trying to get her to come up with us to get her away from all the drugs. I’ll never get over it. I still have dreams about her all the time, and we’re still running around as kids or going to parties, like she was still here. Linda wasn’t the angel of angels, but she had a good heart. She was generous and kind and had a loving heart.”