The Little Rock Girl

synonymous with the town itself. In Little Rock, Arkansas, that name is Ebbie Jane Steppack. It seems like everyone in Arkansas knows Ebbie Steppeck. They know that Ebbie was eighteen years old when she vanished without a trace. They know that her case has been one of the most extensively covered cold cases ever in Arkansas. Maybe they've seen her high school portrait or the missing posters that have papered the city streets and been all over social media since

Ebie disappeared in twenty fifteen. And yet, even though Ebbie is everywhere, so much of her life and her case remain a mystery. What really happened to Ebbie Steppick. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is hell and gone. You just you just go straight. It's out's up here on the right, and I'm back in Arkansas. This time I'm in Little Rock. My producer, Gabby is driving us to our first stop of the day. I had a lot of weird dreams last night about men surrounding our car, so hopefully that

won't happen. But yeah, So this is our first day on the case. We're going to be meeting with Ebbie Steppeck's mom. I've been in contact with Ebbie's mom, Laurie for a few months now. She's walked me through the case, what's missing and what they don't know. She's also been telling me a lot about Ebby in many ways, Ebbie Steppeck was a typical teenager. She was living in West Little Rock with Laurie, her stepdad, Michael, and her younger sister.

Her older brother Trevor lived nearby, so did her maternal grandparents. Both of Ebbie's parents, her mom, Laurie and her dad Peter, were hairstylists, and Ebbie had dreams of going to cosmetology school. She loved doing her hair and switching up styles and colors. She also loved to do her makeup. Ebbie's friends and families say that as she grew up, she developed a strong personality. She was fiercely loyal, she loved to make

everyone laugh, and she loved to entertain. Like a lot of teens, she was a child of divorce, and she was dealing with the conflicts that come with being part of a blended family. Ebbie was eighteen years old. She was at a crossroads, deciding who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do with her life. Loved and just make sure we're right on the rightway. Okay, So we take a left here, and then we take a right, and then it's really close. I've been a

Little Rock a lot. I was actually born in Little Rock, and I grew up just a few miles from here in the southern part of the state. While working on previous seasons of the podcast, it seemed like I was always driving through Little Rock for one reason or another. It's also where the Arkansas State Police and the Little Rock Police Department are based. Little Rock is divided by

several highways. Interstate thirty divides north and south, Interstate four thirty and six thirty divide east and west, and basically anything west of Interstate four thirty is considered West Little Rock and it's an area that has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. Cantrell Road and Channell Parkway are the major roads that run through this part of town. It's full of affluent neighborhoods with names like Brody Creek, Woodland's Edge, and the Channel Valley. Channell Valley is where

Ebby's family lives. It looks a little like the Ozarks. I mean, there are kind of rolling hills, there are a lot of trees. It's got almost like a semi rural feel in this part of West Little Rock. There are a lot of little gated communities and lakes. In general, it's very safe, very friendly, nice area. We arrive at Laurie's, so you turn into this little subdivision and it's basically it's just a planned little community. Really nice houses, nice yards.

They're set, they're close to each other. They look like they're all kind of a similar architectural style. Hi, how are you. Hi's our producer. Hello, thank you. She listens to sounds. I don't want to I want to worry about hi talking, So y'all come on here. Laurie and her family have moved since we went missing, but they still live in the same general area. The house is gorgeous, with white walls, big overstuffed sofas, and while we're there,

it's beautifully decorated for the holidays. In Ebbie's senior picture, she looks exactly like her mom, Laurie. Both are petite and blonde. Laurie says they were alike in personality too. The personality traits they shared made them super close, but it also meant that as Ebbie grew up and became a teenager, they clashed. Ebbie's the strongest filled person that I know, other than myself. We are both so stubborn. That is our biggest defective character, but it's also our

strongest thing we have going for us too. Like a lot of teens, Ebbie was rebellious. She was, also, according to her friends and family, a combination of naive and fierce. She would do anything for a friend in need. She would also not shy away from speaking out for people she believed were being wronged, Like in her junior year of high school, she defended a classmate who was wrongly incarcerated after a gun was found in his car in

the school parking lot. Ebbie rallied her classmates and wrote letters to help the young man get his name cleared. In the summer of twenty fifteen, after her junior year of high school, Ebbie's independent street kicked into high gear. She started working first at Playtime Pizza, then at the footlocker store in McCay Mall, which was a few miles away in north Little Rock. She started arguing more and

more with her stepdad and her mom. Soon she was hanging out with a new set of friends, friends that her parents and her old friends didn't know. Ebbie had been attending a private Magnet school called Lisa Academy for several years. The school was and according to some of her fellow students, it was a fairly sheltered environment. But that summer, Ebbie told her parents that she planned to transfer to Little Rock Central High School for her senior year.

