Anatomy of Murder - Hot Air (Cassandra Robinson)

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

The search for a missing young mom would take police into the world of hot air balloons and bees. Once her body was found, those same connections would be pivotal to the investigation.View source material and photos for this episode at: anatomyofmurder.com/hot-airCan’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

Did you kill her? He obviously tells us no. He says she could come back any day. When we asked if she left, was on her own, he responded she is either not coming back because something happened or occurred against her will. We're like, holy cow. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anna Sege Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation

Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. There are some days you mark on the calendar that you look forward to. It might be a wedding, a birthday, or a favorite holiday. Days that bring friends and loved ones together and promise to put a smile on everyone's face. As we probably all know, sometimes those occasions can bring challenges too.

There's all of the anticipation, the build-up, the preparation, and before you know it, the event is over and it's back to the day-to-day, the routine. For others, sometimes these milestones and celebrations can put into focus what's missing in their lives. A happy marriage, a child of their own, or a painful loss. Today's story starts with a birthday and ends in tragedy. And what should have been a day marking new beginnings would come to leave a family broken and lives shattered, including that of a one-year-old baby girl.

My name is Chad Wilhite. I'm with the Pensacola Police Department. I was assigned to the Criminal Investigations Division as a detective. Chad had enjoyed a diverse career within the Pensacola Police Department. And I was assigned to the Criminal Investigations Division as a detective. Chad had enjoyed a diverse career within the Pensacola Police Department. He had risen through the ranks, spent a few years investigating white collar financial crime, and now was a part of a team of detectives

assigned to major crimes. But the case that landed on his desk in June of 2018, it wasn't yet a crime at all. It was a missing person case at that time. And the missing person was a lady by the name of Cassandra Robinson. She had been reported missing by her sister, Carlisa. Carlisa told the reporting officer

that she had not seen her sister for approximately four months. And the last time she had seen her from her would have been on February the 1st of 2018. Which means Cassandra may have been missing for over four months. So you can imagine why her family was overwhelmed with fear and worry that something terrible

had happened to her, and why her case would have been forwarded to detectives in major crimes. Another reason for a concern, Cassandra was a new mother who had left behind a one-year-old baby daughter. Cassandra Robinson was a typical girl her age. She was active on social media. She had worked as a dancer in one of our local clubs.

So she was just a normal stay-at-home person, raising her child, involved with her baby's dad. raising her child, involved with her baby's dad. Cassandra and her daughter Evelyn had been living with the child's father, a man by the name of Henry Steiger, in a middle-class neighborhood in Pensacola called The Avenues. It certainly wasn't an area that Chad and his colleagues would regularly be called out to. The area they were living in, heck, it was, I want to say, like two blocks from the fire department. So it was a nice little area, nice house.

It was one of Chad's colleagues who first spoke to the father of that child, Henry Steiger, a man that was 28 years Cassandra senior. Top of his list of questions, when did you last see the mother of your child? Detective Galloway spoke to Henry on the phone, I believe it was June 11th. Henry told Detective Galloway that on February the 1st, which would have been the one

year birthday of their daughter Evelyn, after the birthday party, Cassandra left in their BMW and she left with some bags. Henry said I went to bed. She didn come back. And when he woke up, somehow the vehicle and the keys were back at the house and Cassandra was gone. And he hadn't seen from her seen or heard from her since February the first. Now, according to her sister, Cassandra had faced some challenges in her short life. She was just 25 years old, but had struggled at times with her mental health. And that had played a part in the delay in raising the alarm because it wasn't the first time that Cassandra had gone off the radar for a bit. But this time, it felt different.

And that had everything to do with Cassandra's precious new baby girl. She could not imagine a scenario where Cassandra would have ever left her daughter behind. Now, according to his statement to detectives, Henry was less surprised. The couple had never been married, and in fact, Henry was not even listed as the father of the baby on the birth certificate. And this had been the source of some friction in their relationship in the past. Henry told Detective Galloway that she had made statements in the past

that when Evelyn turned one years old, she'd be leaving. So had Cassandra made good on her promise? Had she really made a plan to celebrate her daughter's first birthday and then leave both Henry and their daughter behind? It was a possibility that detectives had to consider. Is she just tired and want to go away?

