29. A Hitman, Hot Tub & Missing Boy: The Loesch Family Massacre

What connects a 3:30 AM execution on a freezing Idaho dirt road to a white Dodge Durango abandoned in the Arizona desert nine years later?

In the late 90s, Gary and Barbara Loesch were systematically hunted and murdered in Post Falls, Idaho, for a half-million-dollar insurance payout. But the masterminds who orchestrated this brutal conspiracy weren't strangers they were family.

​We untangle the terrifying web of Tina Loesch and Skye Hanson. 

Discover how this couple hired a hitman, staged a bizarre hot tub accident, and triggered a real-life, decade-long fugitive manhunt that ended with a desert suicide pact. 

But the darkest part of this true crime mystery isn't the murders themselves. 

It’s the chilling, unresolved disappearance of Kristopher Loesch, the 10-year-old boy they took with them, who was completely erased from existence.

​Chapter Markers

• ​Cold Open: The Erasure of a Missing Child
• ​The Post Falls Murders: The Execution of Gary Loesch
• ​The Hot Tub Hitman: Brad Steckman’s Brutal Confession
• ​The Alias: Hiding Kristopher in Plain Sight
• ​America’s Most Wanted and the Desert Dragnet
• ​The White Dodge Durango & The 8-Page Suicide Note
• ​Unsolved Mystery: What Really Happened to Kristopher?

​Case Evidence & Missing Person Info

Head over to our social media to view the original 1990s police sketches, crime scene details, and age-progressed photos of what Kristopher Loesch might look like today. 

If you recognize him, or have any information regarding his disappearance from Spokane, Washington in August 2000, please contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

​Support the Podcast

If you are addicted to dark, gritty deep-dives into the unsolved mysteries that slip through the cracks, help us keep the synth drones rolling. Hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating, and share this episode with your fellow true crime junkies.

