March 30, 2022 • 39 mins
Ebby's family searches for her everywhere. Catherine talks with private investigator Monty Vickers and former LRPD detective Tommy Hudson.
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. Yeah, that's the playground the park over there. Yeah,
recognize the playground of Salomont Drive. Alright, you're all right,
let's see so I canna pull up the picture in
the day mail. I'm at Chalomont Park and West Little
Rock in the parking lot. This is a tiny private park.
(00:32):
It's on a cul de sac and meant for the
exclusive use of the residents of the Channel Valley neighborhood
and their guests. In the summer, it would be full
of kids swimming in the pool or playing on the playground.
But it's late fall now the pool is closed and
the playground is deserted. That's the entrance on the other side.
(00:54):
It was parked near here. I'm gonna try to see
if I can find a picture of the car. We
know what kind of car she had. It was a
Volklier facade, pretty small car. Yeah. So the other voice
you're hearing is Mike. He's another private investigator. A few
months ago, Mike and I worked on a project together
where we helped local law enforcement apprehend felons. Mike is
(01:18):
former military. He's an expert in data technology. He actually
trains FBI agents on how to use data to solve cases.
I brought Mike down to Arkansas with me to help
out on the case, especially on two very important aspects,
social media and cellular data. These are two things that
(01:39):
may have been initially mishandled by police. Mike is also
around six foot one and weighs about two hundred and
twenty pounds of solid muscle. And since everyone keeps warning
me that we may have to track down some dangerous
people for this case, I decided it wouldn't be a
bad idea to have a little backup. Also, just a reminder,
(02:01):
Ebby's stepdad is Michael, so we'll always refer to him
as Michael and Mike as Mike. Laury Elsa says, there
weren't any cameras down here even now, which doesn't look
like there are no there's there's nothing out here. There's
a few a few light poles. Who was dark as hell,
(02:23):
like you couldn't see anything. There's no lighting down there
at all. Actually, this spot looks almost exactly like it
did back in twenty fifteen when neighbors called in an
abandoned car and that car turned out to be Ebby Stepics. Yeah,
there's beers and like somebody was like, somebody was having
some beers come out here and a party A little
(02:45):
bit looks like which is normal. Yeah, if I was
in high school, this would beg Yeah. It's a big spot. Yeah,
it's it's a safe place. Yeah. I mean if you're
having a hook up in your car or like, do
whatever you're gonna do. I mean, it's even you know,
there's benches down there, but if you're parked up here,
you came the embankment there, so there's lots of screening
(03:09):
and little visibility areas. We're going back to October thirtieth,
twenty fifteen. Ebbi Steppac has been missing for five days.
Her family, including her mom Laurie, her stepdad Michael, and
her brother Trevor, had been driving all over town trying
(03:30):
to find her. Then they get a call Ebby's car
has been found. Michael and Trevor rush over to Schalmont Park.
It's already getting dark. They look everywhere through neighborhoods in
the wooded area behind the park, but they see no
sign of Ebby. Ebby's car is back into a parking
(03:52):
space in the rear of the parking lot. Behind the car,
they see a manhole cover that leads down to a
storm drain. They pull off the cover and look down
into the drain, but there's nothing there except a pile
of leaves. As Ebby's family and the police look for
her everywhere, all over the state and eventually all around
(04:15):
the world, they don't know that she was right here,
just a few feet from her car all along. I'm
Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gothen. In the days following
(04:59):
Ebbie's disappearance, the police take Ebbie's car in for processing,
then they start their investi Now, Normally, early in a
police investigation, detectives will look through the missing person's phone
records and their social media, especially with a teenager like
Ebby who uses social media and texting as the main
(05:20):
ways to communicate with her friends. Ebbie's family has already
gotten started. They scour all of her accounts, including her Facebook,
her Instagram, and her Snapchat for any clues as to
where she could be. JC White is the Little Rock
Police Department sergeant originally assigned to the investigation. Roy Williams
(05:43):
is the detective and Laurie starts budding heads with JC
and the rest of the department very early on because
she says, they don't seem to be doing anything with
Ebby's social media accounts. They didn't know what they were doing.
They didn't know how to get into any of her
social media, any of her Facebook, Instagram. Did they try
(06:07):
to snapchat? They didn't know how to do any of it. Nothing.
So Laurie takes matters into her own hands. She hires
an it guy named Matthew to get into Ebbie's accounts.
The police are not happy about that, so they give
Lauria warning. They tell her to make sure that Matthew
(06:29):
doesn't change anything in Ebby's accounts, but Laurie is concerned
for another reason. When she and Matthew get into Ebby's
social media, it looks like someone else has already been
looking through her accounts. Meanwhile, the police still haven't gotten
into Ebbie's Facebook or her Instagram. Now, the process for
(06:54):
law enforcement to get information from companies like Facebook is
actually pretty straightforward. Facebook requires that a subpoena, a court order,
or a search warrant be filed, but police can ask
for the information they want online without ever having to
serve papers in person. Police can also ask these companies
(07:14):
to release other types of information. This information can include
a person's messages, photos, videos, timeline posts, and location. These
requests gets sent to a special unit in Facebook called
the Law Enforcement Response Team. Their sole job is to
take request for this kind of data. Facebook gets thousands
(07:35):
of these requests every year. All this really is to
say that, in this day and age, requesting information from
a social media company is seen as a very routine
part of any investigation. According to Laurie, the Little Rock
Police department did not seem to be familiar with these procedures.
She also claims the police didn't seem to have a
(07:57):
sense of urgency. I literally copied and emailed them the
instructions that are on Facebook that when you sign up
for Facebook and Instagram that tell you how to contact
law enforcement, to tell you how to contact them. I
copied that and sent that to them. That's how little
(08:21):
they knew. Mike and I talked about how police departments
investigate social media, So let's talk about the way it's
supposed to work. Something happens to a victim in this case,
Ebb Ebby goes missing. Ebby's parents do not have her
social media log in. The law enforcement agency in charge
(08:43):
of the case. All they have to do is get
a warrant to subpoena the social media provider ie, Facebook, Instagram, whoever,
and they'll provide access to that information. And when someone
goes missing, if you're looking through their social media, what
are the kinds of things that you should be looking for.
(09:03):
I would be looking for who they talked to, where
they were when they were posting. A lot of these devices,
when you make a post, there's duolocational data inside of
the picture, so you can get that from the platform
Instagram or Facebook as an example, when you request that data.
(09:29):
If the device has its location services on, it will
be sharing its location with the platform, sometimes whether they're
posting or not. So if they're sharing their location with
the platform, there is a potential or a possibility, you
could receive their last known location, at least as far
as the platform is concerned. In twenty fifteen and into
(09:51):
twenty sixteen, tensions are growing between Ebbie's family and the police.
A member of Laurie's church, who used to work with
the FBI offers to help. Laurie tries to get her
friend involved, but the police department refused. He helped us
as much as he could. He reached out to LRPD.
