Pattern of Life

doesn't go to the news. That's actually what I feel like happen. But we'll see how it goes. I'll keep an open mind. How you feeling, Mike, I feel I feel not hopeful about them sharing information, but I think it will be important to to ask him the questions that we're going to ask, just to get the reaction from them, and also to press them and make them understand that we know more than what they think we know. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone, Mike, our producer,

Gabby and I are at the l RPD station. We're waiting to see Bruce Maxwell, the new detective on Ebbie's case. He agreed to meet with us, but he said, we can't record him. He's made it clear that he does not want to be in this podcast. He told us that he took the case over about a month ago, but he says he hasn't really done anything yet because he's had COVID. During the meeting, Bruce expressed and frustration at the massive amount of data that he's had to

go through. The only thing he would say is that anything after the twenty sixth of October is bs. He wouldn't really elaborate, but he said, I will tell you that, and you figure out why I think that, and we'll let you know. Welcome to Arkansas, like I. So it was interesting because, as so many meetings with the police do here, it starts with them telling you they can't tell you anything and then ends with them telling you things. So here's what I got. Bruce got the case September

of this year. Bruce caught COVID. He had nothing to say about the case in the beginning, said it would be irresponsible to discuss in the beginning right. He did specifically say that anything after the twenty six was bullshit. I proceeded to ask him about cell phone tower data. He said at first that they had it all, but

then he said, well he really wasn't sure. What I thought was interesting, though, is that, like a lot of people, he seems to just sort of stick with that line of the FBI has already done everything, But then it kind of goes to, well, I'm pretty sure they've done everything. So it's like, if you actually don't know something's been done, why wouldn't you right right, It's just it's this sort

of just well, it's been done. It's almost more important to insist that the box has been ticked, rather than like check and see if it's actually been done. It's it's weird. He also said he's currently starting from scratch, so it is December eighth today. He's not going to look at any of the notes. He's going to do all his cell tower data, which will take for one person. That could take him three to six more months for

one person to do it individually. If you're not doing that every day, because he has other casework and receive phone calls about other cases that's going on, you know, while while he's in there, So he's not dedicating a team to this at all. He's taking all of this on him himself. I think we're just gonna have to do it ourselves. But it was important to go in there. I would say, it's not adversarial like at least he you know, he was very friendly. He was friendly and polite.

And I told you what I said. We're gonna go in there and it's gonna be like I guarantee you it's gonna be that kind of thing where it's like, well, I better do this. Just to you know, yesterday there was a conversation that took place between the chief and him and he was like, I'm getting calls some Laurie, so can you just sit down with them and just you know, And that's exactly what happened. So that's my

interpretation of what just took place. So the whole time that I've been investigating Ebbie's death, one issue we have is that the police have this timeline information, but we don't know what that information is. But what was conveyed to us by the LRPD and by former Detective Tommy Hudson is that the police do know Ebbie's whereabouts through

Sunday and they know who she was with. We have found those people that were with her after the Friday night Insiday and I can track her all the way to early Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon when she talked to Trevor, which she was the last person she talked to. And you know these guys that I talked to over night, I mean, they are some shady guys. According to Laurie and Ebbie's stepdad Michael, the police have told them multiple times that they knew where Ebbie was on Saturday night.

They've said she was quote safe, unharmed, and with friends. And Tommy kept saying she never met a stranger. She didn't meet a stranger. If she met one person for five minutes, she was meeting that person again, you know, several hours later and again especially if they're gonna, you know, do drugs or something like that. I mean, she was very transient. She didn't know a stranger. And I'm not trying to say she was making poor decisions because she's

a teenage girl. I mean a teenage boys make poor decisions sometimes. But you know, I don't think she was ever apprehensive who she met or anything like that. And you know, didn't other's people out there that could hurt you or do bad things. And you know, I'm not saying these are the guys that did it. But it's just these guys have been and some of the guys

are still on my radar as a today. This whole time, we've had no idea what was happening with Ebbie from the Saturday when she was with her grandparents to Sunday when she had that phone call with Trevor. But now we know that she was in contact with at least one more person. His name is Eric. Hello, Oh hey, Eric, thanks for calling back. Eric went to Central High School. He was on the football team, and everyone I talked to says that Eric is a nice guy. He was

someone who adored Ebbi. Laurie said that she believed Eric was totally in love with her daughter and devoted to her. I don't know if I ever told her I loved her, got the chance to tell her, you know, but like