https://linktr.ee/HomocidalTendency

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

It's it's January 1998 in Post Falls, Idaho. It's a kind of deep, bone-chilling winter night where the cold makes your lungs ache, and the darkness outside your house feels completely impenetrable. For 52-year-old Barbara Loach, the best escape from not freezing Idaho night is right in her own backyard. She's relaxing in her hot tub. The water is steaming, she's got a television set up nearby, and the blue light flickering against the rising vapor, it's quiet, and it's peaceful. When Barbara is found dead the next morning, this scene looks like a tragic, careless accident. The television is submerged in the water. The initial fluid report writes it off it's exactly that. A lethal, accidental electrocution. Case closed. But then the corner starts looking a little bit closer. She has water in her lungs. That means the electrical shock didn't kill her instantly. Barbara Loche didn't die accidentally by bumping her television into the water. Someone pushed it in. And when the vault just wasn't enough to finish the job, someone put their hands on her head and physically held her under the water. The case we're unpacking today is a Russian nesting doll of absolute chaos. Every time you think you've reached the darkest, most twisted part of the story, the floor completely drops out beneath you. We're talking about calculated generational murder, a decade-long cross-country manhunt, a prison confession from a hitman, and at the dead center of it all is a 10-year-old boy who's essentially erased from the earth. It's wildly complex, deeply unsettling, it's a web of family betrayal, and it's gonna take some time to untangle. But, real quick, before we start pulling the threads on the Loach Family saga, let's get some standard housekeeping out of the way. If you're enjoying my show, please take a quick second to hit subscribe and leave a rating review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. It takes two seconds, but it does a master favor for me, and it really boosts the show and the algorithms. So I do have a new five-star review, so let me shout that out really quick. I'm kind of like not great at checking the reviews right away, but this is from a week or so ago, and it's from Tyler Ameo. And it says, well, it's five stars, of course, and it says, I'm social worthy. It's unique, it's fun, and it's juicy. Love it. Thank you so much for your five-star review, and definitely appreciate it. Anyone else wants to join the team? Go ahead and do it. I don't even know what that means, but yeah, leave me a five-star review and rating it. I'll shout you out. Also, make sure you're following the show on the socials. Um, I'll post all the visual aids and the episode card from today's case, and you're definitely gonna want to pull up the timeline and take a look and see what's going on with this crazy story. Alright, so grab a drink, lock your door, and let's do a little bit of a rewind and go back to where this nightmare actually begins. It's November 1995 in Post Falls, Idaho. We're three years out from the hot tub, and the Loche family tree hasn't been poisoned just yet, or at least not publicly. To understand the level of calculation we're dealing with in this case, you have to look at the first domino to fall. 56-year-old Gary Loche. Gary's Barbara's husband. He's a grandfather, a blue-color guy, and by all accounts a man who doesn't mind grinding out a living. His day job is working for an amusement company, building and maintaining kind of heavy mechanical equipment that requires a lot of sweat. But Gary's also hustling on the side to bring in some extra cash. He's taken on a rural newspaper route. If you've never lived in a rural part of the Pacific Northwest, you understand the isolation of a 3 30 a.m. paper route in November. It's pitch black, there's no streetlights, the houses are spread far apart, set back from the road behind thick lines of pine trees. Out there, you're completely alone, just with your headlights. And Yary is a creature of absolute unwavering habit. He doesn't deviate. Every single morning, in the freezing pre-dawn dark, he drives the same exact dirt roads, he has the same exact stops, and he rolls his window down at the same exact yellow newspaper boxes at the same exact time. In true crime, the routine's a double-edged sword. It brings a peace of mind, sure, but it makes you incredibly predictable. Gary thinks his 330 a.m. route is just quiet, just him. His car, and a stack of papers. He has absolutely no idea that his unwavering consistency has turned him into a target. He doesn't know that out on the tree line, someone's been mapping his every move, watching his headlight cut through the dark, timing how long it takes him to reach each box. Someone has done their homework, and on the morning of November 13th, the reconnaissance phase is finally over. It's roughly 3.30 in the morning on November 13th, 1995. Gary's headlights swoop across a rural dirt road and illuminate a yellow newspaper box sitting at the end of a long