(10:12):
They said, no, we don't want your help. He offered
and offered, and they said, no, we do not want
your help. Through her connections as a hairdresser, Laurie knows
a victim's advocate that works for the prosecuting attorney Larry Juggley.
This woman, Susie, is appalled by the police's treatment of Laurie.
(10:33):
So Susie starts going with Laurie to her meetings with police.
She's like, oh my gosh, Laurie, this is awful. So
she went with me and took notes. So now I
have someone with the prosecuting Attorney's office going with me
to my meetings with little art police department, taking notes,
(10:54):
so I have somebody by my side. It got so
bad that on my emails now I was emailing the
chief of police, the mayor, the sergeant, the detective. I
was putting everybody on the emails. When finally I was
(11:14):
kicked out of the meetings because she and Matthew had
continued to dig into Ebbie's social media. The police department
actually kicks Laurie out of their meetings. I notified him
one day and said, Matthew has to change a password
for a minute. We have to change it so we
(11:34):
can figure out who is trying to get in. It's
just gonna be for a minute. When I emailed and
told him that, they said, we're done. We're done. Noe,
Matthew is off. Off the k off, You're off. He's off.
We're done. We will no longer contact you. We will
not email you, contact you, we won't notify you of anything.
(11:58):
You cannot come down here, don't show up. We're off.
You're done. Laurie, with Matthew's help, downloads all of Ebby's
social media messages. They find lots of messages between Ebby
and her friends, but everything stops on Sunday, October twenty five,
(12:18):
the same day that Ebbie stopped answering her phone. While
Ebby's family tries to find out who she was hanging
out with and where they were, the police start focusing
on someone a lot closer to home, her husband. They
tried to go straight for Michael having something to do
with it. Angle they were already yet Michael's ready to
(12:41):
throw him in jail. They were doing everything they could
to prove some way that he had something to do
with this. Since Ebbie's case is technically an open and
active investigation. We have no access to police case files,
so we have to start at the beginning and take
a fresh look at the cell phone data. We don't
(13:03):
have all of it, but Laurie do have some of
Ebbie's phone records. She's kept them in a file for
six years. I'm also trying to understand as best we
can the mistakes that police may have made early on
with the phone data, so that we can learn from
them and move on with this investigation. When police access
(13:24):
cell phone data and an investigation, they're looking for the
record of calls and the cell phone tower data. So
there are people in law enforcement who are specially trained
and extracting this type of information. It's kind of like
looking at the matrix and seeing pictures in the code.
It's not just a science, it's an art. Mike and
(13:45):
I also talked about this. So now that we're talking
about cell phone data, where does the data actually come from.
The data comes from the network provider. So let's just
say at and T everything that you do, every place
your cell phone goes is reporting one percent of the
time while it's turned on and is attached to the tower.
(14:07):
As you go from one tower to the next. That's
also reported to the cell phone company, where whether you're
actually using your phone or not. What law enforcement should
do when this happens is they go get a warrant.
They subpoena AT and T for example, and say, hey,
can you give me the call detail record of this
(14:29):
phone number, And in that call detail record will have
every person that they've talked to, as far as called
sent a text message to. It will have every tower
that they've connected to and for how long. So you
can actually get a geographical representation of dots on a
(14:50):
map of where they were when they actually made those calls,
where they were if they were sleeping somewhere at night,
their direction of travel if they're traveling from north to south,
east to west, for example. It's very very annular information
and it's very easy to put together what was going
on at that time. The secondary thing you do is
(15:13):
if there are people of interest or people that you
want to talk to, associates that she may have had,
you can look at those phone numbers based on whom
she had contact with and request the call detailed record
for those and do some correlation to see if those
people were in the same place at the same time.
So I guess in a perfect world, law enforcement or
(15:37):
whoever would put together all this information first and have
an idea of where everyone was and then go talk
to those people already knowing that absolutely you would, you know,
don't don't get me wrong, there's going to be you know,
detectives and investigators out there trying to do some things
in real time, right because people are should be trying
(15:59):
to solve the case as expediently as possible. But there's
should would be a team or some people who are
looking at this data from the moment that they receive
it from the telco provider. Laurie said the police made
some serious mistakes early in the investigation. First, she says,
(16:21):
they pinged the wrong cell phone number, which meant that
when Laurie and Michael go to the GPS coordinates that
the police gave them, they end up in a random
field miles away from home. Then, once the correct phone
number was pinged, police also apparently have some of the
cell phone time codes wrong, which will be a big
(16:41):
problem later when they try to establish everyone's ALBI, including Michaels.
They're tracking his movements to times that were totally incorrect. Jay,
seeing them started pushing for us to do a lot
of detector tests. At first they asked us, we said sure.
Well then after they started pushing for us to do
(17:03):
a lot of detector tests. When they started treating us
like that, that's what Michael said. I'm gonna have to
talk to a lawyer. And I didn't blame him either.
I did not trust them at all. In the weeks
after the investigation, on November third, twenty fifteen, a woman
(17:24):
and her daughter, who was a friend of Ebbie's, are
walking through Chalmont Park. She calls nine one one, I's
look as you emergency. I just came out of a
meeting with Detective Williams in regard to a missing person
named Ebbie. Uh. Okay. He said that the car was
(17:50):
located in this park, and I brought my daughter to
Lee Okay. She had been here with her before. True,
you know, we came here gonna have her look around.
And as I passed the sewer, now the composition, could
(18:10):
you I'll send somebody here to investige. I want to
see what who we need to get out there, and
I will call you in just a few minutes and
we'll go from there. Okay, okay, thank you, all right,
thank you man. Alrighty. She says that she smells something
rotting in Shalmont Park, but she says the police brushed
(18:34):
off her concerns. In this world out here, you go
into a police department, the worst thing you can do
is say I'm a private investigator. This is Monty Vickers.
He's a veteran and a former Little Rock police detective.
(18:56):
While Monty was on the police force, he investigated hundreds
of homicides, a lot of which he says, stay with
him to this day. Just something you you can't forget.
He's one of those old school former cops who could
have come straight out of a movie. He really cares
about his cases and about truth, justice in the American way.
(19:20):
He retired from the force years ago and became a
private investigator. I've been thrown out a more poee farmers
and anyone around been thrown out. A senator told me
a Mississippi Bible archer saw hot Springs two times and
I had to get up in their face, and I say,
you know, if you're not going to do your g
D job, at least pretend you give damn you'll make
(19:44):
these victims feel better. In early twenty sixteen, Laurie asked
Money to investigate Abbie's case. I didn't want to get
involved in they're saying at all, I said, I don't
need to interfere with the priest department. I regret that now.
Money says he was actually reluctant to get involved because
he doesn't want to insert himself into an active police investigation.