Or she was just fed up with life and needed a break? She suffered from some mental health issues in the past. Maybe she went and got herself checked in and didn't tell no one. But there was also the possibility that Cassandra's sudden departure was not a case of abandonment, but one of escape.

That's because according to her sister, Cassandra's relationship had been more than just rocky. It had at times become violent. According to her, it was a somewhat volatile relationship at one point. According to Carlyssa, Henry had beaten Cassandra up pretty good in the past, but she would never report it to law enforcement or to anyone that could help her get out of the situation she was in. A friend of Cassandra's had a similar story to tell of Cassandra making plans to move on and away from Henry.

Detective Galloway had interviewed one of Cassandra's friends. Henry had been messing around in their relationship. So she was gonna pack her and Evelyn's stuff and they were gonna go live in her grandma's house. It's a decision that sadly many women, mothers, and people are forced to make every day, uprooting their lives to escape an unhealthy relationship, putting their mental and physical safety above all else.

But in this situation, one thing really didn't make sense, and that was why would Cassandra have left her daughter behind in the custody of the man she was leaving? If she was really looking for a fresh start, there would be no doubt from her sister and her friends that she would have taken her child with her. And so armed with what they had learned from both Henry, the child's father, and Cassandra's sister and friends, they began their search for the missing woman, a search that started,

like so many do these days, online. Today's world, just like it was five, seven years ago, everybody's glued to their phone and they're glued to social media. Cassandra's sister told police that Cassandra was no different, and checking her social media accounts was typically the best way to keep track of her daily movements. She was able to provide us with obviously a phone number. She was able to provide us with the social media, her favorite social media site, which would have been Facebook and Instagram. So we're able to get usernames and handler names off of those in order to help further along the investigation.

Search warrants focused on Cassandra's preferred social media platforms. platforms. And that's where police noticed the first glaring red flags because despite Cassandra being an active poster in the past, her socials showed no activity since February 1, the day she went missing. In fact, her last post at 622pm was a video of Cassandra holding her young child and singing a video filmed by Henry. Now, to everyone on the outside world, it looked like just a family enjoying a special day.

Checks with her cell carrier showed her mobile phone hadn't been active either. The last known communication was the phone accessing a signal tower besides the interstate close to Pensacola. I-110 is a super long road. It runs from literally the East Coast to the West Coast of to Pensacola. I-110 is a super long road. It runs from literally the east coast to the west coast of the whole United States, but it pinged up there. That was the last place it had pinged.

That mobile phone activity was on February 2nd, the day after the party. Could that be Cassandra making her way out of Pensacola, out of Florida, or something else? For a young girl usually prolific on social media, this sudden change in behavior or what we might call a change in her digital footprint was highly significant. So, Anastasia, as you know, as an investigator,

while you always have to take into consideration that if you're a missing person is intentionally trying to be off the grid, so to speak, it could also involve their social media. So to try to answer that question, you turn to something detectives refer to as proof of life. Start searching for things like credit card usage, which is obviously near the top of that list. Just think about it. On a daily basis, how many establishments you walk into, getting gas in your car, going to the dry cleaners, you're leaving those digital breadcrumbs. So it's much easier to trace that in this day and age.

So I think, Anasiga, a lack of that is a red flag. I think for sure it is. But again, depending on how savvy the person who is now missing is, they might know to just get cash, right? And if we look at Cassandra, of course, like sudden changes are often suspicious, but the specifics of every person's life can be very telling.

