First, and always first, was that farm.

Before you can understand anything about the Rogers family, start there. Start, if you can, by imagining what it would be like to get up on a black winter morning, hours before sunrise, when the wind is blowing and the thermometer is stuck somewhere south of zero and the Holsteins are waiting in the barn to be milked and fed and cleaned up after.

Picture crawling out from under the covers on a morning like that. Picture throwing something on, heading outside into the dark and the cold and trudging down the driveway, hands jammed in pockets, to put in another shift at the milking parlor. Located next to the barn, the milking parlor is not a parlor at all, but a concrete box of a room with one tiny window and a fluorescent light and a claustrophobic little rectangular pit cut into the center of the floor. For the next two or three hours, this pit will be your home. You will stand inside it so you can work the milking machines at eye-level with the udders. The cows will be above you, of course, clopping over from the barn to their stations on both sides of the pit, and while you work, hurrying from one end of the pit to the other, checking the flow of their milk into the milkers and dipping their teats in iodine and rubbing peppermint oil onto their skin, they will moo and complain and unceremoniously deposit manure onto the floor around you.

When you're finally done milking and cleaning the equipment and hosing out the pit and the floor above the pit, you walk outside into the first glow of dawn. By this point your arms and legs are aching, and cow smell has settled in your hair and on your skin, and the manure has splattered all over your boots and clothes. You want to hurry back up to the house and take a shower. But before you do, have a good long look at the landscape around you. Gaze out over the fields, acres of brown, brown and more brown, stretching in every direction like a giant, mud-soaked quilt, and at the scattered stands of black and naked trees, and up into the low-hanging bowl of gray that is the sky.

As you soak all this in, remind yourself that you'll have to go back into the pit, back with the cows and the smell and the manure, not just tomorrow morning but every morning and also every afternoon of every day of every year for as long as you can take it.

Now imagine what a week in Florida would look like from inside that kind of life.

Understand that, and you'll understand a little about Jo and Michelle and Christe.

"They were hard-working people, I'll tell you," says Ginny Etzler, Jo's mother. "They'd do what they had to do, and that was it."

It would be wrong to suggest that there were no rewards on the Rogers farm. Hal and Jo made a decent living and were proud of their self-sufficiency and of the care they showed the animals.

"You don't take no milk from 'em," Hal would say. "They give it to you, plain and simple."

Michelle and Christe did their best to make things as fun as possible, or as fun as things could be when nearly every surface in sight tended to be draped in manure. The girls loved the cows -- they loved animals, period -- and knew their personalities and quirks. They had names for them all. There was Sage, Michelle's favorite, and Rosie and Betty and Grandpa and April and May and June; Hal, who usually stuck with calling them by number, was inspired one day to give one the moniker of Crazy.

Christe thought of the cows as her pets. Sometimes, when she was working on her cheerleading routines, she would practice beside the barn, using the Holsteins as her audience. Hal would see her out there, jumping up and down and waving her arms for a bunch of cows, and he would smile. As long as the cows didn't run away, he'd say, she must be doing something right.

Still, the grind of the farm was overwhelming. On top of the milkings and feedings, Hal and the rest of the family had to contend with a mountain of other tasks. There was the breeding -- they'd owned a bull for a while, but switched to artificial insemination when he started chasing Jo and the girls -- and delivering the calves and cleaning the barn every day and cleaning the milking parlor every day and keeping the machinery and equipment in good repair. They had to plow the fields and plant the crops and harvest the crops; sometimes, during harvest, Hal would go for three days straight without sleeping. And like the rest of us, they had to cook and do laundry and keep track of the bills and keep up with the usual chores of life.

They all pushed themselves. But none pushed harder than Jo.

"She could work me under the table," says Hal.

Today, those close to Jo tend to describe her in generalities. They say she was fun. They say she was happy. But they struggle with details. Looking back, sorting through all the years, it's difficult to know which bits and pieces are worth sharing, which are the ones that would sum her up and set her apart. What are the moments that define any of us? The odds and ends that make us real?

Her given name was Joan, but almost no one called her that. She was thin, with brown hair that she curled sometimes and sometimes wore straight. Like her husband, she wore shaded glasses that partially hid her eyes. Unlike her husband, she had an outgoing nature and could talk to anyone. Hal liked to say that she was his personality.