(20:07):
He is sure that the police will do a good job,
but when he starts digging into Ebbie's case, he's deeply
troubled by what he finds. First, he tries to get
security camera footage from the time around when Ebbie went missing.
Police did have some security footage of Ebby's car on
(20:27):
Channel Parkway. This is the single image, by the way
that has been released by police of Ebby. Police would
not say if Ebbie was in the car alone when
the footage was taken, or even which way she was traveling. Also,
Laurie said that Ebby's phone needed Wi Fi to make calls,
so she would often sit in the parking lot of
(20:49):
the Walmart that was about three minutes away from Shalmont Park. Tragically,
by the time Monty talked to people at Walmart. It
had been several months, and Walmart says the surveillance footage
had already been deleted. Five months after Ebbie went missing,
Monty goes back to Shalamant Park. He starts canvassing and
(21:13):
knocking on doors. He's looking for anyone who may have
been in the area where Ebbie's car was found and
he may have seen Ebbie on those crucial days. That's
when he finds Guy Hooper. Guy Hooper is a security
guard who patrols Shalamant Park on a regular basis, and
he was on duty the night that Ebbie went missing.
(21:35):
How did you find the security guard? Did you just
think there might have been a security guard there? And Yeah,
called out there and after the park area and found
out as a security guard. And I called him and
he told me on the phone for this and I
arranged to meet him out there. That's when I took
(21:57):
recorded statement from me about a forty five men or
our statement. Monty is shocked when Guy tells him that
he's the first person to show up to talk to
him about this investigation. Then Guy Hooper tells Money that
he actually called the police multiple times about Ebbe's car
and that the police had failed to show up in
(22:18):
the park. And then guy says that he had seen
Ebby before at that park during his routine patrols. He
had seen her there before with a young small black
male about her size, about five foot he said, five
foot three or four, and he had seen her there
(22:40):
multiple times. And one of the things that was just
gets you right in the heart that he said he
had all his own video, that he had a dash
camera and he videoed all of the encounters with her
in the past, because he said every night when he
would when he would get off shift, he would download
(23:03):
take a chip and download it to to his computer.
But then he tells us that's all gone now, this
dash cam footage that he had of Ebby is gone.
Guy says that he lost the footage after his computer
malfunctioned one morning. He came home shot to download the
(23:23):
dash cam and a computer said it could not read
this device. So his wife worked at a company and
the attic and computer tech there that she took the
computer and the chip in there, and the guy told
him said, computer shot, its fried. You know, it's an
(23:46):
old and best thing. Due just get your new computer.
So he did, and a computer tech guy through his
other computer and everything away. Monty gives this information to
the police and then stops his investigation for a few months.
He still hopes the police will handle it, but then
(24:07):
nothing happens, so he gets back on the case. Monty
wants to find out who Ebby was with on Friday
night and what happened to her. He goes back and
finds another friend of Ebby's, a guy named Gage. Gage
shares the text that Ebby had sent him on Friday
(24:28):
night with Monty, the ones where she said she had
sex with a guy who filmed her against her will.
Since Ebby had sent these texts alleging sexual assault, Monty
believes that police absolutely have probable cause to search the
phones of the boys who were mentioned in those texts.
Jac whyatt Superhu said that he had asked for their phone.
(24:51):
They wouldn't give him their phones, so that's all they did.
So after they told me that, that's when I call
the prosecuting attorney. Monty calls up the prosecuting attorney, Larry Juggley,
to get his insights on this. I called him with
a lawyer and him there that night. I called him
and told him about this, and I said they need
(25:13):
to get these three guys cell phones, and he agreed,
so he had a deputy prosecutor go to the Little
Rock Police department, and from what I was told, the
detective sergeant argued with the deputy prosecutor that there wasn't
(25:36):
enough probable cause to seize these cell phones. What Money's
getting out here is that this situation is getting surreal
because usually it's the prosecuting attorney who's telling the detectives
that they don't have enough evidence, then the detectives go
out and try to get more. It's never the other
way around. It's unbelievable to Money that a prosecuting attorney
(26:01):
is recommending seizing the phones and that the police are
refused to do it. So, even though she's been kicked
out of the meetings, Laurie continues to email the police department.
She takes it to the next level and emails the
captain and finally she gets another meeting with the police.
(26:22):
This time everyone is there, the captain, the detectives, the
prosecuting attorney. Laurie wants to make sure that her voice
and her complaints are heard. So I took all this
to the captain and had a meeting with everybody. And
the first thing was why did you have to email
the chief? And I said, to get y'all's attention. I said,
(26:47):
it got a meeting, didn't it. I got all of
y'all in the room. She has a lot of grievances,
the phone, the social media, the fact that it appears
to her that police haven't really been doing anything, for instance,
even things that would seem to be basic, like why
hadn't police looked through security footage at the nearby walmart
that was less than half a mile from the park.
(27:09):
Then Laurie gets to the issue of the boy's phones,
and I said, so why don't I have Why can't
you get a subpoena for this? Don't have probable cause?
I said, why why don't have probable cause for this?
Don't have probable cause for this? And this? And I said,
the prosecuting attorney says, I do. And I said, what
(27:31):
at what level is probable cause? And the chief said,
the Captain said, when I say it is just started shaking.
I mean, I was just was like this, I'm never
gonna I'm never gonna win, Nothing's ever gonna happen. So
at that point I was so defeated. I mean I was,
(27:55):
I was so defeated. And Monti a former police officer,
someone who believed in the beginning that police were doing
all they could, even he says he lost all faith
in the investigation. After this meeting, the situation between Laurie
and the LRPD continued to deteriorate and things were about
(28:18):
to get a lot worse. Finally, in June twenty sixteen,
the case is handed over to the lrpd's Violent Crimes Unit.
(28:41):
In a way, this is a good thing because these
are the department's most experienced detectives. But Laurie and many
of Ebbie's family and friends question why it took so
long to happen. In November twenty sixteen, police conduct another
search of Shalamant Park. This is a massive search. They're
(29:02):
reporters there from local news stations watching the police who
are working with the FBI. There's a canine team and
dozens of people scouring the woods. We're out here to
conducting a search of an area. It referenced to a
missing person's case. That case is the Ebby Steppic case.
She disappeared about well approximate last year. The lrpds Lieutenant
(29:26):
Danny Jackson explains what they're looking for that day. We
want to come out here and see if there's any
evidence out here that will help us find out what
happened to Abby or where she is at. We've got
two canine teams that are going to search the wooded
area immediately surrounding the park. It's going to be about
(29:47):
a three day search, so it'll be pretty extensive. I
just want to be very very thorough on this and
check this one more time, just to be sure that's all.
After the search, police reveal that they found clothes, handcuffs,
a shoe, and what appears to be part of a
leg bone, but hesting would reveal that the bone is
(30:07):
an animal bone and has nothing to do with Ebbie's case.
Another search, another roller coaster of heartbreak for Ebby's family.
