S1: E12 – BFFs: The Disappearance of Sarah Stern, Part 1

When a nineteen year old's car was found abandoned on a bridge at the Jersey Shore, speculation ran wild keys.

We're in the ignition, no sign of foul play, nothing.

Sarah was nowhere to be found.

But was Sarah Stern trying not to be found?

Sarah talked about possibly starting a new life in Toronto and moving away.

Her mother had left her a lot of cash.

It all added up to one giant mystery.

You don't know what today.

To be honest, today we're at the Jersey Shore in the community of Neptune City for BFFs the disappearance of Sarah Stern. I'm Sloan Glass and this is American homicide. As a note, this podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for all audiences. Discretion is advised. The Jersey Shore, What did it give us? Snookie, Polly d and Jwow. But what you say see on TV and what really happens in real life are two completely different things.

The Jersey Shore is not quite what you would expect to see.

Journalist Tom Davis grew up on the Jersey Shore and now covers the area for Patch dot Com.

It's actually a very conservative, traditional community, that's mixed in with a tourist atmosphere.

Like clockwork, every summer, tourists and beachgoers take over the area.

During the summertime, I would say the population probably for druples at least, especially on the weekends. It almost develops a little bit more of a Miami Field to it.

The party atmosphere every summer takes over the mini bars, restaurants, and of course the beaches.

The beaches are the best place to beat.

The shore features forty four beaches in total, and if you're like Tom and live there year round, you look forward to the off season.

For a lot of people, they really kind of hate the crowd, so they actually like the fall and the winter bigg This is obviously a lot emptier, it's a lot less crowded. I always called it the void between Labor Day and Moral Day because literally nothing happens here.

But in the early morning hours of December third, twenty sixteen, something did happen. A ridehair driver noticed an abandoned Oldsmobile sedan atop a bridge heading out of town and called nine one one.

Mine one one, where is the emergency?

I kut on the Belmore Bridge through the car that debanded gets off the side in the road.

Was there anybody inside the vehicle?

I look down.

That tall bridge spans the Shark River, which despite its name, isn't known for having sharks.

The water underneath is a Shark River, which is a very shallow river. The might do some fishing there. There's really no swimming or anything like that.

When police got to the car, they found no one inside, so they contacted its owner, Michael Stern.

About three o'clock in the morning.

Was kind of a squeaky voice saying they were from the Mamouth County Sheriff's Department and they were looking for the owner of an oldsmobile.

Michael lived in Neptune City, New Jersey year round with his daughter Sarah, but at the time he was out of town. He was vacationing in Orlando.

And I said, yeah, you know, Sarah drives that car.

Sarah was his nineteen year old daughter. She was in college studying media production.

Well, Sarah was into the arts.

She was taking television production, art classes, pottery photography.

Well, her dad was in Orlando, Sarah was back home.

Sarah was basically by herself, and she didn't like to be by herself.

Yes, but sometimes, like everyone, Sarah just needed her space.

When she was fifteen, her mom passed away cancer and it was a tough time for her.

It was very tough. Sarah's mom had a long bout with breast cancer.

And Sarah, you know, she was a champ.

She loved her mom and she did everything she could to keep for comfort when she was going through chemo.

And sadly, her mom ultimately lost that fight. When Sarah was a freshman in high school.

She struggled at the time, you know, losing her mom.

Sarah took that pain and channeled it into her artwork.

So she had to kind of find herself and that's when she threw herself into art, drawing, photography, and the media, and her talent just blossomed. Within a couple of years, she was doing things that I thought were incredible.

According to Michael, as a widower and father of a teenage daughter, he thought the only thing to do was to pull Sarah close and cope together.

Our family basically was Sarah and myself and always a dog. She loved her dog Buddy, and she dressed Buddy up in different outfits like put jackets on them in sweatshirts, and.

The buddy dressed up for Halloween. That was her best friend.

With Sarah and Buddy back home, Michael spent the early morning hours of December third, twenty sixteen, trying to figure out why Sarah's carr was left on a bridge some two miles from their home.

I tried the house phone and her cell phone, and I wasn't getting anything through.

Then he did what every father of a nineteen year old would do. He sent her a text message.

The messages were coming up green as opposed to blue on an iPhone, so I thought, maybe your phone was off, or you know, the battery life had gone down.