I had loved her. We knew we liked each other, and that's why we liked told each other like I'm always be there for you, Like we had being through a lot already together, so we would just you know, I had to understand it, and like we give out at each other, but you know, we still cared about each other. We still wanted each other to be okay. Eric and Ebbie met shortly after Ebbie started at Central High School in August twenty fifteen. They had a pre

calculus class together. Eric said he was good at math and he would help Ebby with her homework. At first, he says, they started hanging out through friends in a group that included his sister, a girl named Carly, and another their girl named Mary. Eric had just come out of a long relationship, and at one point Ebbie had been dating his cousin. But soon Ebbie and Eric started hanging out one on one. Ebby had texting me about something I can't remember, but then she ended up coming

over that we ended up going and smoking. I just remember that being like one of the firsure real times we hung out without, you know, everybody, because I wasn't even thinking about relationships, and at that time that was like right in the middle of football season, so it

actually didn't kind of do come naturally. And then you guys were I mean, would you were you just kind of hanging out or were your boyfriend girlfriend or so we like when we first started talking, we you know, we're trying to make it that but we were both and we both like we're stilled talking to other people. But what happened was the real reason why we never really started dating like Ebbie. Like I said, Ebbie was you know, free spirits, so she would just do with anything,

go hang out, you know, with anybody. When I was talking Eric, he also told me about Chalamont Park. This whole time, no one has been able to tell me why Ebbie was at that park specifically. Eric said that Ebbie loved hanging out in Chelmont Park. In fact, he said she considered it her happy place. He has memories of going there with her, pushing her on the carousel and hanging out in the little playground area. Eric said that high school kids would sometimes hang out in that park.

They would kick back, have a few drinks, or maybe do drugs or hook up. It was considered a safe place somewhere where you could have some privacy. You said that when y'all were hanging out, I mean people would like hang out and drink and things like that, but you never saw anyone like in the man hole doing stuff like there's not even something that it was disgusting. Is not something that you know, people want to do.

Eric also said that he knew Ebbie did hang out there with other people, people he didn't no, and people he says that sometimes did drugs with her. You know, I wish I would have talked to her more about in essence, because then I maybe would know, you know, some names to give, but I, like, I wouldn't want to know who she was, you know who else. But we were telling every like, you can't keep hanging out with, you know, random people. She was just ways she wasn't

as cautious that she should have been. But you shouldn't even live like cautiously, so I can't even necessarily really blame her. And during this time, Eric saw Abby doing increasingly risky behavior, like one time he said she wanted to get a tattoo, but she wasn't going to a tattoo shop. And this was one of the only time she ever asked me to go somewhere, like actually go somewhere with her, like usually it's just to hang out. Oh,

let's find something to do. I think it was because like the way to little set of lay Duty, he was a dude. He was chilling on the couch when we walked in this house, and then there was an a k pourt. He said it on the table, and that's the whole time. I told her, I like, you don't need to be in places like that. And then we went to the back room or whatever it is that looked like he probably was on crack ten years ago with a Jackie tattooed and they were doing tattoos.

Eric was on the football team, so he was friends with c and with l. They weren't people who, to his knowledge, were caught up in violence or in drugs. He did say they might smoke some pot or drink. Basically, he described them as pretty much normal high school kids. The week before the party, Eric and Ebbie weren't really talking. Eric said that one of their friends lied to Ebby about Eric cooking up with someone else, so the two of them seemed to try to get back at each other.

Eric thinks that that's part of the reason why Ebbie went to hang out with CNL that night. But after the party, Eric got a DM from Ebbie. She DMI saying that something happened to whatever, and I'm pretty sure in the DMOR she said, you know, she was raped to say should be at and I think I was asking her questions, but she didn't really want to talk about it. I will now say I just come over.