In twenty seventeen, almost two years after Ebbe went missing,
Laurie and Michael feel like they have nothing left to lose.
They decide to go even more public and take the
(30:28):
story to a national level. They go on Nancy Grace
and Doctor Phil. They up the reward for information about
Ebby's disappearance from fifteen thousand dollars to fifty thousand dollars.
The media outreach works, Ebby's story goes national and this
leads to a lot more interest in her case. And
(30:50):
Ebby's story is everywhere, and more publicity also means more
people calling in from all over the world saying they've
seen Ebby in different places. Police are overwhelmed at trying
to track down all these Ebbe sightings. Some people even
call in with fake tips. This leads to a lot
of wasted time by the police and also more torment
(31:14):
for Ebby's family. There's one caller, a person who says
they're holding Ebby hostage and demands money to set her free,
And even though that caller turned out to be a hoax,
Laurie starts wondering if Ebbie could have been a victim
of sex trafficking. Laurie says that at this point she
(31:36):
felt trapped. She believes that the police are not investigating
Ebbie's case properly. She thinks that they're anger at her
and her family mean that they're not following leads. But
on the other hand, she's worried that if she takes
her complaints farther, police might stop the investigation completely. On
(31:57):
February twelve, twenty eighteen, Laurie files a complaint with the LRPD.
In her complaint, Laurie d tells what the officers had
done and what they hadn't done. She talks about how
some officers sent her threatening messages and told her she
would no longer be getting case updates, basically banning her
(32:18):
from the investigation. In August of that year, Laurie gets
a letter back from the LRPD. It's signed by then
Chief Kent and Buckner. The letter, which does not mention
any of the officers Laurie mentions by name, states that
police did not have enough information quote to prove or
disprove that your allegation that the sworn personnel were rude
(32:41):
and unprofessional during your contact with them end quote. The
police investigation seemed to consist solely of talking to the
officers and their immediate supervisors. It was all done internally. However,
after the complaint, the detective who had been assigned to
the case is removed, and that's when Tommy Hudson takes over.
(33:03):
Laurie says, at that point every thing starts to change.
Hey Tommy, this is Katherine Hawnsend. How are you doing
I'm good. I'm good. Well, thanks for talking to us.
I've been down here. I've been talking a lot to Laurie.
And my colleague Mike is here too. I brought him
(33:24):
with me. How you doing, man. Tommy Hudson has had
a long career with the LRPD as a homicide detective.
He'd actually retired a few months earlier, but he got
pulled back in to work on Ebbie's case as part
of the cold case. He other detectives that had this
case prior to be investigating it, and they screwed up
a bunch of stuff on this case and so I
(33:48):
got basically it just got thrown in my lapse, like
fix this. When Tommy gets the case, he finds that
only some superficial stuff had been done with Ebbie's phone. Also,
up to the point that he gets the case, there's
been little cooperation between the LRPD and the FBI. It
was the supervisors involved in that case on the front
(34:08):
end that refused to give that cooperation, to let them
use that effertise do the things that we finally got.
That's the first thing we did when we took over
the case, because you know, I mean, Laurie, them I'll
tell you that everything was kind of focused on the
family on the front end of the case, and that
was just, in my opinion, stupidity. And because we I
(34:32):
want to say, we had the family pretty much eliminated
at least through digital evidence within a few days, and
you know, because they were real apprehensive of cooperating, which
I understand, and then we we finally I had Laurie
and Michael come in. I said, I'd say, new guy,
you know everything happened before, it's not me, and this
(34:54):
is what we need to do. And then they cooperated
and do the things we did, like giving us new
formal statements, taking polygraphs and all that good stuff. And
and I kind of feel sorry for them the way
they were treated on the front end the case, because
it should have been treated the way they were treated.
Monty Vickers says that he brought up the idea of
looking again at the drainage pipe near where Ebbie's car
was found. Monny had been trying to get down into
(35:16):
that drain pipe since he started his investigation. I'd done
everything I could do, try to find a robot, red robot,
buy one, I said, they're especially but still I would
have like to have taken a robot up in there
and see you at anything. On May twenty four, twenty eighteen,
the Cold Case Unit does another search along with the FBI.
(35:40):
This time they use robot video cameras that Tommy gets
from the city. And then the next day I got
a call and there's gonna be digging the trained pipe up.
I said, you mean I found something? Said, yeah, looks
like it. I'm sitting there and I'm kicking myself and
(36:02):
I'm just you know, because I just shoot. I should
have kept on with that. On May twenty eight, twenty eighteen,
Tommy Hudson makes this statement with RPD, we decided to
conduct a search of the piping and drainage system close
to the area where Missus Steffi's car was initially found
(36:23):
in twenty fifteen. We used robots with video cameras that
we were able to send down the drains. Eventually, starting
from the top drain where her car was found, we
hit obstruction seventy feet down from the top part of
where her car was. We then took the same robots
and ran them back up the other end from the
drain up another one hundred and thirty feet and located
(36:46):
another obstruction. Neither one of those obstructions were human remains,
but they picked our interest that we had an obstruction
from seventy feet from the top from one hundred and
thirty feet from the bottom. So we made the determination
that we needed to eescavate this area to see what
was inside the pipe itself. At ten thirty hours on
Tuesday morning, and we located the piping section that we
(37:07):
believe we need to open up to see what the
obstruction was. Upon opening that pipe, co case investigators located
human rant remains inside that pipe. At that time, we
shut everything down and immediately went and try to search
for the family of Miss Stebbi to let them know
we had found human remains. That process took several hours
(37:27):
to recover those remains along with new evidence that we
did find inside this piping system. The remains were sent
to the Oursel State Crime Lack for positive dentification and
we'll be waiting for the testing results on that evidence
that was taken from those pipes. A few days later,
those remains are positively identified. The body they found is
Ebby Steppic. Ebby Steppic, two and a half years after
(37:52):
she's disappeared is confirmed dead. Remember that search the police
did back in twenty sixteen. If you hit pause during
that press conference, you can actually see the manhole, the
(38:13):
one that Ebbie's car was parked in front of, the
one that leads down to that pipe where her body
was found. Laurie and the rest of Ebby's family had
been back to that part countless times over the years,
and some interviews with Laurie you can see her standing
right in front of that manhole. All this time, she
(38:34):
was going through escort websites and chasing sightings all around
the world, dealing with faked blackmail threats and living a nightmare.
Ebbie was here the whole time. Now we need to
find out how she got down there. I'm Katherine Townsend.
This is Helen Gone. Helen Gone is a production of
(38:56):
School of Humans and iHeartRadio. It's written and hosted by
me Katherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts and Michael
Dowd Our executive Pretty Users or Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley,
and Virginia Prescott. Mix and master is by Ryan Peoples
and our music is by Bensley. If you have any
(39:19):
information regarding the disappearance, of Epistepic. You can call our
tipline at six seven eight six three two six one
five nine School of Humans, School of Humans,
School of Humans. Yeah, that's the playground the park over there. Yeah,
recognize the playground of Salomont Drive. Alright, you're all right,
let's see so I canna pull up the picture in
the day mail. I'm at Chalomont Park and West Little
Rock in the parking lot. This is a tiny private park.