"She never knew a stranger," remembers Jane Dietrich, a close friend who lived on a neighboring farm.

When she was little, growing up on a farm in the same county, Jo used to dress the family cat in baby clothes and walk it in a stroller. She led a sheltered childhood. She'd dated Hal in high school and married him a few months after graduation, when she was pregnant with Michelle.

Though their wedding was held inside a church, her parents were so embarrassed by the pregnancy that they did not allow Jo to wear a wedding gown or to invite her friends to the reception. For their honeymoon, she and Hal were granted a weekend in nearby Fort Wayne, where they stayed at a Hospitality Inn.

Somehow Jo made the best of things. She had a ringing laugh. She loved country music, loved to dance, made a fantastic potato soup. She and Hal owned a motorcycle, a Honda Goldwing, and she liked to ride behind him, the wind in her face. She was independent and strong-willed and not afraid to stand up to Hal; she listened to him and respected his opinion, but if he said something stupid, she could silence him with a look. She used to make him take her out to dinner, just so they could get away from the farm and talk about something other than the corn and the cows. She liked to tease Hal and would make fun of his woeful attempts at singing. She wrote him cards, telling him she loved him. She was a tough woman -- tougher than her slender frame would have led a stranger to believe -- but underneath the toughness, friends saw an enduring glow, a persistently optimistic outlook that had survived all her struggles. In the months before she left for Florida, she talked about wanting to have another baby.

"You would have liked Jo," says Vance Krick, a family friend who lived down the road. "You really would have."

For all her spirit, though, the years had knocked something out of Jo. She had once been beautiful -- you can see it in her high school senior photo -- but by May of 1989 she carried with her an unmistakable air of depletion, a sense that her life had been far too hard for far too long. You could see it in the circles beneath her eyes, her gaunt cheeks, the tight line of her mouth. She was 36, but looked 10 years older.

And no wonder. It wasn't just the demands of the farm or the job at Peyton's Northern. It wasn't just her migraines, either, or the stress of raising two teenagers, ferrying the girls to church and softball practice and cheerleading camp.

It was everything. She seemed to exist in a state of permanent exhaustion. She worked the midnight shift at Peyton's -- the night trick, some people called it -- to supplement the income from the farm and to qualify her and the rest of the family for health insurance benefits. Early in the morning, she'd drive home from the job, and help finish with the first milking and the chores. She'd get the girls off to school, and then ride with Hal into Willshire for breakfast, and then go back home and catch whatever sleep she could before the girls came home from school and it was time for the mid-afternoon milking and for her to make dinner. In the evenings, she would try to nap again before leaving for the next midnight shift. But it was never enough. She would fall asleep while driving. Sometimes, when she was on her lunch break at Peyton's, she would sit in the din of the break room and nod off in front of her co-workers.

"You're killing yourself," Rosemary Krick, Vance's wife, would tell her. "You're killing me, just watching you."

Another strain, a strain that would have broken almost anyone, was the problem with Hal's younger brother. John Rogers was Hal's partner. They owned the farm together, and John lived in a trailer beside the house and worked the farm along with the rest of the family.

People around Van Wert had always thought John was a little off -- he liked to wear Army fatigues and often talked about taking on missions for the Secret Service and the CIA -- but no one knew how deep the problems went until one day in March 1988, when sheriff's deputies showed up at the farm and arrested him, charging him in the sexual assault of a woman who lived in his trailer.

The woman had once dated John, but now they were just sharing space. She told police that one evening she had come back to the trailer and been attacked by a man in a mask who handcuffed and blindfolded her and threatened her with a knife. When she reported the assault, the woman told detectives that she thought her attacker was John -- she'd heard his voice -- and that the rape had been videotaped. The detectives got a warrant and searched the trailer and found, inside a briefcase, a video of the rape.

Disturbing as this was, the worst was yet to come. Shortly after John was taken to jail, the detectives summoned Hal and Jo to the sheriff's department and sat them down. They had something to tell them.

"We think Michelle's been assaulted," one of the detectives said.