driveway. He puts his car in park, he grabs a paper from his passenger seat, he reaches over, rolls down the driver's side window. Then there's no struggle. There's no panic cook chase through the snow. Someone's waiting in the darkness right next to that yellow box. The second Gary rolled his window down to deliver the paper. The killer stepped up and fired a single bullet directly into the side of his head. Gary died instantly in his driver's seat. When the police finally arrive on the scene hours later, they're walking into a complete forensic nightmare. They find Gary slumped over in his seat. The engine is still idling, but what immediately sends a chill down the investigator's spine isn't what they find, it's what they don't find. If this was a robbery gone wrong, the killer would have panicked and grabbed whatever they could. But Gary's wallet is still on him. The cash he had collected from his route is sitting right there in the car, completely untouched. This wasn't a mugging. This was an execution. Detectives quickly realized that the shooter had to be a ghost to pull it off. The killer had to know Gary's route down to the exact minute. They had to know which side of the car the window would be rolled down on. They had to wait in the freezing temperatures and the pitch black without a streetlight in sight, just for a three-second window of opportunity. But who orders a highly coordinated hit on a 56-year-old grandfather who builds amusement rides and labors newspapers in the morning? Police dig into Gary's life. They look for gambling debts, bad business deals, hidden enemies. They find absolutely nothing. Gary was exactly who he appeared to be. And because the killer left zero physical evidence behind, no front prints, no drop weapon, no witnesses, the investigation hits a brick wall almost immediately. For three full years, the murder of Gary Loche sits in the filing cabinet, completely ice cold. A tragic, unsolved mystery on a rural Idaho dirt road. That is, until his wife Barbara decides to take a dip in her hot tub. When a husband is executed in 1995 and his wife is murdered in her hot tub three years later, you don't have to be a seasoned homicide detective to know you aren't looking for a random serial killer. You're looking for the connective tissue. And in the Loche family, that tissue is their daughter, Tina Loche. So let's pull the camera back from the crime scenes for a second and look at the family dynamic. Gary and Barbara were traditional, they're blue-collar. Gary is out there working two jobs, grinding it out just to keep the bank accounts healthy. They're the definition of stable. Tina, on the other hand, is the undisputed black sheep. She's absolute chaos. By the mid-90s, Tina is in her twenties and raising a young son, Christopher, who was born right at the tail end of the 80s. Now Gary and Barbara adore their grandson. They want to protect him. But trying to protect Christopher means dealing with Tina, who is essentially a walking vortex of bad decisions. She's consistently battling financial ruin, she has a history of minor legal troubles, and she's perpetually leaning on her parents to act as her safety net. But by 1995, the safety net is heavily framed, and there's two things that will absolutely detonate a strange family dynamic: money and custody. According to those close to the family, Gary and Barbara were reaching their breaking point. They were tired of finding Tina's chaotic lifestyle. There were heavy rumors that they were threatening to completely cut her off financially, ride her out of the will, and most terrifyingly for Tina, seek full custody of Christopher to get him out of her unstable environment. To Gary and Barbara, this was tough love, a desperate attempt to force their daughter to grow up. But to Tina, this was a declaration of war. She didn't see parents trying to help, she saw wardens try to crawl her life and steal her son. She felt entitled to their money, specifically her mom's massive $525,000 life insurance policy, and she fiercely resented their judgment. By the fall of 1995, Tina is backed into her corner. She's furious, she's broke, and she's harboring a deep, toxic resentment towards the people who raised her. She's kind of a walking stick of dynamite. But to cross the line from an estranged, angry daughter to a calculated, cold-blooded killer, she didn't actually have the nerve to entirely do it on her own. She needed a catalyst. She needed someone who couldn't just validate her rage, but to help weaponize it. So enter Scott Hansen. If you're looking for the exact moment the Lil'Shamley timeline was doomed, you don't look at the dirt road or the hot tub. You look behind bars. To get how Tina crossed the line from a chaotic estranged daughter to a calculator killer, we have to talk about how she met the love of her life. They didn't meet at a bar or through mutual friends. They met in an Idaho prison. Tina was doing a stint for a laundry list of felonies, theft, forgery, stealing a car, and she was reckless. But her cellmate, her cellmate, was playing an entirely different