And I think you said it just the beginning of what you were talking about there, Scott. Like here she is in a problematic relationship. Maybe she needs an escape. She's a young mother plus the hilly relationship. These are things that sometimes people just need to go. Whether it was because she was overwhelmed or something having to do with any past mental health issues,

we just don't know. But regardless, while there were plausible reasons why Cassandra had left home and maybe stopped using her phone, there was also enough reasons to believe that her sudden disappearance was not of her own volition. And detectives in Pensacola weren't comfortable with the idea that Cassandra had simply left. And while it was still a leap to suspect foul play, and again, remember what Scott said about that proof of life digital footprint?

Here, when they looked at it all, they decided to search the property where Cassandra and Henry had been living to see if there were any clues where she might be. They searched the inside of the house outside of the house. They used ground penetrating radar to make sure that to see if there was anything buried in the backyard that maybe would help solve this mystery. All that was that was done with negative results. Those detectives weren't just looking to rule out the presence of Cassandra's body.

They were seeing if there was any indication of violence, any signs that the scene had been cleaned up or covered up, but they drew a blank. There was no signs of a struggle or blood or anything found inside the residence that would lead us to believe that she was harmed inside the residence. At least physically attacked maybe inside the residence, where she would receive some type of injury.

So what had happened to Cassandra? Chad picked up the case with no active leads, but lots of unanswered questions. There's something going on in her past that we don't know about. Was there people that we don't know about that maybe harmed her? Did Henry harm her? We don't know. So there's a lot of things that were going on or potentially going on that we had to look into. Stepping into a case that's already started, Chad needed to go over all of the basic facts

and to see things for himself. I've seen this multiple times in my career. No matter how good the handover may be, how good the paperwork was filled out, nothing beats going through the facts from the very beginning. We want to start back with an initial interview of the person who has the closest ties to Cassandra, which would be Henry Steiger. Would the father of Cassandra's daughter provide a reasonable rationale for her sudden disappearance?

Or would detectives uncover evidence that the 25-year-old mom was not just missing? She'd been murdered. In the four months since Cassandra Robinson disappeared, Henry and their one-year-old daughter had moved to a new house in Perdido Key about 30 minutes away from the house they shared in February of 2018. The house is on a golf course out by the beach. It is very nice out there. In fact, you got to go through a gate guard to get out there. It's just called a gated community.

The two detectives planned to go in cold, ask a couple of questions, shake the tree a little bit and just see what falls out. Either Henry would be consistent with his story that Cassandra had simply deserted him and her daughter, disappearing without a trace just hours after their daughter's first birthday party, or he'd slip up and give them something to explore. And they had one big advantage. He doesn't know we're coming.

We wanted to have the element of surprise on our side, obviously. Being in law enforcement for 20-something years now, the time was only like 15, but anytime you have the element of surprise, it's gonna be on our side. We don't have time to plan for what he's gonna tell us. We don't have time to leave. But even with the surprise visit

of two Pensacola detectives at his door, Henry was welcoming. Henry's there, along with Evelyn and we talked to Henry for two, two and a half hours. We just have pretty candid conversation with him. But what I thought was weird is Evelyn was one years old, a little over one at this point. Kid could barely walk. He held her literally the entire time. And he would feed, while we were there at Evelyn, Apple Jacks. Apple Jacks are an orange-ish color

and a greenish color cereal. And I can't remember which one it was, but he refused to give her either the green or the orange-ish red one. He'd only give them the same exact color. And it was immediately like, this guy, there's something wrong with this guy. And I'm sure as everyone realizes, having some strange habits isn't a crime,

but there are the kind of details that a detective tends to log just in case it becomes relevant later on in an investigation. He seemed to be willing to want to help, seemed to be somewhat concerned. Obviously, the last place he had seen or heard from her was on February the 1st. He had said that during their conversation that evening, Cassandra said she wanted to go on a well-deserved vacation, but he did not know where she had went. An extended vacation. And the more the two detectives pushed and probed,

the more Henry was able to remember about this impromptu holiday. According to Henry, Cassandra had talked about going to Bermuda and had even borrowed some money from a friend to fund the trip. So we started asking about, well, if she's going on vacation, does she have a passport? How is she going to get in and out of the United States?

