Chalamont Park

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. 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 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

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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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

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 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. 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, 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. 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 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,

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 to get a lot worse. Finally, in June twenty sixteen, the case is handed over to the lrpd's Violent Crimes Unit. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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,