game. InterScott Hansen. Sky's about seven years older than Tina, and her rap sheet is a lot heavier. She isn't just writing bad checks. She's in prison for manufacturing drugs. Where Tina is erratic and emotional, Skye's experienced. She knows the criminal underworld. Trapped in a cell together, uh JL Health romance sparks. It's an intense, codependent relationship forged entirely in a pressure cooker. When they both finally get released, they don't go their separate ways. They move in together, bouncing between Clarkston and Pullman counties, trying to build a life on the outside. Now, imagine Gary and Barbara receiving this news. They're conservative and blue collar, and they spent years trying to wrangle their daughter out of a life of crime. And now, Tina isn't just continuing to break the law, she's moved in with an older, convicted drug manufacturer she met in prison. To make matters even more volatile for the era, Gary and Barbara were reportedly deeply unaccepting of Tina's same-sex relationship. It was the absolute breaking point. The financial cutoff became very real. The threats to take custody of Christopher escalated from empty warnings to actual imminent legal action. Tina was terrified of losing her son and in fear her parents were trying to control her. Skye, meanwhile, wasn't about to let anyone threaten the life she had just built with Tina. It was a lethal combination. Tina had the motive and the seething deep-rooted family resentment, but Skye. Skye had the criminal connections. She knew exactly how to escalate a family feud into a permanent solution. They realized that if Gary and Barbara were out of the picture, all their problems would vanish. They wouldn't just keep Christopher, they would inherit the state, including a massive half million dollar insurance policy. But they just needed someone to pull the trigger. Here's the groom reality of contract killing. It rarely looks like a Hollywood movie. There are no sleek assassins in custom suits waiting in the shadows. Real-world contract killers are usually desperate, opportunistic criminals who are willing to trade a human life for a surprisingly low amount of cash. Tina and Skye knew they needed a proxy. They needed someone who didn't have a direct, obvious link to the Loche family, someone who wouldn't flinch at the request. Because as we know, Skye spent time in prison, and she had a Rolodex for this exact kind of problem. She reached out into her network of underground connections and pulled a man's name out. That man's name? Brad Steckman. Brad wasn't a mastermind, and he was a blunt instrument. He was a career criminal, a drifter, and a guy who had absolutely no moral reservations about extreme violence if the price was right. He was exactly the kind of predator you would hire when you had a problem you permanently wanted erased. Sometime in the mid-90s, the three of them sit down to negotiate the cost of a human life. It's treated with the cold calculated detachment of a business transaction. The ultimate prize is Barbara's massive $525,000 life insurance policy. Tina and Skye explain the payout. They tell Brad if he helps them eliminate the obstacles, he gets $10,000. That's the cut of the insurance money once it clears. $10,000. That is what Gary and Barbara Loche's lives were worth to this trio. So Brad Steckman agrees. He becomes the physical muscle of the operation. Years later, while sitting in a prison cell for completely unrelated murder, Steckman would finally confess to his role in the Loche family nightmare. He admitted to police that he conspired. He told investigators that Sky Hansen actually brought him out to the rural dirt roads of Pose Falls, Idaho in the freezing dark. She drove along Gary Loch's 3:30 a.m. paper route. They drove the dirt roads, clocking Gary's exact timing. They mapped out the yellow newspaper boxes, they know exactly where the tree lines provided the best cover, and where a shooter could wait without casting a shadow. But when Detective Slid Gary's case fell across the metal table and asked Steckman who pulled the trigger that morning, Stackman shook his head. He told them he mapped the rat out, but he swore he wasn't the one waiting in the tree line. He pointed the finger squarely at Tina and Skye as the masterminds, but claimed he didn't know who they actually got to do the dirty work or if one of the women pulled the trigger themselves. To this day, the identity of the ghost who stepped out of the dark and executed Gary Loche on his paper route remains one of the coldest, haunting mysteries of the entire case. With Gary executed on the dirt road, the primary protector of the family was gone. But they still didn't have the payout. Barbara was still alive, and she was still holding on to that $52,500,000 policy. It takes three years of waiting. Three years of Barbara grieving her husband, totally unaware that the people responsible are her own daughter and her daughter's girlfriend. But by January 1998, Tina Sky and Steckman decide the waiting period is finally over. It's time to cash out. And they decide the best place to do