I'm assuming you got to have a passport. And he didn't believe she had a passport. Chad's investigator instincts were telling him that something wasn't right. Cassandra taking herself away to Bermuda without her child, without telling her sister, and never returning? It just didn't add up. But more than that was that Henry had never tried to reach out to ask her about her return. Never wondered if anything could have happened to her that would have prevented her from coming home. I asked, have you attempted to contact Cassandra, whether it be through email, text message, phone calls? He said he had not

attempted to contact her because he had not attempted to contact her because he did not want to bother her while she was on her well-deserved vacation. I thought that was very odd. We kind of just put that in the back of our mind and we keep on talking to him. The two detectives asked to take a tour of the house with Henry leading the way.

So he walks us around the house and shows us where their bathroom's at, walks us to a closet. While we're in the closet, Henry points to several suitcases. There's a silver one and a purple one. And he tells us that when Cassandra left, she took the matching suitcases with her to those other two. So we know now we're probably looking for a silver suitcase and a purple suitcase. Now, detectives had already done their background on Henry. He worked, wait for it, as a hot air balloon pilot.

And by the looks of the house, the ballooning business was good. But there was evidence of some financial problems that had attracted the attention of the house, the ballooning business was good. But there was evidence of some financial problems that had attracted the attention of the feds. And it appeared that he was currently on probation and still under investigation. He goes into the story, but it really didn't make sense to us. Henry deflects blame to everybody else except himself.

That is one thing we noticed pretty quick. It's always someone else's fault. It's one thing we noticed pretty quick. It's always somebody else's fault. It's never Henry Steiger's fault. The more time the detective spent with Henry, the more he seemed to have a strange take on his relationship with Cassandra because according to 53 year old Henry, it was never a romantic relationship at all. He at one point referred to himself as acting like a brother figure to her and taking care of her.

I'm thinking to myself, a brother figure? Who the heck sleeps with their sister then and has a baby with them if you're a brother figure? That's crazy. It's another one of those things that we later figure out that I don't know what to believe when it comes out of Henry Steiger's mouth. Henry was calm and collected and seemed to have the answers for all of the detective's questions. But he was prone to the one

thing that is like catnip to a veteran investigator over sharing. We directly asked him, did you kill her? And he obviously tells us no. But he makes a couple of statements that we find very, I want to say troubling, but something that we want to follow up on. In one of them, he says, she could come back any day. She could be in some type of rehab center or she could be in disposed of. It's pretty telling.

And he responded, she is either not coming back because something happened or occurred against her will. We're like, holy cow. After those two statements, I believe Henry harmed her. And now we just got to figure out how he harmed her and where she may be. And again, Scott, that term you always use like BRF, big red flag, if concerned, why not call the police or at least notify her family that he was worried that she wasn't planning to come back. Like something definitely does make you sit up from the second you hear it. You know, when you ask a question like that, normally the answer would be giving reasons

why she would not be dead, right? Maybe she's with a friend and doesn't want to talk to me, or maybe she's incapacitated lying in a hospital bed. Something other, Anastasia, than giving an indication that she may no longer be alive. And again, during this conversation, it is now the end of June 2018, and at this point, Cassandra's been missing for nearly five months. Detectives have strong suspicions that her partner Henry knows much more than he's telling them. But they also still can't discount the idea that she had been planning on leaving Henry and maybe leaving their one-year-old daughter at home.

And that is partly due to one specific text message sent from Cassandra to Henry on the day she disappeared. A text message telling him their relationship was over. There was also internet searches made on Cassandra's phone that indicated she was looking into ways that she could add Henry's name to her daughter's birth certificate to make him financially responsible to care for their child. She was even searching for local hotels and had sent messages asking her friend to send

her $300 via PayPal. In short, she was making plans, maybe plans that she was stopped from carrying out. But his story about a planned vacation, one from which she never returned, just seemed too implausible, especially for the mother of a child that was still nursing. And so with nothing more than a hunch that he was hiding something, Chad took a much deeper look into his suspect's life story in a search of hints that everything was not as it seemed. What we find out is he is involved in a coffee bean roasting business and the two people he's involved in this business with

is a lady by the name of Nadina and a guy by the name of Julian Mazur. Henry refers to Julian as his right-hand man, kind of does everything for him. His driver, his business associate is basically this do-boy. It would probably be a better way to describe Julian. Chad hoped that these two colleagues could help piece together a part of the story, or at least help corroborate Henry's version of events. Chad started with Henry's female colleague. We explained to her why we're there and what we're working.