Central High was a flashpoint in the civil rights movement. You may recognize it from the famous case of the Arkansas Nine. As a large public school, at Central, it was easier for Ebby to get lost in the crowd. She started skipping school, staying out late, and defying her parents. More and more frustrated, Michael and Laurie laid down the law. They told Ebbie that if she couldn't follow their rules, she couldn't live under their roof. So Ebby made the

decision to move out. Ebbie started CouchSurfing. She would stay with her brother, Trevor or sometimes were their grandparents or one of her girlfriends. Talking to Laurie, it's obvious that this was a heartbreaking decision for she and her husband to make, but it's one that they stuck with because they were worried that Ebbie was going off the rails. They wanted to help her get back on the right track. She told Trevor she was tired. She was tired of

living the way she was living. She'd seen more things than she ever wanted to see again. He was talking to her about not necessarily coming back home, but letting Michael help her, letting us help her to get her ged, get in beauty school, as getting her an apartment, helping her just get her life going. Trevor and Michael were talking there was gonna be a conversation that they were going to sit down and talk to Ebbie and say, hey, we're gonna help you get your life back, and she was.

She said she was really ready to stop. During this time, one of the friends Ebbie was staying with was Danielle. Hello, Hey, is this Danielle. Yes, Hey, it's Catherine Townsend. Hey. I talked to Danielle on the phone about what Ebbie's life was like during this time. First, I just wanted to ask, can you tell me how you met her and what she was like? Yeah? So, well, I had known her.

Danielle was one of Ebbie's best friends. She talked about how when she met Ebbie, they didn't like each other at first, probably because, as Danielle explained, they both liked the same guy. It was nothing serious, she said, just your typical teenage drama. They became friends a few months later. I reached out to her via social media and I just said, hey, I just want to apologize, you know, for being the way that I was during said situation, and I would really like it if we could be friends.

And she apologized back, and so anyways, that was the beginning of us becoming friends. I mean, as far as her personality, you know, she she had a very strong personality. She came off one way, but like I think she kind of did it to sort of intimidate people, like I'm not one to be played with. Once we got past that, I mean, she was so sweet to me, and you know, we would hang out all the time and we really just we enjoyed doing anything. That pretty

much got both of us out of the house. Danielle never knew why Ebby decided to transfer from Lisa Academy to Central High School, but she also didn't know a lot of what Ebby was up to in the weeks before she disappeared. After Ebbie left home, she was always on the road in her Volkeswagon Pacade. On Tuesday, October twentieth, twenty fifteen, Ebbie sent a message to Danielle on Snapchat. The message read, Hey, I know this is a lot to ask, but is there any way your mom would

let me stay the night tonight. Danielle wrote back that that was fine. She told Ebbie to come on over for dinner. You know, she would come here and there would be some night she'd be like, well, I'm gonna go home for the night, you know. Of course, I never really know she actually went home, or if she went somewhere else, But I know for sure there were at least a couple of nights when she said, well, I'm going to go to a friend's house and then

I'll come back, and she just wouldn't come back. I know there were several days when she would like skip school, just wouldn't go. But you know, of course, again that was one of the situations where I didn't know where she went, or who she was with or anything like that. On Wednesday, October twenty one, Danielle and Ebbie went together to an event at a local church. They went home afterward, and Ebbie spent Wednesday and Thursday nights at Danielle's house.

On Friday, October twenty three, Ebbie told Danielle that she was going to a party. She asked Danielle if she wanted to go with her, but Danielle said she didn't know anyone who was going to be there, so she declined, and something happened at that party, something that would change the course of Ebbie's life. For several years, every time you would see a news story about Ebbie Steppit, the same narrative gets reported about what allegedly happened that Friday, night.

The reports say that Ebbie was gang raped by several young men at a party, but that's not what happened. On Friday night, Ebbie went out with a male friend from Central High School. Together, they went over to the home of another Central High School student in Little Rock, and it wasn't really a party. It was just a few friends hanging out. Ebbie, her friend, the friend they

went there to see, and two other guys. We'll never know exactly what happened that night, but piecing together Ebbie's text messages after the fact, it seems like what happened to Ebby may have started out as a consensual sexual encounter with one guy. Then at some point she thought that the person she was having the sexual encounter with was videotaping her without her permission. Ebbie was angry. She texted another one of her friends, a guy named Gage.

