Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
a police interview conducted shotly after a missing person was officially reported
the contents of this story were exclusively shared with the decoder by the crow wing county sheriffs office.
it began like any other missing person’s case.
but this was no ordinary disappearance, bryce was last seen on october 26th 2022 in a small rural minnesota Town.
his girlfriend cordelia laflex made the frantic call to authortities 2 days later.
she told them ,bryce had been heading to a storage unit with her father , that was the last anyone heard from him.
as investigators dug deeper they would discover a series of unsettling text messages from cordelia to bryce on the night he went missing .
messages filled with concern, confusion and fear.
” i love you, ” miss you already ” you planning on coming back for me? please !”
but bryce never responded
in the deeper this investigation went the more twisted it became .
a case of a missng 23 year old turning into something far darker than the detectives could have imagined.
a storage unite , a sled
and a haunting discovery in the woods,let’s dive into the chilling story of bryce Brogle ‘s dissapearance.
it was october 26th 2022
when cordelia’s longtime boyfriend disappeared into thin air
it was a cold day in c center township with temperatures hovering just above freezing for most of the day .
this lakeside region was sparsely populated and littered with resorts designed for urbanites to escape into nature noe with temperatures dropping the tourists had gone home
and cordelia who lived in the same town as her father and her boyfriend and had just come home from a months long trip waited for bryce to come home .
he’d gone to a nearby storage complex with her father to drop off some of his belongings.
cordelia had been dating bryce for 8 months since february 2022
and they’d got back into town just that afternoon, following a trip across the country
bryce was familiar enough with her father michael that they went off to the facility on their own cordelia stayed home and showered and texted michael again ,getting impatient.
there was no ostensible reason a trip to the storage facility should take so long , the laflex house was only a third of a mile away from the facility ,barely 10 minutes walking distance
eventually her father came home alone, he told her that bryce had been arrested when they were at the storage complex.
some official seeming men in two unmarked vehicles had shown up and taken him away in handcuffs, according to michael,they had not shown any identification and he had no explanation for it , what t agency they might have come from or what the charge might have been.
this was cordelia’s father and she had no reason not tobelieve his account
she texted bryce again and waited him to call her and or text her back or tecty her back to eexplaine what had happened. but he never did .
28th of october 2022
so on friday october 28th with no more information she went to the crow wing cpinty sheriff’s office and filed a missing person’s report .she had no more information to give the police than michael had told her
and so michael laflex was the first stop in their investigation, they tracked michael down at a family halloween party in brainerd and he took them to the storage facility where they interviewed him, michael was cooperative with their questioning.
mihael explained that they’d gone to the storage unit to sort through bryce’s belonings after his long trip away with cordelia,it had taken a while as bryce decided what he wanted to keep or get rid of.
so after heading to the storage unit aaround 5:00
michael said they were done there about 5 :45
it was as they were leaving that things took a turn
according to michael he and bryce had been intercepted in the car michael’s white gord escape on their way out of the storage facilities .
these strangers had lights on their veihcles though not the traditional overhead siren lights , instead thr kind used on unmarked police cars.
they took both michael and bryce into custody
michael said they the two of them were separated ,if this was an official arrest it was a serious operation with multiple officers involved
there were hints of strift within the family that michael didn’t particularly want to spend time with bryce, why then had michael offered to take bryce to the storage unite without his daughter
from michael’s persepctive this was an ordinary outing to the storage facility hijacked by whatever trouble bryce had got himself into.
bryce and codelia had returned from their trip across the US just that afternoon and he thought it could be related to that ….
from the sounds of things cordelia and bryce had got themselves mixed up in something more than they could handle ,possibly something criminal.
together cordelia and bryce had traveled scrss country to Arizona and Whashington state
they’d left the day after cordelia’s graduation party in june and spent four months away from home together ,four months in which anything could have happened.
and michael clearly believed that something had .
nothing came of these interactions with the cops , apparently, for michael however, this was a recurring problem and perhaps the root of his dislike of bryce.