She states during that interview, it was all around the February 1st or 2nd, she receives a text message from Henry saying, hey, I have a surprise for you. He's like, Okay. So she goes over and picks him up. And lo and behold, Henry's holding this child. Incredibly, Henry had never revealed to his close colleague Nadine that he even had a child. And apparently for a good reason.

The whole child called her off guard because according to Nadina, she believed that her and Henry were in a relationship since about 2013, so about five years. So Henry had revealed to this partner of five years that he was not only having a relationship with another woman, but that he was the father of her child. And keep in mind, this big reveal happened just a day or so after Cassandra had supposedly left him, and immediately Henry was disclosing, with some pride it seems, his daughter to his other girlfriend. Is that because he already knew

Cassandra was never coming back? Nadina couldn't offer any insight into what else may have happened on February 1st. She hadn't known Cassandra even existed, so she couldn't provide any information about her possible whereabouts. But Chad hoped that Henry's other business partner, a man named Julian, might have had more information to share.

Julian confirmed that, yeah, he is a business associate with Steiger and they were involved in this coffee bean business. He described his involvement as the driver. He would drive Henry around town wherever he needed to go and basically he was at his beck and call. If Henry needed something, he would take care of it. So I don't know many hot air balloonists with a coffee business side hustle that require a chauffeur, but nevertheless, this Julian would prove to be a source of some critical information, because on February 1st, just before Baby Evelyn's birthday party, Julian remembered running Henry around town.

For some reason, it stuck out in Julian's mind that he, on that particular day, the morning of, he drove to multiple DMV locations with Henry that were both in Escambia County, which is the county that Pensacola is in, and Santa Rosa County, which is the next county over, and also to several different Wells Fargo banks. And why was this important? Because supposedly Henry wasn't allowed to open bank accounts due to his federal probation and financial misdemeanors.

So Julian had opened some for him and he'd acquired property on Henry's behalf, too. He said he had two vehicles put in his name. We learned about a storage unit at the Noah's Ark storage, which is like literally two blocks from the police department. So Henry and Julian were up to no good hiding assets from the authorities and opening bank accounts behind the back of the feds. In fact, those multiple trips to Wells Fargo banks were an effort to deposit a large amount of cash without having to declare where the money came from.

Henry had given him $40,000 in cash to deposit in the bank. And Henry had told him, he can't put more than $9,999 in 9-9-cent account at one time. And I asked him, well, did Henry tell you why you can't do that? And he told him about the banking reporting regulations, which $10,000 or more, they have to fill out a SARS report. So Henry explained that to him and he needed to do multiple deposits at the various banks,

branches of the Wells Fargo. During their search for Cassandra, detectives had now stumbled on evidence of a money laundering scheme. But in addition to painting a clearer picture of Henry Steiger and his criminal background, it also gave them good reason to obtain a search warrant for his property. Whether that search would also reveal clues about Cassandra's fate was still unknown. So, Anasiga, you know, as investigators always look to best ways to utilize as many tools as they can in a tool belt to get information.

And here they have a situation where they likely don't have enough to even think about a search warrant for a crime like murder, but they need to get into his home to determine if they can gain any information that connects to Cassandra's disappearance. And here was a pretty cool way to get in. And it's all about Chad's background, which is obviously unrelated to a missing persons or any potential murder investigation. And it just shows how all these things

that you may not even realize, how they can really help connect dots and move investigations forward, how they can be utilized. Like it's Chad's experience in white collar crime that really now started to help move things quickly. So the good thing with being in, when I was bitten in fraud is I made a lot of connections

at these banks. I mean, I can call our prosecutor, and be like, hey man, I need a subpoena for bank records from, you know, Wells Fargo. And literally it'll be in my email in like a couple of minutes. And I'm talking to the people at Wells Fargo, I'm like, look, all I need is this right now.

I need something official from y'all showing these deposits and they do us a solid and get us what we need. So using all of that on June 29th, Pensacola Police Department returned to Henry's home this time with that search warrant. And as we mentioned while the search warrant was written for a financial crime, these are also homicide detectives with experience in working crime scenes. So while they're in there, they're also going to keep a

close eye to see if anything could be tied to Cassandra's disappearance. During the search warrant, we find just a lot of money wrapped up in like three by five cards, a lot of that money just in weird places. So a thorough search warrant execution often takes a really long time. I mean, it can take on the quick end, many hours working methodically around the room, looking inside everything. And one officer while doing that was searching the garage, made a huge find. Comes across the orange colored toolbox

and when he opens it up, there's approximately $100,000 in cash wrapped up in the bank wrappers. But the search went beyond Henry's home. That storage unit that Julian had mentioned, it included that too. We found some airline receipts, nothing to assist in the money laundering case.

But what we did see was the matching purple suitcase that Cassandra supposedly left with was in that storage unit. And in that purple suitcase was ladies clothing, shoes, brush, and various other items. A packed suitcase filled with items belonging to Cassandra. Evidence that maybe she was planning a trip, but that she never reached her destination. Chad's experience told him that five months after the last sighting, the chances of finding Cassandra alive were growing dim. But if she had been harmed or worse, he was determined to find out how and why and ultimately who was responsible.

As for Henry Steiger, he was not exactly doing the kinds of things typical, at least, for an innocent man. On July 2nd, we get a call from the Sheriff's Department, out of all people, that there is a guy named Henry Steiger and a Dollar General about 20 minutes from the police department with a child. And he was out there buying like a disposable phone and some gift cards. Like these are gift cards. Henry Steiger appears to be preparing to make a quick exit,

purchasing a disposable phone and some untraceable phone numbers. Chad and his team had raced to his home where they had met him with an arrest warrant. That's when he again first learns the terms murder and homicide in this search warrant. I just got some dumb look on his face. The detectives hunch about Steiger skipping town were right. At his residence, they found packed suitcases

by the front door. We got there just in time that we believe we did. When we took him into custody, searching him, we find two like prepaid cell phones, a bunch of keys, and some cash. Whether he would escape the mounting evidence that he had something to do with was still a looming question. Henry Steiger was now in custody on white collar charges. His daughter was taken in by the authorities until detectives could determine if he was responsible for Cassandra's disappearance and possible homicide. In the meantime, another detective had begun building a picture of all the other known

associates of Henry Steiger that he may have contacted to help him make his escape from Pensacola. And what they found was that Henry enjoyed a hobby of beekeeping, and he had a friend in the beekeeping world named William Shelby Johnson. Balloonist, beekeeper, and fraudster, as a suspect, Henry Steiger, looked pretty unique. And in order to keep building

the most complete picture they could, Chad invited this William Johnson in for an interview. So he comes down on July the 10th and explains to us that he's actually doing construction work for Steiger at a business in downtown Pensacola that Steiger has the plans to convert into a coffee shop, which we didn't think was too strange because he's in this coffee business. The interview didn't last long with strange because he's in this coffee business. The interview didn't last long with a friend offering up a little help. But shortly after being escorted out of the building, Henry's buddy made a quick beeline back to the station.

By the time Detective Irish and I get back up to our offices, the officer who's working the front desk calls us and says, Hey, Shelby said there's something he forgot to tell y'all and wants y'all to come down. I'm like, oh, okay. So we go down there and he says, hey, I forgot to tell y'all that back in the middle of June, Henry was getting grief from his HOA about a trailer he had parked in his driveway.