The text read, I was hanging with some dudes last night and we smoked and I was having sex with one of them and he fucking recorded me, dude, like when I wasn't looking. There is a black hole of information about what was going on that weekend, and we're working to try to find out what happened. But we do know that Ebby must have made her way back to her brother Trevor's house later on Friday night, because Trevor told Laurie that Ebby was there when he woke

up that Saturday. Now, at this point, Ebbie and her mom, Laurie were still not communicating at all. This was part of their agreement after Ebbie moved out, So the whole time this was playing out, Laurie had no idea what was happening to her daughter after that happened. That was on a Friday night, she came home to Trevor's. He didn't know anything that happened. He called me and asked if Ebbie could stay with me that day, so he had a wedding to go to and didn't want to

leave her home by herself. I said no, If she couldn't come home, that was the deal. And I knew if Ebbie and I saw each other, everything would break, and then she would lie and be gone two days later, and we'd read right back where we started from. Danielle saw Ebbie on Saturday, the day after the party. She said she had no idea that her friend had been through a trauma the night before Saturday I saw her. She came to my mom's house, but she had to leave.

She didn't tell me where she was going. She just told me she had something that she had to take care of and then she would be back. Ebbie never went back to Danielle's and that's the last time that Danielle ever saw her friend. We know that she spent the afternoon at her grandparents' house, just hanging around in her pj's watching her favorite shows. So she went to my mom and dad's all day until at night. She stayed over there, slept, had a great day. My parents

didn't know anything that had happened. On Saturday evening, Laurie and Michael were out to dinner when Laurie started feeling sick, and then Michael got a text from Ebbie. She said, I gotta tell you something, but don't tell mom. I was raped and video taped and I want you to go to the police with me, but I don't want mom to know. And he said, okay, let me get your mom home and then well, you know, we'll figure out a place to meet. She said, okay, he said,

stay put. Michael was focused on getting Marie home and then he says his plan was to meet up with Ebbie so they could go to the police station together. He told her to stay where she was at her grandparents house, but Ebbie didn't stay put. Instead, she told her grandparents that she was going out to meet Michael. When Michael got Laurie home, he tried to get in touch with Ebbie, but she never replied. Eventually, he called her grandparents house, so he was calling my mom to

ask her where she was. She said she didn't know she was going to meet him, and my mom didn't get She wasn't alarmed because Ebbie was real flighty. Anyway, Trevor was at a wedding, so I think that's what Michael was thinking. There's just nothing he could do but wait. To this day, no one in Ebbie's family knows where she went on Saturday night. It's Sunday, October twenty five, twenty fifteen, and it's the day after Ebbie texted her stepdad Michael about wanting to file a sexual assault claim.

Michael had been trying to get in touch with her so they could meet up and make a plan to go to the police, but Ebbie never answered. Now, at this point, Michael says he was concerned, but not panicked. He just assumed that Ebby, like she had many times before, gone back to her brother Trevor's house. Meanwhile, Trevor and Ebbie's sister were calling her all day and not getting

any response. Ebbie was supposed to go to a church event with Danielle, but she didn't show on Sunday afternoon, is when I was at a separate church event and I got a call from her sister and she had asked me like, hey, have you talked to Ebbie? Have you seen her? Because we haven't talked to her or heard from her, And I said no. I said, I can go make sure that she's not at my mom's house, you know, just in case like her phone had died

or something. So I left the event that I was at and went to my mom's house to see if she was there, and she wasn't. So that was kind of once we started to realize, hey, something's up. A few hours later, Danielle got another call from Ebbe's sister. That was when she told me about she had talked to Trevor, and then after that we were just completely in the dark. What she's talking about is this Trevor dialed Ebbie's number at around five thirty on Sunday afternoon.

No one answered, but then just a few minutes later, his phone rang and it was Ebby, and that phone conversation with Trevor would change everything. One of the most heartbreaking parts of this case is the fact that Trevor also passed away in twenty nineteen of a heart attack, so we can't ask him exactly what was said on this phone call. Here's what Laurie remembers. Trevor just runs in the house, bust in the house. Heys like, Mom, Mom, like,

what Something's happened to Ebbie? Something has happened. And I'm like, what what are you talking about? He was like, I was talking to her on the phone. She's somewhere. She's fucked up, she can't talk. She's in her car. She doesn't know where she is or who's with her. But something's happened. We got to find her, call the police. When Trevor comes in and tells me that I can't even describe. I know that something bad is happening. And

Trevor said, Mom, I just talked to her. I said where are you and she said, I'm out in front of your house, and Trevor's like, I hung up, walked outside and she's not there. So I called her bag and I said, Ebbie, you're not out in front of my house. Where are you? And she said, I'm in my car and I'm really fucked up. I don't know who I'm with, I don't know where I am. And even though she had no idea where she was and she was messed up, Ebbie knew that she was in trouble.