michael claimed that bryce was a heavy pot smoker ,both e and cordelia had two phones one ordinary
and one flip phone that could be easily disposed of
locating bryce’d phone was obviously a matter of urgency for the investigators but michale said didn’t know where they were
and as the interview progressed and the sky grew dark, he gave more details he said cordelia had told him
but the investigator were aware of the possibility that bryce’s dissappearance could be related to something else. …they considered that maybe it could have been staged.
the investigators asked to look at mchael’s phone so they could examine its location data and confirm where he’d been on wednesday evening as the last person to see bryce.
but michael’s wires were getting crossed,only about 10 minutes after michael had denied having bryce’s phone the investigators asked him about it again.
he said he’d thrown it into the trash at the gas station in brainerd that evening, his reason for this highly suspicious behaviour- he wanted to protect his daughter
a contradictory picture was emerging,on the one hand there was the terrifying story of a couple pursued by law enforcement,bonnie and clyde style all the way the across the country …
on the other there was michael’s obvious dislike and suspicion of his daughter’s boyfriends.
to undersand this complicated situation ,we’ll need to dive into what we know about bryce and cordelia’s relationship and the Laflex family dynamic .
bryce Brogle was born in september 1999, he just recently turned 23 while on his cross- country trip with cordelia and this was a trip that represented everything he loved
which was exploring out west and living an independent back to basic’s life ,his dream was to build a yurt in Alaska and create a self- sufficient farm
he and cordelia met in february 2022 and bonded over their love of dogs and their similar goals of adventuring,yonger than bryce she graduated in june 2022 and that’s when they took off across the country
part pf her drive to travel was an overbearing home life, she considered her parents to be helicopter parents who had boundary issues.
once according to cordelia ,her parents had hired a private investigator to follow one of her previous boyfriends .
her mothher had huntington’s disease and her younger sibling of whom she was very supportive was transgender.
both of these things factored into a tense family environment at times.but according to cordelia it was her father michael who was the most stressful presencein the house.
though he seemed to be devoted to his family he even had a tattoo that read” daddy’s little girls” with a stylized illustration of them with him and silhouette.
born in 1977,michael was 45 and had grown up in Pequot lakes minnesota , a suburb of brainerd his parents were divorced and his mother had remarried, having more children in the new relationship which left michael with younger half siblings.
h graduated from Pequot lakes high school in 1996 and moved up into center township soon after that ,he’d worked construction in the past and was now self employed, working a variety off odd jobs in the neighborhood.
this was not michael’s first runin with the law.
early in 1999 at the age of 21 he pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct in the third degree and was sentenced to 5 years probation.
in 2018, he pleaded guilty to another sex offence this time ,fouth- degree criminal misconduct with an adult considered developmentally disabled and mentally impaired
records suggest that initially this person refused to have sex with him but eventually agreed when he insisted.
as a result he’ taken a polygraph test in the past in fact he taken four .
but that was a very different type of crime from the one that might have been committed here .
bryce Brogle had been missing for 2 days and michael’s story was suspicious and he even told them he’d threatened bryce before.
but he seemed to anticipate this line of questioning, talking to the investigators outside the storage unit, he always used the past tense to refer to bryce.
at the end of this interview the investigators checked and could find no record of an outstanding warrant for bryce’s arrest or that he’d had ever been taken into custody.
when they examined the data on michael’s own phone they found that he’d left home at 4:45 a.m on october 27th the day after bryce went missing…
and went back to his storage unit, he stayed there for 22 minutes..
before heading to a spot of public land by lake Edward, staying there for an hour.
it was becoming increasingly clear that the storage unit was the scene of a crime.
on october 29th , the police executed a search warrant on it.
on the unit’s concrete floor they found a bottle of bleach that held traces of both bryce and michael’s DNA the remains of a substance that tested positive for blood..
and marks consistent with something heavy being dragged on a sled.
on october 30th they followedt he evidence of michael’s cell phone location data to the spot near lake Edward.