All these years later, these terrible events still cast a shadow over any attempt to understand Michelle. It's hard to separate the darkness from everything else, hard to remember that she had a life completely apart from whatever happened with her uncle. But she did. It was not an easy life, but it was hers, and by the time she left for Florida, she was well on her way to reclaiming it.

Most people, seeing Michelle for the first time, would have said she was pretty. Many would have described her as beautiful. She had wavy brown hair that fell just past her shoulders, a cautious smile, dark eyes that were somehow both playful and haunting. Like so many teenage girls, she was a shape-shifter. Sometimes, when she hadn't put on all her makeup, she could pass for a middle school student; at other moments, when she was dressed up or when she tilted her head a certain way, she looked like a woman in her early 20s. Yet in both incarnations, there was something removed about her, a sense that an essential piece was kept in another room somewhere, under glass. The events of the past two years were in that wariness; they were there, too, in the lines already forming around her eyes.

At Crestview High, where she had just finished her junior year, Michelle was an average student known for being both a little shy and a little wild. She could be withdrawn around people she did not know, but could also drop into a boy's lap and flirt outrageously. She smoked occasionally. At parties, when others were drinking beer, she preferred wine coolers. On the way to school, she sat at the back of the bus with the guys from the agricultural club and listened to their off-color jokes and laughed when they grabbed for her rear.

The brazen exterior left Michelle with a bit of a reputation. In keeping with the age-old traditions of high school, other students spread whispered stories about her. Michelle knew she was a fixture of school gossip -- she talked about it with her girlfriends -- but she did not particularly care. Or at least she pretended not to care. The truth was, beneath the surface, there was a bruised sweetness to Michelle, a painful vulnerability more complex than either her reputation or the facade she presented to others.

Publicly she may have shrugged off the gossip. But privately she scribbled notes to friends, saying she was lonely. Sometimes, she talked about going to college and becoming a veterinarian, swearing she would never allow herself to wind up on a farm, staring at cows for the rest of her life. Other days, she said she wanted to get married and raise a family on a farm. She had a schoolgirl's fascination with rings, wearing four of them -- two gold and two silver -- on her left hand, one on each finger. Her bedroom was decorated with pictures of unicorns. She belonged to the 4-H Club and to the Future Farmers of America. She chewed Bazooka bubble gum. She listened to Guns N'Roses, U2, Madonna. On weekend nights, she liked to cruise up and down Main Street in Van Wert. If she was going to a school dance, she made a point of stopping by her maternal grandparents' house first so they could see her dress. She sometimes wore wide, pink-rimmed glasses, not to correct her eyesight but because she thought them stylish. During the summer, when she showed cows and sheep at the Van Wert County Fair, she would sleep in the barn with the animals.

"She was a tomboy," remembers Jeff Feasby, the boy she was seeing when she left for Florida. "A typical farm girl."

Michelle and Jeff had gotten together a month before the end of school, at a party after the prom. Neither had a date that night, and so they'd been free to pursue each other; they'd talked until the sun came up, by which point they were a couple. Although they'd dated only a few weeks, Michelle was already growing close to Jeff and had accepted his class ring as proof that they were going steady. The ring was adorned with a stone of cubic zirconium and a carving of a knight atop a horse -- in honor of the Crestview High Knights -- and Michelle was terrified of losing it while working in the barn. Instead of wearing it on one of her available fingers, she kept the ring in her purse.

The two of them were a good couple. They'd known each other since seventh grade and thought of each other first as friends. Between them there was true affection and respect. Jeff had heard the talk over the past year or so about something bad happening with Michelle and her uncle. But Jeff sensed that she did not want to talk about it and left the subject alone.

"Didn't think it was any of my business," he says.

The night before Michelle and her sister and mother began their trip, Jeff came out to the house. The two of them stood in the laundry room and kissed goodbye. Michelle got emotional, saying how much she'd miss him. To others, a week's vacation to Florida would have been nothing extraordinary. To Michelle, it must have seemed like she was headed for the far side of the moon. She was excited about the trip and could not wait to get started. But that night, in her boyfriend's arms, Michelle's eyes filled with tears.

Christe Rogers did not have a boyfriend.