By then, the police had gone to Sarah's home and already did a search.

No one was there except for the dog.

The police found Buddy locked in his cage, which was something Sarah's dad said she would only do when strangers were at the house.

It was kind of odd that he would have been in there, but Sarah was nowhere to be found. At that point, we just didn't know what was going on, so we just packed up and threw everything in the car and started driving north.

The sixteen hour ride from Orlando to Neptune City gave Michael plenty of time to think about what could have happened.

There was a million scenarios going through my head. Did the car stall with something wrong with it, you know? Did Sarah have somebody with her that might have abducted her.

There was also the terrifying thought that Sarah, who was struggling with the loss of her mother, possibly took her own life.

We had no answers, no answers at all.

Early that morning, the police sent a team of divers into the frigid waters of the Shark River to look for any signs of Sarah.

The tides go in and out very very quick.

It's cold, it's rocky in some areas, and it's marshy and other areas.

By the time the sun came up that Saturday morning, there was still no sign of Sarah and no evidence of what could have happened.

There were a couple of theories that law enforcement believed.

Early on, Alex Napoliello covered the story for NJ dot com and the Star Ledger newspaper.

It's possible her car had broken down and she flagged the wrong person for help, and someone did something terrible to her, possibly threw her body off the bridge. And I remember early reports talking to sources off the record, that there was belief that she had jumped off the bridge. So then law enforcement wants to start putting the pieces together. What was her mental state leading up to this?

You know, was she sad?

Was she depressed?

Well?

According to witnesses who last saw Sarah, she was not in a good place mentally.

Police talked to her neighbor across the street, Robin Draper, and what Robin had told them was that Sarah had seemed a little off that day and not necessarily herself. Sarah was over at their home earlier in the day and she had dropped off some bins of her belongings.

But Sarah didn't just drop all of some of her stuff. She also dropped some hints about where she might be going.

Sarah talked about possibly starting a new life in Toronto and moving away. If she's getting rid of these belongings while her father is vacationing, maybe she wanted to leave town without necessarily notifying her family that she was leaving.

One of the last people to see Sarah Stern before her disappearance was one of her best friends, Liam Mcatasne.

Liam Mcatazsne was one of Sarah's closest friends growing up. They lived about a block away from each other. They were childhood friends and they did what normal kids do, play video games, talk on the phone, text with each other.

The two had one of those rare lifelong friendships. They met at Sunday School when they were just six years old.

They were close and they remained close up until the day she disappeared.

Liam was with Sarah that afternoon as she moved those beens filled with her personal belongings into a neighbor's house. When detectives questioned him, he painted a bleak picture of Sarah's state of mind.

In the past, she has had a tendency to have self destructive, suicidal behavior.

He was telling law enforcement she wanted to move away. She wasn't happy, she was depressed.

Over the past few months, she's been telling.

Me how bad her relationship with her father is and how she just needs to get out of here.

She had a rocky relationship with her father. There were some periods where you know, they fought and had disagreements.

So let's say that one of Sarah's best friends was right, and she did leave to get away from her dad, Well, how could she afford it.

On the day before Sarah's carr was found abandoned on the bridge, police learned that she I had gone to a bank during the day to withdraw money from a safety deposit box that she had.

Liam said he went with her to the bank, but stayed in the car while Sarah went inside.

She took out seven thousand dollars. What would a nineteen year old be doing with this money?

What nineteen year old has thousands of dollars soft away in a safe deposit box.

You don't know what to think, to be honest.

Sarah's father also didn't know what to think of that cash.

I didn't know about it.

Well, here's what he learned. Sarah found those thousands of dollars in a shoe box inside their home, and this money was filthy and old from well before the US Treasury redesigned the twenty and fifty dollars bills.

Her mother I'd squirreled away money, I guess for years. But she mentioned it to somebody and he got back to Sarah and.

She found it.

So Sarah Stern had some problems with her dad, and she had a pile of cash. So it makes perfect sense that she left town, but her dad wasn't buying it.

You know, she just wasn't leaving her car on a bridge and leaving her suitcase and her passport. Her passport was up in her drawer where she kept it.

Yeah, without a passport, Sarah would have no way to get into Canada.

We just we didn't know. Then.

It just left the big open wound.