And I told him he could park his trailer out on my empty land lot thing and that he could leave it there for a while. A trailer owned by Henry Steiger parked on Shelby's land. A trailer the detectives had known existed. We drive out there and this trailer is tucked back in like a wooded area and is surrounded by all the honey bees that he is using to produce the honey. Detective Owerson, she gets out of the vehicle that I'm driving, walks over to the trailer. Me, I don't like pain. I refuse to get out because I don't want to get stung by these bees. I hear Detective Iverson start yelling to get my attention.

So I walk over there and there's a vent near the front of the trailer. She's like, smell that, tell me what you smell. And it's literally, I'm about to throw up right then. It is obviously the smell of decomposition going on. It is a smell all too familiar for those in the field that can signal the arrival of a critical turn in an investigation, often with the most tragic results. When we open the back of the trailer, the first thing we see is the hot air balloon basket that the people stand in if they're on a hot air balloon.

Then when we remove the back of the basket, which was several hundred pounds, those things hot air balloon basket that the people stand in if they're on a hot air balloon, then we'll remove the basket which was several hundred pounds. Those things are heavy. We see two green barrels that have a large metal locking device at the top of each one. The first one we open is there's nothing in it. It's like pristine crystal clean. The second one, once we removed the screw, we find Cassandra inside that barrel. More than five months since Cassandra Robinson was last seen alive, her remains have been discovered

in a trailer owned by her partner, Henry Steiger. It appears that she was stuffed in the barrel feet first. She's wearing a purple shirt, blue jeans, and it's got a bag over her head and the barrel has a couple inches of bodily fluid in it. It's 100% a homicide now. During the search we just find a bunch of stuff that belongs to Cassandra, a wallet, her ID, Florida Medicare card, gift cards. We find the other missing suitcase. The forensic pathologist would later determine

that the cause of death was homicidal violence of undetermined means. In short, she had been murdered, and her body was stored in a place where someone hoped she'd never be found. The person suspected of doing both, the man they already had in custody, and the father of her child, Henry Steiger.

Detectives wasted no time in sitting down to do an interview, one which starts with a litany of complaints about how the cops had treated him. This is audio from that police interview. I lost my business. I lost the coffee fund that I draw from to drive that business. I lost, I guess you have my car now too. My child is separated from me, which is the worst thing.

And I can't pay the rent, so I'm losing the house. Detectives began their questioning by asking Steiger again about his relationship with Cassandra, keeping the discovery of her body a secret, at least for the time being. She wanted our relationship to be more than it was, and she was dissatisfied with our relationship in that I could not give her, honestly, what she wanted. She wanted more of a peer-to-peer,

romantic partnership kind of relationship. We have been that to some degree off and on throughout the time, but mostly it became me babysitting her and becoming a caretaker for her and helping her. But Henry denied that relationship was ever abusive or violent, telling detectives that their unusual arrangement was actually no different than many other couples. If you were to take all of the negative text

messages between she and I and build a case against me, you could make me look like a bad guy. Right. This was a regular relationship with a normal amount of frustrating texts and a normal amount of compassionate texts. And normal amount, you know. That this was a typical cross-section of a typical relationship. But after allowing Steiger to go on about his, quote, normal relationship with Cassandra, they changed gears and asked Steiger about his friend

William, the beekeeper, and the trailer in his yard. And with the mention of that trailer, I imagine he expected these questions were gonna sting. We talked to Shelby for a while, and he explained he was doing a project down there, but that he had originally met you, I think, through making honey. Is that correct?

How long have you known him? Few years, through honey. Through making honey. I've been doing How long have you known him? A few years, through honey. Through making honey? I've been doing honey for a few years, yeah. Cool. We talked a little bit about it, but not too much. He didn't have, he was busy. He didn't have a lot of time to talk about it.