(00:32):
It's on a cul de sac and meant for the
exclusive use of the residents of the Channel Valley neighborhood
and their guests. In the summer, it would be full
of kids swimming in the pool or playing on the playground.
But it's late fall now the pool is closed and
the playground is deserted. That's the entrance on the other side.
(00:54):
It was parked near here. I'm gonna try to see
if I can find a picture of the car. We
know what kind of car she had. It was a
Volklier facade, pretty small car. Yeah. So the other voice
you're hearing is Mike. He's another private investigator. A few
months ago, Mike and I worked on a project together
where we helped local law enforcement apprehend felons. Mike is
(01:18):
former military. He's an expert in data technology. He actually
trains FBI agents on how to use data to solve cases.
I brought Mike down to Arkansas with me to help
out on the case, especially on two very important aspects,
social media and cellular data. These are two things that
(01:39):
may have been initially mishandled by police. Mike is also
around six foot one and weighs about two hundred and
twenty pounds of solid muscle. And since everyone keeps warning
me that we may have to track down some dangerous
people for this case, I decided it wouldn't be a
bad idea to have a little backup. Also, just a reminder,
(02:01):
Ebby's stepdad is Michael, so we'll always refer to him
as Michael and Mike as Mike. Laury Elsa says, there
weren't any cameras down here even now, which doesn't look
like there are no there's there's nothing out here. There's
a few a few light poles. Who was dark as hell,
(02:23):
like you couldn't see anything. There's no lighting down there
at all. Actually, this spot looks almost exactly like it
did back in twenty fifteen when neighbors called in an
abandoned car and that car turned out to be Ebby Stepics. Yeah,
there's beers and like somebody was like, somebody was having
some beers come out here and a party A little
(02:45):
bit looks like which is normal. Yeah, if I was
in high school, this would beg Yeah. It's a big spot. Yeah,
it's it's a safe place. Yeah. I mean if you're
having a hook up in your car or like, do
whatever you're gonna do. I mean, it's even you know,
there's benches down there, but if you're parked up here,
you came the embankment there, so there's lots of screening
(03:09):
and little visibility areas. We're going back to October thirtieth,
twenty fifteen. Ebbi Steppac has been missing for five days.
Her family, including her mom Laurie, her stepdad Michael, and
her brother Trevor, had been driving all over town trying
(03:30):
to find her. Then they get a call Ebby's car
has been found. Michael and Trevor rush over to Schalmont Park.
It's already getting dark. They look everywhere through neighborhoods in
the wooded area behind the park, but they see no
sign of Ebby. Ebby's car is back into a parking
(03:52):
space in the rear of the parking lot. Behind the car,
they see a manhole cover that leads down to a
storm drain. They pull off the cover and look down
into the drain, but there's nothing there except a pile
of leaves. As Ebby's family and the police look for
her everywhere, all over the state and eventually all around
(04:15):
the world, they don't know that she was right here,
just a few feet from her car all along. I'm
Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gothen. In the days following
(04:59):
Ebbie's disappearance, the police take Ebbie's car in for processing,
then they start their investi Now, Normally, early in a
police investigation, detectives will look through the missing person's phone
records and their social media, especially with a teenager like
Ebby who uses social media and texting as the main
(05:20):
ways to communicate with her friends. Ebbie's family has already
gotten started. They scour all of her accounts, including her Facebook,
her Instagram, and her Snapchat for any clues as to
where she could be. JC White is the Little Rock
Police Department sergeant originally assigned to the investigation. Roy Williams
(05:43):
is the detective and Laurie starts budding heads with JC
and the rest of the department very early on because
she says, they don't seem to be doing anything with
Ebby's social media accounts. They didn't know what they were doing.
They didn't know how to get into any of her
social media, any of her Facebook, Instagram. Did they try
(06:07):
to snapchat? They didn't know how to do any of it. Nothing.
So Laurie takes matters into her own hands. She hires
an it guy named Matthew to get into Ebbie's accounts.
The police are not happy about that, so they give
Lauria warning. They tell her to make sure that Matthew
(06:29):
doesn't change anything in Ebby's accounts, but Laurie is concerned
for another reason. When she and Matthew get into Ebby's
social media, it looks like someone else has already been
looking through her accounts. Meanwhile, the police still haven't gotten
into Ebbie's Facebook or her Instagram. Now, the process for
(06:54):
law enforcement to get information from companies like Facebook is
actually pretty straightforward. Facebook requires that a subpoena, a court order,
or a search warrant be filed, but police can ask
for the information they want online without ever having to
serve papers in person. Police can also ask these companies
(07:14):
to release other types of information. This information can include
a person's messages, photos, videos, timeline posts, and location. These
requests gets sent to a special unit in Facebook called
the Law Enforcement Response Team. Their sole job is to
take request for this kind of data. Facebook gets thousands
(07:35):
of these requests every year. All this really is to
say that, in this day and age, requesting information from
a social media company is seen as a very routine
part of any investigation. According to Laurie, the Little Rock
Police department did not seem to be familiar with these procedures.
She also claims the police didn't seem to have a
(07:57):
sense of urgency. I literally copied and emailed them the
instructions that are on Facebook that when you sign up
for Facebook and Instagram that tell you how to contact
law enforcement, to tell you how to contact them. I
copied that and sent that to them. That's how little
(08:21):
they knew. Mike and I talked about how police departments
investigate social media, So let's talk about the way it's
supposed to work. Something happens to a victim in this case,
Ebb Ebby goes missing. Ebby's parents do not have her
social media log in. The law enforcement agency in charge
(08:43):
of the case. All they have to do is get
a warrant to subpoena the social media provider ie, Facebook, Instagram, whoever,
and they'll provide access to that information. And when someone
goes missing, if you're looking through their social media, what
are the kinds of things that you should be looking for.
(09:03):
I would be looking for who they talked to, where
they were when they were posting. A lot of these devices,
when you make a post, there's duolocational data inside of
the picture, so you can get that from the platform
Instagram or Facebook as an example, when you request that data.
(09:29):
If the device has its location services on, it will
be sharing its location with the platform, sometimes whether they're
posting or not. So if they're sharing their location with
the platform, there is a potential or a possibility, you
could receive their last known location, at least as far
as the platform is concerned. In twenty fifteen and into
(09:51):
twenty sixteen, tensions are growing between Ebbie's family and the police.
A member of Laurie's church, who used to work with
the FBI offers to help. Laurie tries to get her
friend involved, but the police department refused. He helped us
as much as he could. He reached out to LRPD.