it is Barbara's backyard. Let's go back to that freezing night in January 1998. For years, the official police narrative was that Barbara Loche died alone, a tragic freak electoral accident in the quiet isolation of her backyard. But thanks to Brent Steckman's prison confession in 2004, we now know exactly who was standing in the dark watching her. According to Steckman, he and Tina are on the Post Falls property, Barbara's in the hot tub, and the television is set up nearby. The plan is supposed to be simple, brutal, and designed to look like a complete accident. Steckman creeps up to the edge of the tub, he grabs the heavy television set and shoves it directly into the steaming water. But the physics of the execution didn't work. The electrical shock doesn't kill her. It shorts out the circuit, sending a jolt through Barbara that stuns her and leaves her gasping, but she's still very much alive. Steckman freezes. The hit has been botched. He realizes that if he wants the $10,000, he's gonna hatch the finish of jobs with his bare hands. But Steckman is a calculative criminal. He knows that if he reaches into the electrified water, he's gonna fry himself. So Steckman reaches over to the wall and unplugs the television. He kills the current, he stacks up to the edge of the water, reaches in, places his hand firmly on Barbara's head, and pushes her under. But this is the detail that makes the blood run completely cold in your body. While Steckman was holding Barbara underwater, Tina was right there. Tina Loch stood in the freezing dark and watched the hard hitman drown her own mother. She didn't panic, she didn't call out, she didn't try to stop him, she just watched the woman who raised her fight for her final breath. So here's where I have to pause for the narrative. Because I've seen in different accounts that it was actually Tina that pushed her mom underwater and drowned her. So I mean, take it with a grain of salt. Either way, from both accounts, Tina was there. Either Brad drowned her or Tina drowned her. Either way, they were both a piece of shit. The geniuses, they leave the unplugged television floating in the water to stage the accident, and they slip back into the night. The coroner misses the signs of manual drowning, and the police see the TV in the water, and they rule in an accident. And shortly after, the insurance company cuts a check for $525,000. Latina takes the money, signs it over to Skye, and they pay Steckman his cut. They think they committed the perfect murder, the untraceable family annihilation. But half a million dollars leaves a massive paper trail. And when detectives finally start connecting the dots between Gary's execution and Barbara's accident, Tina and Skye realize the walls are closing in. So in October 1999, the two women buy an RV, they pack their bags, they grab Tina's 10-year-old son, Christopher, and they completely vanish into the American highway system. Before we hit the gas on this cross-country fugitive run, we need to stop and look in the rear beer mirror. Because sitting in the back of that fleeing RV, watching the Pacific Northwest fade away through the window, is a 10-year-old boy. If we're gonna understand the absolute tragedy of this case, we have to talk about Christopher Loche. Not as a missing person in statistic, but as a kid who was caught in the middle of a generational conflict. Born right at the end of the 1980s, Christopher grew up in a constant, confusing tug of war. Imagine his perspective. On one side, you have Gary and Barbara, his grandparents. Their house in Post Falls is the anchor. It's the place where you got hot dinners, a backyard, consistency, and a grandfather who woke up at 3:30 every morning just to keep the family alive. To Christopher, Gary and Barbara represented safety. They doted on him, and they wanted him to have a normal, quiet life. On the other side, you have his mother. Life with Tina is a roller coaster with no breaks. It's financial panic, sudden moves, legal trouble, and Arguments. And then suddenly there's a new figure in the house, the sky. An older woman with a hard edge and a criminal record. Stepping into the role of a surrogate parent. For a kid, this kind of instability becomes normal. You learn to read the room. You learn to stay quiet. By the time Christopher is six years old, his grandfather's shot to death on a dirt road. Two years later, his grandmother, the woman who is fighting to get custody of him, the woman who offered him an escape hatch, is dead in her own backyard. Think about the psychological horror of that for a second. Christopher is grieving. He's lost the two most stable pillars in his entire world. And he has absolutely no idea the two women drying his tears, the woman tucking him into bed, are the exact same people who paid a hitman to slaughter his family. He's completely alone in the dark with the monsters, and he thinks they are his protectors. When the police start circling in late 1999, Tina and Skye don't just sit Christopher down and explain the legal intricacies of entrance fraud and a murder investigation. They pull him out of his school, they call off his friends, and they throw him into the back of a motorhome bought with blood money. At ten years old, Christopher is an accomplice, he's a hostage to his mother's paranoia. And as his RV crosses the state line, leaving Ida behind, Christopher is unwittingly drafted into one of the most bizarre, desperate Thomas Louise road trips in modern trip crime history. If you want to disappear in America today, it's practically impossible. Your phone pinging towers, license plate readers at every intersection, facial recognition cameras at gas stations. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, if you had half a million dollars in blood money and knew how to stay off the paper trail, the American Southwest was an ocean you could completely drown in. And that is exactly what Tina and Skye did. For nearly a decade, these two women pull off an astonishingly successful run. The media quickly latches on to the narrative, dubbing them the real life of Thelman and Louise. And honestly, the comparison is terrifyingly accurate. You have two women, deeply in love, fiercely codependent, fling a murder charge, and live entirely outside the boundaries of law. But the Hollywood version of being an outlaw is glamorous. The reality is absolutely grinding paranoia. Imagine the psychology of this road trip. They buy cheap vehicles with cash, they bounce between sketchy RV parks, transient motel rooms, and empty stretches of land across Washington, California, Texas, and Arizona. They use aliases, they take under-the-table jobs, cleaning houses, doing yard work, doing whatever it takes to stretch the insurance money. Because here's the thing about a half a million dollars. It drains fast when you can't put it in the bank. And you're constantly paying a premium to be off the grid. And every time a police cruiser pulls up behind them at a red light, they're hard to stop. Every time someone knocks on the door of their trailer, they have to assume the gig is up. The stress level of that hypervigilance will rot you from the inside out. They're trapped in a high-stakes survival loop, relying entirely on each other. If one breaks, they both go down. And the FBI isn't just letting them go. The feds are actively haunting them. Warrants are issued. Their faces start popping up on America's Most Wanted. They're officially high-value targets. But through it all, they keep moving. They change their hair, they change their names, they create an impenetrable toxic bubble of just the two of them against the world. But wait. Did you just catch what I just said? Just the two of them? Let's look in the back of their RPE again. Let's look at the passenger seat of the beat-up cars they were driving across America. When Tina and Skye fled Seattle in October 1989, they had a 10-year-old boy with them. They were a trio. But as the years grind on and the infusion of sightings pile up, a deeply disturbing pattern begins to emerge in the police reports and witness statements. People remember seeing two women working odd jobs. People remember two women staying in RV parks. But nobody remembers a kid. August 2000. Spokane, Washington. Write that date and location down because it's the exact moment Christopher Loch ceases to exist on paper. Before he vanished completely, Tina and Skye realized that running with a growing child was a massive liability. So they actually tried to hide him in plain sight using the very people who helped them secure their blood money. In early 2000, police eventually learned that Christopher was living in Spokane with a man named Steve Castle and his wife, an attorney. And here's this sickening connection. She was the exact same attorney who helped settle Barbara Loche's life insurance policy after she was murdered in the hot tub. For a brief window, they attempted to give Christopher a ghost life. They enrolled him in Shiloh Hills Elementary School in Spokane, but he wasn't Christopher Loche anymore. He was placed in classrooms under a fake name, Christopher Robinson. But the alias didn't last. Sometime around August 2000, Christopher Robinson stopped showing up to classes. No one called the school to excuse him. No one ever requested his transcripts to be forwarded to a new district. The boy just vanished from the roster. Authorities believe that when the arrangement in Spokane fell through, the women pulled him out of the school system and brought him down to Tucson, Arizona, where they were establishing their new off-the-grid life. But a 10-year-old boy draws attention when neighbors in Arizona inevitably started asking questions about who the boy was and where he suddenly went. Tina spun a cold lie, a calculated lie. She told them that Christopher was having behavioral problems, so she put him on a bus and sent him back up to Washington to live with his father. It was a complete fabrication. Authorities later investigated the claim. There was no bus ticket. And from the moment in August 2000 onward, Christopher generates absolutely zero paper trail. No medical records, no social security pings, no driver's