On humid summer nights, teenagers still drive out past the edge of Emporia, down a narrow county road that dissolves into farmland and dark. They park near the bridge and wait. 

Some swear they’ve seen a ghostly figure walking the rails; others say they hear splashing, as if a car has gone into the Cottonwood River again. The stories shift and change—an apparition in white, headlights that appear and vanish—but they all circle back to one name: Sandra Bird. 

To most who visit, she’s a ghost. To those who were there in 1983, she was a woman found dead at the bottom of the bridge—her car submerged, her body floating in the river. What began as a tragic accident would become one of Emporia’s most infamous legends. 

But, beneath the folklore and hauntings, there is a story. A story that centers around a woman who was a wife, a mother and an Emporia State math instructor—before her death was turned into local legend. 

When Emporia Gazette reporter Bobbi Mlymar went to work on the morning of July 18, 1983, the newsroom hummed with the usual Monday, start-of-week static. The dispatch about the Bird crash had come through the night before, a simple traffic fatality. Nothing in it suggested murder. 

“It was classified as an accident,” Mlymar said. “The case was closed. Later on, after some investigation, it did become a murder—but to me, the evidence was there from the get-go.” 

In the first 36  hours, she said, the Rev.Tom Bird, a Lutheran minister and Sandra’s husband, gave several conflicting versions of what had happened that night. 

“Different law enforcement agencies were given different stories,” she said. “Once we got our hands on that, we were skeptical.” 

But law enforcement didn’t investigate it further, and Emporia moved on. Sandra Bird was buried, and the case went quiet. 

That all changed the following November, when a man named Martin Anderson, the husband of Lorna Anderson — the church secretary where Rev. Bird preached — was found shot to death in neighboring Geary County. 

“It was at that time that people started piecing things together,” said Nancy Horst, who worked with Mlymar at The Gazette in 1983. “Oh, wait. This might be something more.” 

The connection was almost unbelievable: two deaths, two small-town families, a tangle of adultery and faith. Mlymar remembered the night she heard Geary County investigators were in town. 

“I hopped in my car and went to track them down,” she said. “Next thing I know, they were following me, so I just drove down to the sheriff’s office and parked. I went inside, explained who I was, and we found we had mutual interest and could work together.” 

It was the beginning of a partnership. The Emporia reporters and the Geary County officers began comparing notes, linking Sandra Bird’s “accident” to Martin Anderson’s murder. Slowly, a picture emerged of what authorities believed to be a pastor and his lover plotting to rid themselves of their spouses—one body at the bottom of a bridge, another shot in cold blood. 

For Mlymar and Horst, resistance came from their own community. 

“I got mainly pushback from members of the church,” Mlymar recalled. “And other members of the community.” 

Horst agreed. 

“I’m not saying anyone tried to cover it up,” she said, “but it was almost like—things like this don’t happen in a little town like this. People couldn’t wrap their heads around something like that happening in Emporia.” 

At the time, Rev. Bird was still preaching every Sunday. He stood at the pulpit as his wife’s death remained publicly “accidental.” The case might have stayed that way if not for Geary County’s renewed investigation—and the determination of the two reporters who refused to drop the thread. 

Eventually, their reporting and the county’s evidence reached the Kansas Attorney General’s Office. The case was reopened. Within a year, both Rev. Bird and Lorna Anderson were arrested. Trials followed; convictions came, so did prison time. The story made national headlines. There was even a film, “Murder Ordained,”  based on the case that was released by CBS in 1987.

Lorna Anderson was convicted of criminal solicitation to commit murder in the deaths of Sandra Bird and Martin Anderson. She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in her husband’s death. 

Convictions for conspiracy and criminal solicitation of first-degree murder ensued for Rev. Bird. A jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in the death of his wife; a different one acquitted him in Martin Anderson’s death. He maintains his innocence in both. 

Then, as quickly as it had erupted, it settled into memory. The courtrooms emptied, the headlines faded and Emporia went back to its small-town rhythms. 

More than 40 years later, the facts are clear enough, but the grief still feels raw when Mlymar speaks of it. 

“It was horrible,” she said quietly. “Because of those two very selfish people, seven children grew up without parents. You don’t do that to your children.” 

Horst echoed her. 

“What sticks with me,” she said, “is that two people died and seven children lost parents. It got all this sordid coverage because it was a minister and a girlfriend, but that’s what I remember—the kids.” 

Both women have since retired from reporting, yet the case follows them. Mlymar still gives the occasional talk about it. She has the court transcripts, the newspaper clippings, even a PowerPoint presentation she made for a forensic science class. 

“I can tell you for sure, this story has not died.” 

Today, when people talk about the Bird case, they don’t mean the trials or the evidence; they mean the bridge. Teenagers drive there at night to test their courage, locals tell ghost stories and its location is featured on multiple “Kansas’ Most Haunted” websites. 

Mlymar laughed when asked about the ghost stories. “I have not heard of any of those,” she said.  

Horst had heard the tales, if distantly. 

“Even when my kids were growing up, there were always stories about Bird Bridge,” she said. “But I never experienced any of that.” 

To both reporters, the ghost lore feels like an echo of something they lived too closely to romanticize. The haunting, if there is one, exists in the way tragedy lingers—in the strange space between what people remember and what they prefer to forget. 

Now, after decades, the county is replacing the old Bird Bridge, formally known as Rocky Ford Bridge. Horst mentioned it almost offhand. 

“You know that bridge is being replaced, huh?” she said. “It’s been talked about for years.” 

For those who only know the legend, it might not matter. They’ll still drive down the dark road, park on the shoulder, and wait for a flicker of something beyond the headlights. But for the women who first told the truth of it—for the families who lost everything—the haunting isn’t supernatural. It’s personal. 

Maybe the real ghost of Bird Bridge is memory itself: how it refuses to leave, how it keeps remaking the past into story and story into myth.