(10:12):
They said, no, we don't want your help. He offered
and offered, and they said, no, we do not want
your help. Through her connections as a hairdresser, Laurie knows
a victim's advocate that works for the prosecuting attorney Larry Juggley.
This woman, Susie, is appalled by the police's treatment of Laurie.
(10:33):
So Susie starts going with Laurie to her meetings with police.
She's like, oh my gosh, Laurie, this is awful. So
she went with me and took notes. So now I
have someone with the prosecuting Attorney's office going with me
to my meetings with little art police department, taking notes,
(10:54):
so I have somebody by my side. It got so
bad that on my emails now I was emailing the
chief of police, the mayor, the sergeant, the detective. I
was putting everybody on the emails. When finally I was
(11:14):
kicked out of the meetings because she and Matthew had
continued to dig into Ebbie's social media. The police department
actually kicks Laurie out of their meetings. I notified him
one day and said, Matthew has to change a password
for a minute. We have to change it so we
(11:34):
can figure out who is trying to get in. It's
just gonna be for a minute. When I emailed and
told him that, they said, we're done. We're done. Noe,
Matthew is off. Off the k off, You're off. He's off.
We're done. We will no longer contact you. We will
not email you, contact you, we won't notify you of anything.
(11:58):
You cannot come down here, don't show up. We're off.
You're done. Laurie, with Matthew's help, downloads all of Ebby's
social media messages. They find lots of messages between Ebby
and her friends, but everything stops on Sunday, October twenty five,
(12:18):
the same day that Ebbie stopped answering her phone. While
Ebby's family tries to find out who she was hanging
out with and where they were, the police start focusing
on someone a lot closer to home, her husband. They
tried to go straight for Michael having something to do
with it. Angle they were already yet Michael's ready to
(12:41):
throw him in jail. They were doing everything they could
to prove some way that he had something to do
with this. Since Ebbie's case is technically an open and
active investigation. We have no access to police case files,
so we have to start at the beginning and take
a fresh look at the cell phone data. We don't
(13:03):
have all of it, but Laurie do have some of
Ebbie's phone records. She's kept them in a file for
six years. I'm also trying to understand as best we
can the mistakes that police may have made early on
with the phone data, so that we can learn from
them and move on with this investigation. When police access
(13:24):
cell phone data and an investigation, they're looking for the
record of calls and the cell phone tower data. So
there are people in law enforcement who are specially trained
and extracting this type of information. It's kind of like
looking at the matrix and seeing pictures in the code.
It's not just a science, it's an art. Mike and
(13:45):
I also talked about this. So now that we're talking
about cell phone data, where does the data actually come from.
The data comes from the network provider. So let's just
say at and T everything that you do, every place
your cell phone goes is reporting one percent of the
time while it's turned on and is attached to the tower.
(14:07):
As you go from one tower to the next. That's
also reported to the cell phone company, where whether you're
actually using your phone or not. What law enforcement should
do when this happens is they go get a warrant.
They subpoena AT and T for example, and say, hey,
can you give me the call detail record of this
(14:29):
phone number, And in that call detail record will have
every person that they've talked to, as far as called
sent a text message to. It will have every tower
that they've connected to and for how long. So you
can actually get a geographical representation of dots on a
(14:50):
map of where they were when they actually made those calls,
where they were if they were sleeping somewhere at night,
their direction of travel if they're traveling from north to south,
east to west, for example. It's very very annular information
and it's very easy to put together what was going
on at that time. The secondary thing you do is
(15:13):
if there are people of interest or people that you
want to talk to, associates that she may have had,
you can look at those phone numbers based on whom
she had contact with and request the call detailed record
for those and do some correlation to see if those
people were in the same place at the same time.
So I guess in a perfect world, law enforcement or
(15:37):
whoever would put together all this information first and have
an idea of where everyone was and then go talk
to those people already knowing that absolutely you would, you know,
don't don't get me wrong, there's going to be you know,
detectives and investigators out there trying to do some things
in real time, right because people are should be trying
(15:59):
to solve the case as expediently as possible. But there's
should would be a team or some people who are
looking at this data from the moment that they receive
it from the telco provider. Laurie said the police made
some serious mistakes early in the investigation. First, she says,
(16:21):
they pinged the wrong cell phone number, which meant that
when Laurie and Michael go to the GPS coordinates that
the police gave them, they end up in a random
field miles away from home. Then, once the correct phone
number was pinged, police also apparently have some of the
cell phone time codes wrong, which will be a big
(16:41):
problem later when they try to establish everyone's ALBI, including Michaels.
They're tracking his movements to times that were totally incorrect. Jay,
seeing them started pushing for us to do a lot
of detector tests. At first they asked us, we said sure.
Well then after they started pushing for us to do
(17:03):
a lot of detector tests. When they started treating us
like that, that's what Michael said. I'm gonna have to
talk to a lawyer. And I didn't blame him either.
I did not trust them at all. In the weeks
after the investigation, on November third, twenty fifteen, a woman
(17:24):
and her daughter, who was a friend of Ebbie's, are
walking through Chalmont Park. She calls nine one one, I's
look as you emergency. I just came out of a
meeting with Detective Williams in regard to a missing person
named Ebbie. Uh. Okay. He said that the car was
(17:50):
located in this park, and I brought my daughter to
Lee Okay. She had been here with her before. True,
you know, we came here gonna have her look around.
And as I passed the sewer, now the composition, could
(18:10):
you I'll send somebody here to investige. I want to
see what who we need to get out there, and
I will call you in just a few minutes and
we'll go from there. Okay, okay, thank you, all right,
thank you man. Alrighty. She says that she smells something
rotting in Shalmont Park, but she says the police brushed
(18:34):
off her concerns. In this world out here, you go
into a police department, the worst thing you can do
is say I'm a private investigator. This is Monty Vickers.
He's a veteran and a former Little Rock police detective.
(18:56):
While Monty was on the police force, he investigated hundreds
of homicides, a lot of which he says, stay with
him to this day. Just something you you can't forget.
He's one of those old school former cops who could
have come straight out of a movie. He really cares
about his cases and about truth, justice in the American way.
(19:20):
He retired from the force years ago and became a
private investigator. I've been thrown out a more poee farmers
and anyone around been thrown out. A senator told me
a Mississippi Bible archer saw hot Springs two times and
I had to get up in their face, and I say,
you know, if you're not going to do your g
D job, at least pretend you give damn you'll make
(19:44):
these victims feel better. In early twenty sixteen, Laurie asked
Money to investigate Abbie's case. I didn't want to get
involved in they're saying at all, I said, I don't
need to interfere with the priest department. I regret that now.
Money says he was actually reluctant to get involved because
he doesn't want to insert himself into an active police investigation.
(20:07):
He is sure that the police will do a good job,
but when he starts digging into Ebbie's case, he's deeply
troubled by what he finds. First, he tries to get
security camera footage from the time around when Ebbie went missing.