In the early hours of December third, twenty sixteen, nineteen year old Sarah Stearn's car turned up on a bridge near her home in Neptune City, New Jersey.

There's really not a lot of room over there on the shoulder, so it's very, very odd for people to be stopping.

On the bridge.

Edward Kirshenbaum was the director of Public Safety for the Neptune City Police Department.

He's bring the ignition with no sign of a driver or a pass sure, no sign of foul play. Nothing.

And here's a bit of bad luck. Surveillance cameras near the bridge were not working that night, but a home security camera across from the Stearns house was working. Unfortunately, for detectives, they couldn't make out anything other than the time Sarah's car came and left the house.

You don't know what's going on, so you have to pull in every resource that you can to try to get to the inline of what happened.

Hundreds of Sarah's friends and neighbors joined Sarah's best friend, Leah Mcatasne in the search for any sign of Sarah.

The beaches in the lakes and the inlets were all searched by volunteers, so there was an all out effort by the community to see if they could locate anything that would give any indication of what happened to.

Sarah stick but detectives were concerned about Sarah's bizarre behavior. The afternoon before she.

Disappeared wasations with friend of Sarah's Liam mcintazie, where she may have had some type of suicidal tendency that she was upset with issues, maybe because of her mom's death.

In fact, Liam was with her when she moved some of her stuff into a neighbor's house. The afternoon before she went missing.

Sarah had dropped off bins of her personal belongings to be kept in the friend's basement. Sarah also gave a bin of footballs and basketballs or some type of equipment to kids in the neighborhood, so that was kind of odd.

Liam told detectives that afternoon, the two went to the bank, got tacos for lunch, and returned to Sarah's house. They ate and then played video games until around four forty five PM. That's when Liam left for his job at a local steakhouse.

Liam was the last person that Sarah had talked.

To, and most concerning was what Liam told detectives about Sarah's state of mind.

Sarah was unhappy with her home life, that her father was overbearing, that the relationship between Michael Stern and Sarah Sterne was not a good relationship.

So naturally, detectives questioned her father, Michael, about his relationship with Sarah, and they were surprised by his response.

Michael Sterne was an open book. He was forthcoming with everything that we discussed. Any type of telephone communication, whether it be text messages, their voicemails.

And these messages didn't show any sort of conflict between them. Just before Sarah disappeared, she texted her dad, Hey Dad, good afternoon. What day are you coming back from Florida? Her text also contained emojis, a smiley face with sunglasses, a palm tree, and a little red car. Michael's response included a picture of a rainbow that had just appeared right around that time. He later sent a picture of Disney's Magic Kingdom, where he was vacationing. Sarah wrote back, Wow,

It's a parent sports nightmare. I couldn't imagine it myself, and my heart was breaking for him.

At this point, all detectives knew for sure was that Sarah took out a large sum of money from the bank and then vanished.

There was no utilization of any bank cars or anything that would give some kind of information that she had left the area, because without funding, how far can you go you have no car, So it was a unique case. There was nothing adding up.

Even the surveillance footage from the bank showed Sarah smiling and waving to the manager as she left, it didn't exactly point to someone who was considering taking her own life or fleeing the country.

There were no hardcore facts out there, so you had to use the totality of circumstances to just old fashioned police work, hoping that somebody says something, and just talking to everybody to try to put the pieces together.

Journalist Alex Napoleello covered the story.

Very early on. The reports coming to us from police was that Sarah was missing and that there wasn't anything suspicious about her disappearance. And then, sort of seemingly out of the blue, the Mammoth County Prosecutor's office puts out information that they are willing to pay anyone who would have information in her disappearance.

That reward, which totaled five thousand dollars, caught everyone off guard.

Now that struck us as a bit odd because usually those rewards are put out when there's a crime that has occurred.

Reporters saw it as a sign that police no longer believe Sarah took off to Canada or her own life.

And it was the first indication to us that maybe something the faarius had happened here.

And then seven weeks after Sarah's disappearance, detectives got a mysterious lead from someone who went to high school with Sarah.

Police father got information of a gentleman by the Marathony Curry.

Okay, let's talk about Anthony Curry. Like Sarah, he was nineteen years old and liked the arts at the time. He considered himself to be an aspiring horror movie maker and sort of looked the part. He was tall, with long, dark hair, wore dark clothing, and smoked cigarettes, but he wasn't exactly a loner. In high school, he was named most likely to become famous.