She was stressed out, she was being a destroyer. Eric comforted her, but at this point he didn't know where she had been or who she'd been with. She slept in Eric's sister's bed. They had breakfast together in the morning, and then he says that he believed she was determined to talk to her family and possibly go to the

police about the alleged sexual assault. He says he can't remember if they sent any more texts on Saturday, but according to what we have from police, Ebbie sent Eric an Instagram message on Saturday night at around six forty five pm, and in that message, she said she was

still at Moppy's house. Moppy was Ebbie's nickname for her grandmother, and Detective Bruce Maxwell said in an email to Laurie that Ebbie had had no contact with anyone from Saturday evening when she sent the DMS to Eric, until Sunday when she called Trevor. But Eric tells us that is not true. We'll be right back. On Sunday, Eric got a call from Ebbie's brother, Trevor. Trevor told him that they couldn't find Ebby, and he asked if he'd seen her. I lived in a high rise condo, came in, I

would rather call me. I was in the lobby when he called me, like our kind of crows, Like I never moved until until I actually talked to her. This means that Eric also talked to Ebby on Sunday. He can't remember if she called him back or if he finally got through to her, but he does remember what happened after she picked up. It's something that has haunted him for years. Do you remember the very last time

you talked to her on Sunday? It was either right before I'm almost positives, right before she talked to her brother, And what did she say? What was she like? Then? She wasn't really good at as I was trying to see where she was, and she didn't tell me anything that I could actually help. She said, I'm sorry. A

couple of times. It was weird, like I never heard a voice sound like that, Like I said, like, you know, she would go crazy places like I've never seen or scared, you know, like I've even heard of a cry, but like that was a different, like just was scared. Ebbie sounded totally out of it, like she had been roofied. Eric said that in the past he had seen Ebbie smoke pot or maybe do some party drugs sometimes like

molly or coke, but never meth or heroine. He said that he had no idea what would make her sound like this. The way she sounded that she sounded exhausted, She sounded like out of it. She sounded like in cohering like she didn't really like she might not have

like she knew where she was, but she couldn't. Either she knew where she was and she couldn't like explain it, or she just like was so out of it that she didn't eve she might not even know where she was at that point, like she was just like that far gone. Eric was focused, he says, on putting Ebby in touch with her brother. I knew something was wrong, but I thought he was gonna be Aby's gonna have to go to rehab. Once Ebby was in touch with Trevor, Eric said he kind of relaxed at this point. He

thought Ebby would get the help she needed. She's at a load right now. She needs, you know, actually helps. She needs somebody that's gonna be able to take her to somewhere where she can, you know, get the help she you know, it's the same like that's happened before, Like Eby has somebody stressed out and going to get in contact with her Emby because if you know, her faults don't work. So Eric just mentioned that her phones

don't work sometimes. That's phones plural. Laurie also forwarded me a photo of some stuff from the front seat of Ebbie's car. It's blurry, but it looks like a receipt for a Straight Talk phone number. All of the records we have are from Ebbie's primary phone, the one her parents paid for. Could Ebbie have had a second phone and was it ever found? I talk a lot about victimology,

trying to get inside a victim's head. On Saturday, October twenty fourth, the day after the party, Ebbie sent that text to her friend Gage to say that she had been recorded without her consent. She ended that text with the line I'm going to go kill myself. So we do have to consider the possibility that she may have

been in a suicidal state of mind. According to Eric, Ebbie was upset about what had been happening in her life, all the chaos and about what happened to her on Friday night, You don't think she would have had suicidal thoughts or anything like that. I mean, honestly, like, I'm not gonna you know, it passed her just because of the way life was going, Like me and her weren't

the best, her mom and her mom and stepdad. You know, she felt like they didn't want hurt everything that was going on at school, and then after the video situation and her probably feeling like the police weren't gonna do nothing because I mean, I'm not saying and she wouldn't against suicide. Like that's enough to make anybody, you know, had thoughts. But I don't think that's the type of

person Ebbie was. Like, she was a fighter for sure, Like and that's the whole reason she didn't go back home, because she felt like she could do it on her own. You know. Yeah, even if she was, let's say, I don't believe she did have suicide thoughts of that day. But even if she did, how does that explain her being in a pipe? It doesn't. That's that's where the disconnected is. That's why I'm almost positive that it wasn't

just hurt by herself. Looking at Ebbie's movements on Saturday and into Sunday, nothing there indicates a person who's contemplating suicide. Later that Saturday afternoon, after Ebbie had sent that text to Gauge, Ebby's despair had turned to anger. She googled sexual assault Anne how to file a police report. Her phone records show that she dialed the Little Rock Police Department, and her close friends and family say they didn't see

anything off about her behavior. Ebbie went to Danielle's house at some point, and Danielle has said that she didn't seem to be in distress, and we also know her grandparents didn't see anything out of the ordinary with her behavior, and even into Sunday when she talked to Trevor, she was not expressing any kind of suicidal thoughts. She was asking for help. We'll be right back. Since we started our investigation, I haven't had any more direct contact with