Police did have some security footage of Ebby's car on
(20:27):
Channel Parkway. This is the single image, by the way
that has been released by police of Ebby. Police would
not say if Ebbie was in the car alone when
the footage was taken, or even which way she was traveling. Also,
Laurie said that Ebby's phone needed Wi Fi to make calls,
so she would often sit in the parking lot of
(20:49):
the Walmart that was about three minutes away from Shalmont Park. Tragically,
by the time Monty talked to people at Walmart. It
had been several months, and Walmart says the surveillance footage
had already been deleted. Five months after Ebbie went missing,
Monty goes back to Shalamant Park. He starts canvassing and
(21:13):
knocking on doors. He's looking for anyone who may have
been in the area where Ebbie's car was found and
he may have seen Ebbie on those crucial days. That's
when he finds Guy Hooper. Guy Hooper is a security
guard who patrols Shalamant Park on a regular basis, and
he was on duty the night that Ebbie went missing.
(21:35):
How did you find the security guard? Did you just
think there might have been a security guard there? And Yeah,
called out there and after the park area and found
out as a security guard. And I called him and
he told me on the phone for this and I
arranged to meet him out there. That's when I took
(21:57):
recorded statement from me about a forty five men or
our statement. Monty is shocked when Guy tells him that
he's the first person to show up to talk to
him about this investigation. Then Guy Hooper tells Money that
he actually called the police multiple times about Ebbe's car
and that the police had failed to show up in
(22:18):
the park. And then guy says that he had seen
Ebby before at that park during his routine patrols. He
had seen her there before with a young small black
male about her size, about five foot he said, five
foot three or four, and he had seen her there
(22:40):
multiple times. And one of the things that was just
gets you right in the heart that he said he
had all his own video, that he had a dash
camera and he videoed all of the encounters with her
in the past, because he said every night when he
would when he would get off shift, he would download
(23:03):
take a chip and download it to to his computer.
But then he tells us that's all gone now, this
dash cam footage that he had of Ebby is gone.
Guy says that he lost the footage after his computer
malfunctioned one morning. He came home shot to download the
(23:23):
dash cam and a computer said it could not read
this device. So his wife worked at a company and
the attic and computer tech there that she took the
computer and the chip in there, and the guy told
him said, computer shot, its fried. You know, it's an
(23:46):
old and best thing. Due just get your new computer.
So he did, and a computer tech guy through his
other computer and everything away. Monty gives this information to
the police and then stops his investigation for a few months.
He still hopes the police will handle it, but then
(24:07):
nothing happens, so he gets back on the case. Monty
wants to find out who Ebby was with on Friday
night and what happened to her. He goes back and
finds another friend of Ebby's, a guy named Gage. Gage
shares the text that Ebby had sent him on Friday
(24:28):
night with Monty, the ones where she said she had
sex with a guy who filmed her against her will.
Since Ebby had sent these texts alleging sexual assault, Monty
believes that police absolutely have probable cause to search the
phones of the boys who were mentioned in those texts.
Jac whyatt Superhu said that he had asked for their phone.
(24:51):
They wouldn't give him their phones, so that's all they did.
So after they told me that, that's when I call
the prosecuting attorney. Monty calls up the prosecuting attorney, Larry Juggley,
to get his insights on this. I called him with
a lawyer and him there that night. I called him
and told him about this, and I said they need
(25:13):
to get these three guys cell phones, and he agreed,
so he had a deputy prosecutor go to the Little
Rock Police department, and from what I was told, the
detective sergeant argued with the deputy prosecutor that there wasn't
(25:36):
enough probable cause to seize these cell phones. What Money's
getting out here is that this situation is getting surreal
because usually it's the prosecuting attorney who's telling the detectives
that they don't have enough evidence, then the detectives go
out and try to get more. It's never the other
way around. It's unbelievable to Money that a prosecuting attorney
(26:01):
is recommending seizing the phones and that the police are
refused to do it. So, even though she's been kicked
out of the meetings, Laurie continues to email the police department.
She takes it to the next level and emails the
captain and finally she gets another meeting with the police.
(26:22):
This time everyone is there, the captain, the detectives, the
prosecuting attorney. Laurie wants to make sure that her voice
and her complaints are heard. So I took all this
to the captain and had a meeting with everybody. And
the first thing was why did you have to email
the chief? And I said, to get y'all's attention. I said,
(26:47):
it got a meeting, didn't it. I got all of
y'all in the room. She has a lot of grievances,
the phone, the social media, the fact that it appears
to her that police haven't really been doing anything, for instance,
even things that would seem to be basic, like why
hadn't police looked through security footage at the nearby walmart
that was less than half a mile from the park.
(27:09):
Then Laurie gets to the issue of the boy's phones,
and I said, so why don't I have Why can't
you get a subpoena for this? Don't have probable cause?
I said, why why don't have probable cause for this?
Don't have probable cause for this? And this? And I said,
the prosecuting attorney says, I do. And I said, what
(27:31):
at what level is probable cause? And the chief said,
the Captain said, when I say it is just started shaking.
I mean, I was just was like this, I'm never
gonna I'm never gonna win, Nothing's ever gonna happen. So
at that point I was so defeated. I mean I was,
(27:55):
I was so defeated. And Monti a former police officer,
someone who believed in the beginning that police were doing
all they could, even he says he lost all faith
in the investigation. After this meeting, the situation between Laurie
and the LRPD continued to deteriorate and things were about
(28:18):
to get a lot worse. Finally, in June twenty sixteen,
the case is handed over to the lrpd's Violent Crimes Unit.
(28:41):
In a way, this is a good thing because these
are the department's most experienced detectives. But Laurie and many
of Ebbie's family and friends question why it took so
long to happen. In November twenty sixteen, police conduct another
search of Shalamant Park. This is a massive search. They're
(29:02):
reporters there from local news stations watching the police who
are working with the FBI. There's a canine team and
dozens of people scouring the woods. We're out here to
conducting a search of an area. It referenced to a
missing person's case. That case is the Ebby Steppic case.
She disappeared about well approximate last year. The lrpds Lieutenant
(29:26):
Danny Jackson explains what they're looking for that day. We
want to come out here and see if there's any
evidence out here that will help us find out what
happened to Abby or where she is at. We've got
two canine teams that are going to search the wooded
area immediately surrounding the park. It's going to be about
(29:47):
a three day search, so it'll be pretty extensive. I
just want to be very very thorough on this and
check this one more time, just to be sure that's all.
After the search, police reveal that they found clothes, handcuffs,
a shoe, and what appears to be part of a
leg bone, but hesting would reveal that the bone is
(30:07):
an animal bone and has nothing to do with Ebbie's case.
Another search, another roller coaster of heartbreak for Ebby's family.
In twenty seventeen, almost two years after Ebbe went missing,
Laurie and Michael feel like they have nothing left to lose.