Mister Curry met with detectives of the case and told them an incredible story.

Incredible is an understatement. Anthony Curry told detectives about a bizarre conversation he had with a longtime friend about movies. This friend floated a movie idea past Anthony that involved robbing and killing someone.

A scenario of parking a vehicle on the bridge, making hear that somebody committed suicide by jumping off the bridge into the water.

This so called movie plot sounded all too familiar to detectives.

It was a detail by detail description of what had happened to Sarah.

Star, making things even more bizarre. This conversation with Anthony Curry happened on Thanksgiving twenty sixteen, just days before Sarah Stern went missing.

Anthony came up with information that only somebody involved in the crime would know.

And this person who shared this movie idea with Anthony, well, he was also no stranger to Sarah.

It was a friend of Sarah's, Liam mcintazie.

I know a lot has happened, so let's take a moment to reset. A week before Sarah disappeared, Anthony Curry alleges that Sarah's good friend, her best friend, Liam shared his idea for a movie about a young woman who was robbed, murdered, and then thrown off a bridge while her car was left on a bridge to appear like she took her own life. Things are getting really weird here, so just.

The whole concept is beyond comprehension.

And Anthony said he never thought about this conversation after it happened, that is, until he read about Sarah's mysterious disappearance.

Mister Curry came forward too law enforcement because mister mcintassie continued to reach out for mister Curry.

Leah mcintazzne told Anthony it was urgent they meet up, which is what caused Anthony to go to the cops. But again, Liam was one of Sarah's oldest and best and most devoted friends. Could he actually be involved in Sarah's disappearance? Was this just some sort of weird coincidence, or had Sarah and Liamp cooked up some sort of plan.

This is just so off the choice that nobody knows what happened.

So the police came up with a plan to learn the truth, and it involves some serious work on the part of Anthony Curry. If he could pull this off, it would make him famous for reasons no one in his high school could have ever imagined. A week before nineteen year old Sarah Stern went missing in December twenty sixteen, Leamcatazzne told his friend Anthony Curry an idea for a movie. In this movie, a young woman is robbed and killed. Her body is then thrown off a bridge, all to

To the cops, so they wired mister Curry up.

Edward Kirshenbaum worked for the Neptune City Police Department, and a plan.

Was put in placed by the investigative team for a meet between Liam mctazzie and Anthony Curry, with law enforcement wiring mister Curry and monitoring with audio and video the conversation that would take place.

On January thirty first, twenty seventeen, seven weeks after Sarah Stearn's disappearance, Anthony Curry met Liam mcintasney in his car. The police listened from a safe distance in hopes of learning whether Liam's idea for a movie was actually his plan to murder Sarah.

Don't he don't put you on to hide from the cops. Dude, you can't blame me for doing this, right. I got a few y real quick, right right.

Off the bat. Liam Mcatazsney amped up the drama. He was nervous and asked to pat down Anthony Curry in case he was wearing a wire.

No disrespect.

I'll show you no disrespect, okay.

Liam's pat down of Anthony didn't reveal anything because the police didn't wire him up. They wired up his car, so Liam had no idea their conversation was being recorded.

I got the FBI on my ass. Dude, what are they questioning? Oh yeah, a lot? Well what killing there?

The FBI was not involved in the investigation, So what was Liam talking about? Was this another page from his script? Was this all again to him? And then police heard this?

I did something really dumb.

Then I planned it out half a year and the worst part is we threw off the bridge and the body never showed up.

Well that was pretty shocking, and who is we? Then Liam shared what happened the afternoon before Sarah disappeared.

I'm hanging out with her. We went to the bank. She took some money out, not all for money.

Liam said. After Sarah took seven thousand dollars out of her safe deposit box, the two went back to Sarah's and that's when Liam put his plan into action.

We're counting out and then she goes to walk out the front door.

I choked her out, like I just I picked her up.

And had her just like dangling off the ground, and she just herself said my name, and then that was it. And her dog laid there and watched as I killed her. Didn't do anything.