license, no juvenile arrests, nothing. The boy simply vanishes into the desert air, swallowed a whole by his mother's desperation to stay out of a prison cell. It's November 8th, 2008. Tina and Skye have successfully defied the odds. For nearly nine years, they've lived completely off the grid, they've outsmarted local police, they've dodged the FBI, and they have successfully buried the memory of a 10-year-old boy. But in 2008, there was one apex predator in the true crime world that you simply could not outrun. If you grew up in the 90s or 2000s, you knew exactly what I'm talking about. America's Most Wanted. Back then, before everyone had a true crime podcast or a TikTok account dedicated to internet sleuthing, John Walsh was the undisputed king of The Manhunt. When America's Most Wanted aired on Saturday night, it wasn't just a television show, it was a national drag net. Millions of people tuned in. And if John Walsh put your face on that screen, your Fugitive Clock officially struck zero. And on that Saturday night in November, the producers of America's Most Wanted pointed their massive spotlight directly at the Loch family murderers. They broadcast the whole twisted saga, the paper route execution of Gary, the hot tub murder of Barbara, the Hitman's Confession, and most importantly, they flashed high-definition photos of Tina and Skye to millions of living rooms across the country. They also highlighted the fact that Christopher is missing, throwing his childhood photos up on the screen. The America's Most Wanted tip line immediately lights up. The switchbloods are flooded with calls from people in the Southwest who recognize the two women. Now we don't exactly know where Tina and Skye were sitting when the episode aired. Maybe they were in a cheap hotel in Tucson. Maybe they were sitting in an RV park in the desert. But we know they were watching. Imagine that moment of absolute stomach-dropping terror. For nine years, their survival depended on completely blending in, on being anonymous. And in the span of a 15-minute television segment, they're stripped of their anonymity. They know by morning, every gas station attendant, every motel clerk, and every local cop in Arizona is going to be looking for their faces. The bubble hasn't just popped, it's completely shattered. Tina and Skye know the FBI is practically already at their door. They have two options surrender and spend the rest of their lives in a concrete cell for the brutal murder of Tina's parents, or take the coward's exit. They grab the keys to their SUV. They don't pack for a long trip. They just drive straight on to the desolate, freezing Arizona desert. The manhunt doesn't last long after the broadcast. In fact, it's over in a matter of hours. Late the same Saturday night, around 11:30 p.m., a motorist is driving down a desolate road near Tucson, and they spot a vehicle parked awkwardly in the scrub brush. It's a white dodge sharango. It's sitting completely silent, miles away from any major highway or prying ice. When Pima County sheriff deputies arrive and approach, they don't know who's inside. But as they get closer, they look through the dusty glass, they realize the manhunt for the Loche family killers is officially over. Inside the SUV are the bodies of Tina Loche and Sky Hansen. Faced with the reality that their faces were just broadcast to millions of Americans, and knowing that a life sentence in a federal penitentiary was waiting for them, they made their final calculated decision. They drove out into the desert, parked the car, and carried out a double suicide pack. They both died from gunshot wounds. They lived in their own terms, completely outside the law, and they chose to die exactly the same way. When crime scene investigators begin processing the SUV, they find something sitting in the cabin. It's a suicide note. But it isn't just a hastily scribbled on a napkin kind of note. It's a massive eight-page handwritten letter. For the detectives standing in the desert, this is the holy grail. Eight pages is a manifesto. It's a confession. This is a document that's going to tie off every loose end in the Losh family saga. It's going to spleen the paper out. The hot tub. The hitman, the money. And most importantly, it's going to tell them exactly where to find Christopher. Detectives put on the gloves, they open the letter, they start reading. Over the course of eight pages, Tina and Skye detail their intense love for one another. They write about their stress of the life on their run. They air out their grievances. They try to justify their actions, painting themselves as victims of circumstance, victims of Gary and Barbara's judgment. They meticulously detail their decade-long Zelma Louis fantasy. The detectives read one page, two pages, three pages. They flip all the way to the final signature at the bottom of the page eight. And then a seconding realization washes over the crime scene. In an eight-page letter detailing their entire lives, their crimes, and their final thoughts before pulling the trigger, there's not a single word written about Christopher. They