the detective Bruce Maxwell. That meeting we had was in December twenty twenty one. This episode comes out April twenty twenty two, and Laurie just called me with updates from Bruce's investigation. And when Laurie told me about what's been going on. I was shocked. I called up Mike and Gabby to give them the latest updates. So, Katherine, can you give us some updates about like what's going on

with me? Yeah? Well, you remember when we saw Bruce a few weeks ago and he said that he hadn't even really started looking at Ebbie's case, he'd only had it for a few weeks. Well, since then, there's been a lot of back and forth between Bruce and Laurie. Laurie says Bruce told her that the timeline was completely wrong, that all this time, for six and a half years, the police thought they knew where Ebbie was on Saturday night.

And you remember, they've been telling us this whole time that she was safe and with friends, and they had that time accounted for, and that the only time they didn't know where she was was on Sunday, shortly around the time before she went missing. But now Bruce is saying that he's seen some pictures on Ebbie's phone that he says, I've never been looked at. He says the timeline is off by a whole day, that in fact, police don't know where she was on Saturday night, and

she sent an Instagram message from her grandparents. She was dming on Saturday afternoon, and after that they have no idea where she was until the phone call with Trevor. That's huge, But then it got a little weird because at that point I really expected Bruce to say, Okay, we have the timeline wrong. We're now going to go

reinterview everyone. We're going to start from scratch. But instead what happened was shortly after that, he told Laurie that the only conclusion he could come to was that Ebbie had crawled down in the dream pipe herself, either because she was having some sort of suicidal thoughts or because she just crawled down there and got stuck, and that is his conclusion. He said also that there is no more work to be done on her case file, but

he won't close the case officially. Well, when you close the case, then that opened the door to look at all of this information. It's the worst possible outcome for the family because what it means is they won't officially close it. They're keeping it officially an open and active investigation. I'm using air quotes now, which means that no one can look at it. It's all confidential, but it's just sitting there collecting dust. So that's a terrible outcome for

our family. Laurie tells me she's devastated. She feels like six and a half years later, she's back at square one. How can they be closing the case file, especially if they have so much data they need to review and to redo the entire timeline. I've said before in past seasons that while it can be frustrating to have zero access to the case files, the positive side of that is the fact that we know that everything we do have we've verified ourselves. But I keep feeling like with

Ebbie's case, we're missing something. It feels like the scene at the end of the movie The Usual Suspects, after the detective has been listening to Kevin space he taught for hours. He steps back from that courtboard and realizes he was being misled from the very beginning. It feels like the pieces are all here, but we just can't quite put them together in the right order yet. So I go back again to the very beginning of the case.

What did we know then? We had heard the media narrative about Friday Night, which we now know was wrong because there weren't four guys who would have had a motive to do Ebby harm. There was one person who Ebby was having a dispute with. What about the crime scene. We've always heard that the security guard was the first person who reported Ebbie's card to the police, and that he called the police on multiple days, but there seems

to be some confusion about this. The neighbor Lee said she told the security guard about the car after noticing it in the parking lot for several days in a row. He told her money and others that he had called the police several times about that car. I've done several freedom of information requests with a Little Rock police. Not surprisingly, they tell me the case is an open investigation and that they can't release any information. Then I get an email from the LRPD, and when I open it, I

am stunned. They were able to release the original incident report that relates to Ebby's abandoned car. This was before it became an official missing person's case. The incident report is from Friday, October thirtieth, five days after Ebbie went missing. The person who's listing as reported Ebby's abandoned car is Lee. The neighbor, not the security guard. Why would he tell people that he reported the car missing if he didn't.

Why isn't he all over this incident report. Part of our investigation is figuring out Ebbie's pattern of life to the best of our ability, trying to figure out where she was every hour over the weekend until Sunday when she dropped off the radar. But we also need to look at the people who were around her and around Chalamont Park and figure out their patterns of life, because the evidence points to the person who put Ebbie in that drain pipe being someone who knows this area intimately.

And besides the incident report, the security guard has given even more conflicting information and we need to figure out why his stories don't match. 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 Doubt. Our executive producers are 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 Ebby Steppic. You can call our tipline at six seven eight six three two six one five nine School of Humans, School of Humans,