The Murder of Rebecca Park - Part One: Cortney Bartholomew | #468

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When 22-year-old Rebecca Park vanished, her family were terrified. She was 38 weeks pregnant. She could have literally gone into labor any day. And she had seemingly taken nothing with her. Some people reported that the last they had seen of Rebecca was on the 3rd of November of 1925, as she climbed into a mysterious blacked out sedan.

But 21 days later, Rebecca Park's body was found deep in a remote area of the Manistee National Forest. And the baby boy she had been carrying had been torn from her womb.

In a case so nightmarish that it feels like the plot of a new French extremity horror movie, and yes I have watched Inside, but believe me, this is so much worse, because the culprit, the one who lured a heavily pregnant Rebecca to her death and sliced her open while she was still alive and conscious to steal her unborn baby, is allegedly Rebecca Park's own mother. Yes, you heard that right. So prepare yourselves, because this really is one of the most twisted stories we're probably ever going to cover. I'm Saruti.

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And I want to go home.

SPEAKER_1 (1:31)

You can't, you'll stuck it with me.

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I'm Hannah.

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And this is RedHanded.

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When Rebecca Park was just a year old, she and her two siblings, a sister named Kimberly and a brother whose name we don't know, were taken into foster care.

They were placed with a woman named Stephanie Park, who eventually went on to adopt all three children and raise them as her own. The two girls, Rebecca and Kimberly, both got pregnant young, and they worried about how they were going to manage. So their adopted mother Stephanie stepped in. Adopting Rebecca's two boys and Kimberly's daughter, they all agreed that it was for the best. As this way, the children would be raised in a loving home and be cared for by Stephanie. An experienced mother, but Rebecca and Kimberly would still be able to see their kids every day. When Rebecca and her sister Kimberly turned 18, as much as they loved Stephanie, they wanted to find their birth mother, a woman named Cortney Bartholomew.

Stephanie had spent their entire lives trying to keep them away from her. As far as she was concerned, Cortney was bad news bad.

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Your heart just breaks throughout this entire story. Obviously not just for Rebecca and everything we're going to get into, but for Stephanie Park, she does the right thing every fucking step of the way. She takes in these children from this incredibly fucking toxic family as we're going to find out. She loves them. She raises them in this lovely, loving home. Then obviously, she tries to keep them away from Cortney Bartholomew while they're minors, but she can't do anything when they become adults. She warns them. She warns them. She's no good, but there is always going to be, for better or worse, for a lot of people, this internal drive that's going to make you want to try and find some fragment of your biological family, just to understand some questions that you as an adoptee may still have. So I can absolutely understand why that feeling is there, but it's just so, so bad.

And from here on out, the story continues to just get more and more unconventional, shall we say. The cast of characters involved is far from desirable, and the poverty, drug use, neglect and abuse paint an incredibly grim picture of deprivation and desperation. Boone Township in Wexford County, Michigan, where this story plays out, is a very poor, very rural area, about 200 miles from Detroit. And if you look this case up, particularly if you head down into the comments section, there are a lot of people out there busy calling out the trailer trashiness of everyone involved. But I don't think that's very fair.

As we have seen on RedHanded, people from all walks of life are more than capable of carrying out the most heinous of crimes. And while yes, there are certainly a far larger proportion of people within the vicinity of this crime with serious criminal offences than the usual situation, I think that's probably to do with the fact that they're probably all coalescing in this area because it's so much cheaper to live there. And also somewhat out of the eye of authorities, in many cases, because it is so rural. And as we'll also go on to see, many of the people who fought the hardest for justice for Rebecca and her baby were also from this community.

Saying that, this family did seem to have a certain strangeness to them, starting with the messiness of their relationships.