That's really hard to hear and makes my stomach drop. Such a sad ending to Sarah's life and the police could not believe what they were hearing. Sarah Stearn's friend and neighbor, Liam mcintosney, very nonchalantly described how he killed Sarah with his own two hands.

She was just laying there, having a seizure or something.

I got a shirt and I just shoved it down her throat so she wouldn't throw up her anything, and held my finger over her nose.

And it took me like a half an hour.

It's really hard to listen to this because he is so cold, But Liam went on. He said he ran out of time. He had to be at work at five pm, so he dragged Sarah's body to the bathroom and left her there. And that's where Liam's accomplice comes into the story. His roommate, Preston Taylor. According to Liam, Preston was in on the plan. They had actually been planning to rob and kill Sarah for six months.

You are the only person on the planet that not besides Preston, and Preston doesn't know.

That you know.

So if what he is saying is true, then while Liam was at work, Preston entered Sarah's house through her back door and then moved her body to a bushy area in the backyard.

I get off work, Donn Preston, and I go over to her house. Then we take her body out of the bushes and drag it over to her back fence, and I crawl get into her car and I back up. She had There's a security camera across the street, so I had to back I had to act like her. I watched her. Every time she backed out, she does the same thing. So I backed out exactly like she did and drove off.

Liam still hasn't said anything that establishes a clear motive. His story is so brutal and so nonchalant at the same time, it's hard to believe it's true. And then there's another thing. Somehow Liam dodged the security cameras, which wasn't easy considering where he put the body.

Put her in the passenger seat of her own car.

With a seatbelt around. Sarah's dead body in the passenger seat of her own car, Liam said he drove to the bridge over the Shark River.

I go up, open the door on hooker, pull her out, start dragging her to throw her over, and then cars start coming up.

I seeing like headlights coming.

I try to get her over and I can't my leg up like so now I'm limping my legs up and there's three cars coming up.

Liam said he freaked out and dragged Sarah's body back to the car, pushing her into the passenger seat and signaling to his roommate pressed in for help. From the way he described it, Liam did all of this with no regard for Sarah. It was it's like she was no longer a person, but just an object, no longer his best friend, just a thing.

The two of us throw the body over and then we're out. This is the thing about there's so much you can't account for. You don't know until it happens.

Liam then explained how he and Preston stole a safe from Sarah along with that money Sarah took out from her safe deposit box.

That's not even the worst part. The worst part of it is I thought I was walking out fifty grand, one hundred grand in my pocket. She only had ten grand and this money I don't know if it was birth or something.

It's old money, terrible quality.

That's the worst part. He's upset about the money. Well, if you remember those twenty and fifty dollars bills looked old and beaten up, which upset Liam.

I don't even know if I can put any of it.

In the ban out this sickening discussion with Liam, Anthony Curry kept repeating, it's like a movie. It's like a movie, man, and Liam agreed, to.

Your life, you might as well make it. What are you gonna list on? Foreign ass life?

That's when Liam said he needed to go and exited the car. But then seconds later Liam turned around and ran back to Anthony's car. Liam knocked on Anthony's window and looked worried.

There he there, got ahead, everything got They're there.

Liam found his keys in Anthony's car, grabbed them and left. Anthony exhaled, lit up another cigarette, and drove back home, wondering how on earth this horror movie plot Liam shared with him on Thanksgiving may have turned into a real life murder. As for the detective, they also tried to process what they heard.

It was a detailed accounting of what he, along with President Taylor did to Sarah start Ed.

Kirshenbaum of the Neptune City Police Department was shocked not just at what Liam said, but how he said it.

It was a chilling account with no remorse, no emotion.

With Liam mctasne on tape detailing what he did to Sarah Stearn. You would think there would have been enough evidence to charge him with murder, but this story was far from over.

They spotted somebody but looked like Sarah.

I got a good look right in her face, stared right into her eyes.

Away and looking at you right now, and she turned her head duck down an alleyway. I said, I don't know what that is, but that girl did not.

Want to be seen. I just you know, I was beside myself.

I had never seen anything like that. As a reporter covering crime for many years.

I'm Sloane Glass. Join me for part two of BFFs, the Disappearance of Sarah Stern, as we learn what really happened in the small beach town of Neptune City. That's next time on American Homicide. You can contact the American Homicide team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. That's American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com. American Homicide is hosted and written by me Sloane Glass and is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of