didn't apologize to him, they didn't explain why they took him, they didn't leave a map, a name, or location. In their final act on this earth, Tina Loch and Sky Hansen completely, deliberately erased a 10-year-old boy from existence. They took the secret of what happened to him out into the Arizona desert, and they took it directly to their graves. When the police finally finished processing the SUV, they were left with a cold, terrifying reality. The only two people on Earth who knew exactly what happened to Christopher were dead. So where does that leave us? For the last 15 years, investigators, true crime communities, and the remaining members of the Loish family have been haunted by that same exact question. If Christopher wasn't in the SUV, where did he go? So when you break down the timeline and psychology of Tina and Skye, you're left with three main theories, and none of them offer a happy ending. Theory one is the darkest, but statistically is the most likely. It's a theory of the ultimate liability. Think about the sheer grinding paranoia of being a fugitive. Every time Christopher got sick, they couldn't take him to the hospital. Every time they met someone new at an RP park, they were worried about what a ten-year-old boy might accidentally say. Christopher knew his real name. He remembered post falls. He remembered his grandparents. And as he got older, he would inevitably start asking questions. Why can't we go back? Why are the police on the news talking about us? At some point between 1999 and 2000, Tina and Skye might have realized that keeping Christopher alive was gonna get them caught. And we already know exactly what Tina Loch does to family members who threaten her freedom. Did the paranoia finally consume them? Did they pull off onto a namelister road in the dead of night, silence the only remaining witness to their past, and bury him in the desert? Theory number two offers a sliver of hope, but it requires a massive suspension of disbelief, the underground handoff. In this scenario, Tina and Skye realize they can't care for a child while dodging federal warrants. Instead of killing him, they abandon him. They give him away to someone in the transient off-grid community they've been living in. Maybe a sympathetic drifter, maybe a religious group, or maybe they just left him at a bus station with a fake name. But if that's true, why hasn't he come for it? If they did hand him off, likely they embedded the terror so deep into his psyche that he spent the rest of his life completely terrified of his own identity. Which brings us to the final theory, the ghost in the system. If Christopher Loch survived the desert, if he survived the transient camps and the handoff, he would be a man in his mid-30s today. This is a very real, chilling possibility to Christopher's life right now. Walking under a different name, working a normal job, completely unaware that the women who raised him were national fugitives who annihilated his grandparents. Childhood trauma has a terrifying way of bearing memories to protect the host. He might remember fragments of a dark road, an RV, the heat of the Arizona sun, but he might not know who put the pieces together. He could be sitting in traffic right now, or scrolling on his phone, entirely oblivious to the fact that his face is sitting in a coal case while in Idaho. As we close out this wild story, there's one final suffocating layer that I just can't shake. It's the absolute staggering cruelty of the irony of it all. Gary and Barbara Loche weren't perfect people, but they genuinely loved their grandson. Gary was out there in the freezing dark in the morning, driving a dirt road to make sure the family had money in the bank. Barbara was drawn the line in the sand, fighting for custody, definitely trying to keep Christopher stable, a safe roof over his head. They were his only lifeline. Tina and Skye systematically slaughtered them under the guise of protecting their family unit and getting their hands on that half million dollar payout. They executed the only two people in the world who were actually fighting for Christopher's well-being. And then, when the money started running out and the FBI started closing in, they just threw him away. They murdered his protectors, stole his childhood, and then treated him like disposable luggage the second he became a liability. If you want to see the faces behind this tragedy, head over to our social media. I've posted the timeline, the original 90s police sketches, and the age progressed photos of Christopher. Take a good look at them. If you recognize them, or if you know anything about the Loche family movements between Washington and Arizona in 1999 and 2000, please contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And if you like this episode, do me a massive favor. Subscribe and leave a five-star rating. And also share it with your fellow True Prime Junkies. I'm Matt, and this has been Homicidal Tendency. Remember, the monsters aren't always hiding in the woods. Sometimes they're the ones holding your hands. I'll see you next time.