That's all that I know that kept going on in the phone conversation. I could never get Trevor to tell me every single word that was said. I wanted to know every single word, and he couldn't tell me every single word. This is how the call with Ebbie ended. He said, Okay, I'm gonna hang up and get Michael to turn your location on your phone. And she said okay, and she hung up, and that's the last that we ever heard from her, and her phone was never answered again.

At this point, Laurie and Trevor are freaking out. Laurie was trying to absorb this. This was the first time that she was hearing that her daughter may have been sexually assaulted and now could be in serious danger and a lot of this is a blur. But Trevor's on the phone with the police. He's like, something's happened to my sister. You've got to do something. You've got to

find her. And the police are like, there's nothing we can do, and he said, then put an all points bulletin out for her car because something has happened to her right now. Somebody's done something to her or was doing something to her. So, according to Laurie, the police said they would put out an all points bulletin on the car. She says after that they didn't do anything. Trevor told Michael to track Ebbie's location on her iPhone.

Michael said that he tried, but Ebbie's location services feature was turned off. Then, Laurie says they tried to report Ebbie missing, but the police told her that she had to wait twelve hours. This is not true, but it is a common misconception that people have and because of that, crucial hours can be lost when someone goes missing. Over the next several days, after Ebbie's phone called Trevor, her

family and friends called everyone they could think of. They papered the area with flyers, Laurie is a hairdresser and some of her clients worked in the media, so that night had her face in car in everything on TV that night. Ebbie was a kid who lived and breathed on social media. Her family scoured her Facebook, her Instagram, and her Snapchat for potential clues. They also looked through Ebbie's phone records. They found out that after that four

minute call with Trevor, all contact with Ebbie stopped. After that, her phone was never answered again. They could also see her last Instagram post. It looks like she's belted into the passenger seat of a car, maybe her car. She's looking into the lens. The caption reads, I Know what you did. On October thirtieth, twenty fifteen, five days after Ebbie went missing, police searched Ebbie's two thousand and three

silver Volkswagen Pasade. It was sitting in the parking lot of Shalamont Park, a small residential park near her home in West Little Rock. La and Michael find out to their horror that Ebby's car has been sitting there in the park since the day she disappeared, and that people in the area had been calling the police for days about an abandoned car. It was called in every day by the security guard by neighbors. Lee was a neighbor who lived very close to the park and regularly took

walks there in the mornings. And Lee is the one who called Laurie to tell her the police had found Ebby's car. And she calls me and says, Laurie, they're up here with Peter with the car. Peter is Ebbie's biological father, and because both Peter's name and Ebbie's name were on the title of the car, police called him

to let him know that the Volkswagen had been found abandoned. So, even though Ebby's family had reported her missing several days earlier, and even though there were supposed to have been an all points bulletin put out on that car, when police called Peter to tell him that his abandoned car had been found, police had not connected that Volkswagen to Ebby.

They called Peter and said, Peter, we have your car up Peter, and Peter's like, what, Yeah, we have your car up here, and he said, that's my daughter's car. Who's missing. Who's missing. Peter raced over to the park and met police there. This is what they found. Ebby's car was unlocked, the keys were in the ignition, and the car was out of gas, as if it had been left running. All of Ebbie's personal belongings were left in that car, her clothes, her purse, and her phone.

Her makeup, which she usually kept in pristine condition, was broken and scattered everywhere. Laurie knew her daughter, She knew that Ebby's entire life was in that car. She believes Ebby would never have gotten out of that car, walked away and left everything she owned behind, including by the way, her contact lenses, the ones she couldn't see without, and her phone, which she had with her all the time.

It made no sense. Michael and Trevor went to the park to see if they could find any sign of Ebby, but she was gone. And I don't know why she went to the park. We didn't know anything that was going on with her, where she was going. None of her friends knew any of the people she was hanging out with. No one knew anything about who she was around or where she met him. What was Ebby doing in Chalamont Park? Did she go there to meet someone or had someone picked her up there and taken her

somewhere else. Her family said they had no idea. They're open to the possibility that Ebby had been leading a whole other life that they knew nothing about. I'm Catherine Townsend. Is Hell and Gone. Hellan Gone is a production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio. It's written and hosted by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts and Michael dowd Our. Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Else Crowley, and Virginia Prescott. Mix and Master is by Ryan Peoples and

our music is by Bensley. School of Humans