They decide to go even more public and take the
(30:28):
story to a national level. They go on Nancy Grace
and Doctor Phil. They up the reward for information about
Ebby's disappearance from fifteen thousand dollars to fifty thousand dollars.
The media outreach works, Ebby's story goes national and this
leads to a lot more interest in her case. And
(30:50):
Ebby's story is everywhere, and more publicity also means more
people calling in from all over the world saying they've
seen Ebby in different places. Police are overwhelmed at trying
to track down all these Ebbe sightings. Some people even
call in with fake tips. This leads to a lot
of wasted time by the police and also more torment
(31:14):
for Ebby's family. There's one caller, a person who says
they're holding Ebby hostage and demands money to set her free,
And even though that caller turned out to be a hoax,
Laurie starts wondering if Ebbie could have been a victim
of sex trafficking. Laurie says that at this point she
(31:36):
felt trapped. She believes that the police are not investigating
Ebbie's case properly. She thinks that they're anger at her
and her family mean that they're not following leads. But
on the other hand, she's worried that if she takes
her complaints farther, police might stop the investigation completely. On
(31:57):
February twelve, twenty eighteen, Laurie files a complaint with the LRPD.
In her complaint, Laurie d tells what the officers had
done and what they hadn't done. She talks about how
some officers sent her threatening messages and told her she
would no longer be getting case updates, basically banning her
(32:18):
from the investigation. In August of that year, Laurie gets
a letter back from the LRPD. It's signed by then
Chief Kent and Buckner. The letter, which does not mention
any of the officers Laurie mentions by name, states that
police did not have enough information quote to prove or
disprove that your allegation that the sworn personnel were rude
(32:41):
and unprofessional during your contact with them end quote. The
police investigation seemed to consist solely of talking to the
officers and their immediate supervisors. It was all done internally. However,
after the complaint, the detective who had been assigned to
the case is removed, and that's when Tommy Hudson takes over.
(33:03):
Laurie says, at that point every thing starts to change.
Hey Tommy, this is Katherine Hawnsend. How are you doing
I'm good. I'm good. Well, thanks for talking to us.
I've been down here. I've been talking a lot to Laurie.
And my colleague Mike is here too. I brought him
(33:24):
with me. How you doing, man. Tommy Hudson has had
a long career with the LRPD as a homicide detective.
He'd actually retired a few months earlier, but he got
pulled back in to work on Ebbie's case as part
of the cold case. He other detectives that had this
case prior to be investigating it, and they screwed up
a bunch of stuff on this case and so I
(33:48):
got basically it just got thrown in my lapse, like
fix this. When Tommy gets the case, he finds that
only some superficial stuff had been done with Ebbie's phone. Also,
up to the point that he gets the case, there's
been little cooperation between the LRPD and the FBI. It
was the supervisors involved in that case on the front
(34:08):
end that refused to give that cooperation, to let them
use that effertise do the things that we finally got.
That's the first thing we did when we took over
the case, because you know, I mean, Laurie, them I'll
tell you that everything was kind of focused on the
family on the front end of the case, and that
was just, in my opinion, stupidity. And because we I
(34:32):
want to say, we had the family pretty much eliminated
at least through digital evidence within a few days, and
you know, because they were real apprehensive of cooperating, which
I understand, and then we we finally I had Laurie
and Michael come in. I said, I'd say, new guy,
you know everything happened before, it's not me, and this
(34:54):
is what we need to do. And then they cooperated
and do the things we did, like giving us new
formal statements, taking polygraphs and all that good stuff. And
and I kind of feel sorry for them the way
they were treated on the front end the case, because
it should have been treated the way they were treated.
Monty Vickers says that he brought up the idea of
looking again at the drainage pipe near where Ebbie's car
was found. Monny had been trying to get down into
(35:16):
that drain pipe since he started his investigation. I'd done
everything I could do, try to find a robot, red robot,
buy one, I said, they're especially but still I would
have like to have taken a robot up in there
and see you at anything. On May twenty four, twenty eighteen,
the Cold Case Unit does another search along with the FBI.
(35:40):
This time they use robot video cameras that Tommy gets
from the city. And then the next day I got
a call and there's gonna be digging the trained pipe up.
I said, you mean I found something? Said, yeah, looks
like it. I'm sitting there and I'm kicking myself and
(36:02):
I'm just you know, because I just shoot. I should
have kept on with that. On May twenty eight, twenty eighteen,
Tommy Hudson makes this statement with RPD, we decided to
conduct a search of the piping and drainage system close
to the area where Missus Steffi's car was initially found
(36:23):
in twenty fifteen. We used robots with video cameras that
we were able to send down the drains. Eventually, starting
from the top drain where her car was found, we
hit obstruction seventy feet down from the top part of
where her car was. We then took the same robots
and ran them back up the other end from the
drain up another one hundred and thirty feet and located
(36:46):
another obstruction. Neither one of those obstructions were human remains,
but they picked our interest that we had an obstruction
from seventy feet from the top from one hundred and
thirty feet from the bottom. So we made the determination
that we needed to eescavate this area to see what
was inside the pipe itself. At ten thirty hours on
Tuesday morning, and we located the piping section that we
(37:07):
believe we need to open up to see what the
obstruction was. Upon opening that pipe, co case investigators located
human rant remains inside that pipe. At that time, we
shut everything down and immediately went and try to search
for the family of Miss Stebbi to let them know
we had found human remains. That process took several hours
(37:27):
to recover those remains along with new evidence that we
did find inside this piping system. The remains were sent
to the Oursel State Crime Lack for positive dentification and
we'll be waiting for the testing results on that evidence
that was taken from those pipes. A few days later,
those remains are positively identified. The body they found is
Ebby Steppic. Ebby Steppic, two and a half years after
(37:52):
she's disappeared is confirmed dead. Remember that search the police
did back in twenty sixteen. If you hit pause during
that press conference, you can actually see the manhole, the
(38:13):
one that Ebbie's car was parked in front of, the
one that leads down to that pipe where her body
was found. Laurie and the rest of Ebby's family had
been back to that part countless times over the years,
and some interviews with Laurie you can see her standing
right in front of that manhole. All this time, she
(38:34):
was going through escort websites and chasing sightings all around
the world, dealing with faked blackmail threats and living a nightmare.
Ebbie was here the whole time. Now we need to
find out how she got down there. I'm Katherine Townsend.
This is Helen Gone. Helen Gone is a production of
(38:56):
School of Humans and iHeartRadio. It's written and hosted by
me Katherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts and Michael
Dowd Our executive Pretty Users or Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley,
and Virginia Prescott. Mix and master is by Ryan Peoples
and our music is by Bensley. If you have any
(39:19):
information regarding the disappearance, of Epistepic. You can call our
tipline at six seven eight six three two six one
five nine School of Humans, School of Humans,
Hell and Gone News
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