in the middle of the woods.
it was far from the civilization, not a place thaty could easily be stumbled upon
the leaves on top of this freshly dug site didn’t match the surrounding fallen leaves, as if someone had made an attempt to disguise the area,but they hadn’t disguised it well enough.
when an excavation team arrived the grave was dug up and they found the body
it was the body of bryce Brogle
and he’d been shot in the back of the head.
micchael waas undeniably implicated in this murder,now that the body had been discovered ,but this wasn’t a suprise to law enforcement.
because 2 days earlier his two half siblings had gone to the police to tell them that michal had confessed.
when michael got back from speaking with the investigators at the storage unit on october 28th he talked to his sister jen baker whose party he’d been at earlier that evening
he asked to borrow her car as he said he was concerned the police would follow his track, when she ask him why …..
he told her he needed to bury bryce’s body .
he confessed to shooting bryce in the back of the head.
he told her not to worry because
” they’d never find the body”
he told her he’d use the sled to move it as it was too heavy to move by hand.
and he took a bag of leaves she had by the garage to cover it up once he’burried it .
this sled was later found in a ditch onthe way to the storage unit,covered with a blanket.
it had a dried red brown substance on it
when mchael was gone, jen called her brother michael’s half brother patrick and told him what michael had told her .
patrickwas a night shift clerk in Pequot lakes and the local police interacted with him often he had a bond of trust with them and so when jen told him this chilling revelation he went to the police asking that he remain anonymous.
it was common knowledge in their family apparently that michael believed bryce was abusing cordelia ,but everything he’d said to the investigators that cordelia needed to make her own choices and could only realize that bryce was toxic on her own had been a lie .
michael was arrested for the killing .
in november 2022, he was arraigned on a charge of second deegreee murder without premeditation
he had shot bryce in the back of the head from a distance in the storage unit and then moved his body on a sled to the spot in the woods after cleaning the storage unit.he buried the body and ineffectually covered up the dig site.
but as the investigation moved forward another witness emerged.
bryce and cordelia’s landlord in washington state, the landlord said that michael had called him and asked if bryce had hurt his daughter
when the landlord told him that’he’d seen cordelia with two black eyes michael said that he was going to kill bryce and that he’ already had the whole dug.
when pressed michael’s half brother corroborated this, michael had told him the same thing.
this aligned with other details of the case michael stored his firearms at his half-sister jen’s house on october 26th,just hours before cordelia and bryce arrived back home in minnesota
michael had collected one of his guns, saying he needed it to kill a rodent to at a bjob site where he was working
this hadn’t been a killing in the heat of the moment,this had been a coldblooded premeditated murder….
on march 30th 2022 the prosecutors uppgraded the charge
and michael was indicted by a grand jury on charges of first -degree murder
his trial took place a year later, in 2024.
michael took the stand and maintained that bryce had been abusive,remembering times he’d seen cordelia with bruises that she denied or explained away.
he said tht in july, 2022 a month into her trip with bryce she texted her father to come get her.she never shared her location and a few days later she said everything was fine.
and this was the line she held during the trial, she maintained that her relationship with bryce was never physical violent and that she had been happy with him.
her facebook posts reflected this, on october 31st 2o22 when her father already been arrested for the killing she wrote a very special person was taken from me, but i know now that he will never leave, he’s my guardian angel forever , i love you so much bryce.
in his testimony michael admitted killing bryce however he denied it had been premeditated he said he’d brought out to the storage unit to provoke him into a fight so that he could press charges and then keep bryce away from his daughter
he said he just happened to have the gun with him after dealing with vermin at a client’s house earlier that day
he claimed he confronted bryce about his treatment of cordelia and that bryce said she is mine and she is my business and that he would kill her before ever giving her up
this michael said was when he shot bryce in the heat of the moment to protect his daughter.
however the jury did not agree with him
in april 2024 they found him guilty on one count of first- degree premeditated murder and a lesser coundt of second degree murder he was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole ….