Knowledge is power. When it comes to servicing your Audi, we know that subject better than anyone else. That's why every service, minor or major, is carried out by our fully qualified Audi. Service technicians using only genuine Audi parts plus get twelve months complimentary roadside assistance. With every service that's progress you can feel for all your Audi servicing needs, visit audiservice. Ie.

An email telling you the ingame virtual outfits your child has been buying cost real world actual money. It's not chill. A chill renewal email telling you they've already compared 14 insurers and could save you money. It's insurance. And it's chill. Chill Insurance Limited Trading. As chill insurance is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

The Bakersfield Three is proudly part of the Acast creator network. Sometimes it's the simplest action, done without much thought, that ends up setting off a chain of events that will change numerous lives. Such was the case on a warm August afternoon when a group of 14 year old boys were wrestling with each other in the cold water of the Kern River.

Seventeen's Olivia Lavois joins us live at Heart Park tonight with what she's learned today.

Olivia Gurini the discovery was made here this weekend when a group of teens found a portion of a human arm from the elbow down with the hands still attached. This comes three weeks after a child found a portion of a human leg out at Lake Buena Vista. Officials really can't say much about either body parts, but one thing's for certain, this situation is highly unusual and of course, very suspicious. The boys were in a part of the river where the water was calm enough to wade into. One of the boys felt something brush up against his leg. At first, he jumped and moved away, but when the object once again floated towards him and touched his foot, he decided to see what it was and pulled up a heavy black bag from the river floor. One of the boys yelled there might be money or maybe even gold inside. One investigator said they were just young kids with a wild imagination, thinking they'd found treasure. I have to think 99% of people probably wouldn't have gone after the bag. They just let it pass by continuing downstream. But these boys didn't. As one boy pulled up the bag, he wasn't quite sure what he was looking at until he pulled it out and realized he was holding a human arm.

The bag was filled with rocks. Whoever put it in the river intended it to stay at the bottom, hidden. Unlike the leg in the lake, this was clearly a crime. See, when the leg was found, investigators said it was possible that it had detached from the body naturally from decomposition. The arm in the river, however, was clearly an act of dismemberment and therefore considered a homicide. Here's Bailey's mom. Jane.

When the arm was found, we didn't know whose that was, so we're like, does the leg and the arm go together? Are they two different people?

When the leg in the lake was found, cheryl and her family didn't strongly consider it could belong to Micah. It seemed too small. But from the little information we could get about the arm in the river, it seemed possible it belonged to an adult man.

I remember talking with, and I think he said it, and it's so true. He said, I thought we feared the worst. I thought we feared that he was dead. And now all of a sudden, it became now we're worried that he's been chopped up.

I'm Olivia LaVoice, and this is the bakersfield. Three.

Moms are going frantic. Is that our baby? It was just very I don't know how to describe it. It's like you're just walking through it and doing what you have to do to get through it. And you have breakdowns and you're horrified. And sometimes you're like, oh, please, god, let this be my daughter so we can find them. And then you feel bad for thinking that, because I never wanted Bailey to.

Be dead at this point. Micah had been missing for five months and Bailey for four. For jane and Cheryl, the not knowing where their children were and what had happened to them had been agonizing. But the not knowing if the body parts belonged to their children opened them up to a special kind of crippling, maddening misery, as they were told the DNA results wouldn't be in anytime soon.

When you're sitting in the middle of it and you just want to know, is that my son? Is that my son? And they tell you it's going to be a year or more, can't really give you an idea because they're so backlogged, because they got file folders full of information and baggies and bags and God knows what. And we aren't the only family in line. There's a whole year full of people waiting in front of us, and now there's a whole two. However many year behind us, we're all just this sequence of body parts or bodies that are trying to be identified, and that just broke our heart. Just broke our heart.

Being faced with waiting a year or more for the DNA results was the last straw for Cheryl, Jane, and dai, who had already seen so many cracks in the justice system.

We just found so many things that we, as moms, felt were broken. I think we all just knew that our children, we couldn't let their stories end with this kind of final note. We had to use this to help ourselves, help each other and help others.

They decided investigating their children's cases wasn't enough. They wanted to change the entire system. And they began with taking on three monumental issues. The first was issues with secret witness, a nonprofit that operates an anonymous tip line, as well as allocates reward funds to certain unsolved cases in an effort to get people to call in with tips.

We find out when we ask for rewards. Oh, wait a second. There is no money and we haven't had any money for rewards in years.

The second issue was the DNA testing wait times. And the third was that Kern County didn't have the specialized equipment needed to thoroughly search waterways for bodies. Their first step was going to the Kern County Board of Supervisors meeting. Let me just say, as a crime reporter, covering a Board of Supervisors meeting was sort of my worst nightmare. No offense to any local politics reporters out there, the meeting feels endlessly long, roughly 6 hours during which supervisors go over county budget issues. And then there's public comment, where, just as it sounds, members of the public can bring their complaints or concerns to supervisors. Usually the comments are to the average person, probably pretty boring. I want the sidewalk near my house fixed. I want there to be more bus drivers for the schools, things like that. Even though Kern County is ridden with crime, I'd never heard of anyone coming to the supervisors to demand action as it pertained to violence, certainly never a victim's family. Until one day, at the end of a long session, the three moms Donning Bakersfield Three T shirts and holding large poster boards with their children's faces, walked towards the podium.

Could you give us your name for the record, please?

Cheryl Holsen bake. Our purpose here today as part of this terrible club that we're calling Bakersfield Three my son went missing first, and we believe my family and I believe that it's connected to the two other women and their families behind me. We noticed on your agenda that you are considering or have considered a grant, partnering with a grant from the Department of justice that would help improve DNA processing times. I would beg you to please consider that and move forward with it. There are, at this .2 different human remains. We still don't have DNA evidence back from them to suggest whose child it may or may not be.

James's mom di then took the floor talking about the issues with the Secret witness program that services Kern County. The women learned early on that their children's cases could not have rewards because the funding just wasn't available. And they also heard from people who told them they tried to call in an anonymous tip and had issues getting through to an operator. Secret Witness was supposed to be a lifeline for families in their situation, and it was hardly functional. As it turned out, at that point, the organization was flat broke. It had little over $1,000, and organizers at the time said that money was more or less saved to pay the phone bill. As a reporter, I had encouraged people to call in tips to the anonymous hotline hundreds of times. By that point, I had no clue the program was in such rough shape until the mothers exposed it.

They have their website that had not been updated since 2012, and with my friends standing behind me, we learned that the majority of the links were broken.

Lastly, Bailey's mom, Jane, spoke to the board. Her voice was shaky as she tried to keep from breaking down.

One of the main things is we need to have funding for the equipment to search the waterways instead of having to borrow from Tulare county to search for these body parts in the rivers and the lake that we're still waiting on DNA for all these months later, wondering if it's my daughter or if it's Micah or who it is so desperately need funding for. Know it shouldn't take months to find out if an arm or a leg is your daughter or your son, because what we're dealing with is very hard. It's harder than knowing if they're dead because it's not knowing that drives you crazy and what you think is happening to them, some of what you know has happened to them and you just want to find them and bring them home. And if they're in the water or out in the desert, you want to go get your child and bring them home.

Thank you, ladies, for coming forward this morning. Our hearts break for you with the tragedies that you have endured, and I admire your courage to come forward and try to help us find a way to do something positive out of the tragedies that you've endured. So we will take to heart what you've said and explore what some options are. Supervisor Perez.

Thank you, Chairman. Hearing from you this morning is absolutely horrifying in a way that there are no words for, really. And I can't imagine what you have been through and what you are going through. It is utterly horrifying. To say this is shocking is a gross understatement. The degree to which you are educating us and the community is priceless.

Seeing a supervisor cry at a meeting was unheard of, but so was this entire situation of the moms bringing these issues out in public like this. The only female supervisor on the board, Leticia Perez, said she wanted to pledge $10,000 to the secret witness program.

I'm sure that we all cannot imagine.

I cannot imagine what you are experiencing. Thank you for being here, and I think this body really cares about what you're experiencing, so I think we need to take action fast. Thank you.

Experience Ireland's Best 5G Network Availability with Ireland's Best Value 5G prepay offer on Air Mobile for just 20 Euro top up, you can get no limits data, unlimited calls, unlimited texts, and no extra cost, meaning you can connect faster, stronger and better than before. To switch to Air Mobile, go in store or visit Air E 5G. Coverage is subject to availability. Unlimited allowance is subject to fair use. For full terms and verification, see Air.

E. Black Friday sale is now on at Harvey Norman. Get Black Friday discounts on SIM free smartphones today. Save 370 euro and get six months of Disney Plus free with the Samsung Galaxy S 21 fe smartphone now three nine nine. Or save 80 euro on the Motorola G 32 smartphone. Just one four nine. With our best prices guaranteed in store and online, why shop anywhere else? Don't wait. Now's the time to buy. The Harvey Norman Black Friday sale is now on. Don't miss out.

The other supervisors quickly followed suit, pledging in total $40,000 to secret witness. As it turned out, it was the first time the program had gotten a sizable donation in six years. But the moms didn't stop there. They still had to fix the two other issues of the DNA testing times and the lack of equipment to search the river and lake.

Well, what do you mean? We have to borrow equipment that's better than what we have? We have to borrow that from another county. Well, wait a minute. And all of a sudden we're talking about, okay, how do we fix or how do we help a public agency gather the resources to get equipment that's better than what we have now? That's when we decided to raise money to buy the equipment and make the public aware that we need this.

Together. The three moms were a force united, driven, relentless. As they always said, fight like a mother.

And I think we learned early on, if we stick together, we can do this better.

More often than not, the three of them were together. If one of them had a meeting with law enforcement, the other two would show up. That's just sort of how they operated as one. And they bonded in a way that most of us could probably never understand.

Because we know exactly what you're going through. You're not going crazy because you're having these weird thoughts where you like, oh, I'm going to go on the Internet and look what decomposing bodies look like at this many months in the water. And this meant long. We can talk about that to each other. We have very OD conversations for most people. Most people would think them very OD. And I think because we know that our children knew each other, it feels like we were meant to work together and we were meant to be a team.

As a team, they began working with other victims'families who didn't know how to advocate for their loved ones cases. But the moms now being referred to as the Bakersfield Three Moms had become experts in the few months they had been working together. That fall, I'd see them at court with other families there to hold their hand, show support, and be an advocate of sorts. Around this time, I was working with a woman who had been brutally attacked, raped, her throat slit, left for dead in a field, only to be discovered the next day by a traumatized maintenance man. The woman was left with severe brain damage and post traumatic stress, and as a result, she was living in squalor and conditions utterly unfit for any human being. As I reported it, the moms were some of the first people to reach out to help. Cheryl and her other son Luke actually came to the woman's house with me and helped clean it out, dead mice, cockroaches and all. I remember. After a long day of cleaning, cheryl then took to organizing the woman's photographs and putting them into a photo album so she could look back at her happy memories whenever she wanted.

Cheryl said working with other victims and victims'families was fulfilling and a welcome distraction from their personal hell they were living in. But no matter how much they filled their schedules, the wait for the DNA results on the leg found in the lake and the arm in the river was consuming, particularly for Jane.

I tried to keep Jane calm. Calmer? I mean, how can you keep anybody calm? And who wants to wish that that's their loved one found? You? Don't. But when your mama gut tells you that your daughter really isn't with us anymore, it's so conflicting. But you want your nightmare to be over, or part of your nightmare always went to the know and fought to get it drained. And the community said, drain the lake, clean the lake, see what's in there.

It killed Jane. Knowing the rest of a woman's body, potentially her daughter's body was in the lake and seemingly nothing was being done about it. So she made it a point to talk to just about anyone who would listen about how unsanitary the lake was and how much it needed to be drained, even when they didn't want to hear it, which was likely the case for hundreds of people who gathered that fall for the fishing derby. Among the hopeful fishermen, there was Jane.

Handing out flyers reminding people of the body part that was found out here and that the body hasn't been recovered. Whether or not it's Mike or Bailey, we don't know whose body part it is. And they're out here having a fishing tournament, reminding people not to eat the fish.

Jane's audio is from a Facebook Live video she did on the Bakersfield Three Facebook page. She then directed her phone camera to the area where she'd been going daily for several months by that point.

So this is the little, I guess, the beach where the lake washed up in July and the little five year old girl was playing with it. This is a lake that they have signs that say you can't swim in because there's so much bacteria and, you know, hey, why not drain it, clean it up?

The water there is so dirty and murky, you could be just ankle deep and not be able to see your feet. Part of Jane's daily process involved taking a long stick and poking around at the bottom of the man made lake to see if she'd find anything that felt like it could be another body part.

Who carries a stick around in their know to go look for a dead body at the lake? That's what my reality is now.

Cheryl, Micah's mom, knew what that was like. To be doing something you could never dream you would have to do, and for there to be really no words to describe it, such as when the coroner's office asked her to give a DNA sample they could use to see if the arm in the river matched her bloodline.

It seems like it would be a really straightforward process, the whole DNA swab thing. But every time I've ever had it done, I've broken down. It's just like saying, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. It's just that whole I'm giving you part of my body so that you can see if my son, who is part of my body, if this is.

Part of me, if that's part of.

Me is the body part that you hauled out of a river, part of me.

Having to give the swab in the first place felt nightmarish enough. Knowing the answer would take possibly a year or more was simply unacceptable to the mothers.

We knew that there was technology out.

There, and they were right. The technology came to light after a horrific wildfire that fall in Paradise, California.

I read an article about this company, Andy, who volunteered to set up a lab and send volunteers with new rapid DNA technology to match DNA and to help those loved ones find their family members in the rubble of that fire. Their technology could take just a portion of a bone. And as long as there was a living family member that they could attempt to match it to, they could say within a certain range of certainty that this was their loved one. And so I called Jane and Di, and I'm all read this newspaper article, read this news article. This company can do this with a chip off of a bone in days. They can do that in days. Why are we waiting? Why are we waiting? A year or more can't really tell you when it's going to happen, about whether these remains are Micah's or Bailey's. Then the rage and anger starts flooding in. So Jane being Jane, because this is who she is, she's like, I'm calling them, I'm calling them. And she did. She talked to them, and they said, sure, we'll come. We'll do it.

Having Andy rapid DNA on board was a big breakthrough. After several months of an agonizing wait, it seemed Cheryl and Jane would finally get answers. Did either set of remains, the leg found in the lake or the arm in the river belong to their children? But like with everything in this case, there was never much time to focus on just one thing. Something else shocking was about to happen.

The timing. I was trying to do the math in my head. I just was like, this girl has to know something.

That's next time on the Bakersfield three.

The wait is over. The black Friday sale is now on at Harvey norman get black Friday discounts today across our huge range of appliances and technology with great deals on big screen TVs, home appliances, laptops, SIM, free phones and so much more. And at Harvey nomin get our best prices guaranteed in store or online. So why shop anywhere else? Don't wait. Now's the time to buy. The Harvey nomin Black Friday sale now on.

Why don't you get a coffee? Are you free to grab a coffee? What's the story, buddy? Do you want to grab coffee? Coffee, anyone? Coffee break?

Could we get a coffee?

Urban sips coffee for everyone. Available in selected cost cutter stores nationwide.