I asked him about different things, and he said that you had a trailer on his property that had the balloon stuff in it. How long has it been parked there? I don't know. Even he would know. Henry didn't show it, but he had to have been thinking that with the mention of the trailer,

his lies had finally caught up with him because all of a sudden, Stiger seemed much less chatty. Chad and I went over to have a look at it because we're interested in everything because we're looking for a Cassandra. And I detected an odor, an odor that I recognize very well for doing this job. And it's the odor of decomposition from human body. The interview had taken a noticeable turn.

Steiger knew the police were on to him and the detectives were urging him to admit what he had done. Something happened. Something happened. I don't think it was a planned thing. I don't know what happened, but I know in my heart, I don't think it was a planned and on purpose thing. Because you love little Evelyn and I don't think it was a planned and on purpose thing because you love little Evelyn and I don't think you would do anything to harm Evelyn or harm Evelyn's mother. Of course not. Something happened

and I need to know from you what happened. I don't want my mind to be spinning and everybody else's mind to be spinning. I just need to know what happened and I need to know it from you. Well, it is a story that I don't think anyone would believe. And that's my problem. The story he concocted next was not only hard to believe, it also began to reveal the true depths of Steiger's duplicity and depravity.

I'm at peace with what occurred. I understand it. I'm not happy about it, but I understand it. I don't think I can get anyone else to understand it, so I haven't explained it to anyone. I haven't shared it with anyone. How Cassandra wound up in this barrel, sealed in your balloon tray, parked in Shelby's property.

I'm trying to figure that out, how in the world that could happen. But you're not leaving me any other choice but to believe this is a bad thing, and a monster did that. And I don't wanna believe that. That's why it's given me the opportunity to tell me why. Well, you think I need the opportunity

to explain to you with a professionalist's distance? According to Steiger, he had arrived home to find Cassandra in the bathroom, having taken her home life supposedly by using a ligature around her neck. Steiger claimed that then in a panic, he had set about concealing Cassandra's death and her body. Given the state of decomposition to the body, an exact cause of death had been difficult to determine.

So detectives knew that Steiger's version of her death might be hard to disprove. But there was one person detectives thought could help. Henry Schofer and his right-hand man, Julian Messore. We arrest Julian on the money laundering conspiracy and destructuring the deposits. He spends the night in jail and he comes down on the 26th. His interview is long. Massour first revealed the source

of those large amounts of cash. It turned out that he and Steiger's coffee business was nothing more than a front for a cocaine smuggling scheme. As for Cassandra's death, he had information about that too. Did he tell us about a conversation that him and Henry had on the night of the first where he goes into all this philosophical talking mess that he likes to use, that he's using plain English? And during that, he says, Henry tells him that he basically grabs her by the throat, chokes her out.

The baby, she's holding the baby at the time. The baby slides down, hits the ground, and then he has to put her in one of those black tokes. And that's how he gets the body moved out of the house that night. Stiger strangled Cassandra while their one-year-old child was still in her arms, an act of cruelty hard to fathom. He and Messor then set about covering his tracks, hiding the body and disposing of her electronics, clothes, and personal items, all in an attempt to stage what he had once called an extended

vacation. Stiger was then soon arrested for the murder of Cassandra Robinson. In a year after the investigation first began, the trial started. And a jury was asked if they would believe the prosecutor's evidence that Henry had murdered Cassandra on the day of their daughter's birthday or Henry's version, that Cassandra had suffered from depression and had taken her own life. After four days of testimony, Henry Steiger was found guilty of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 18 months for the financial crimes and also being an accessory to the murder after the fact.

For Chad, it's a case he'll never forget. Not the least of which because of that little girl, Cassandra's one-year-old child. The girl who ultimately lost her mother and father on her first birthday. I've gotten a pretty good relationship with Evelyn in her adoptive parents. So every year at Christmas,

police department sponsors a like a Christmas party for kids in our area. We've come in contact with whose parents are like victims of crimes and Evelyn is the only child that gets invited back every year. So I get to see Evelyn every year which is kind of cool. Get invited to a birthday party. So I'm going to her birthday party once or twice. Just a bunch of good folks her family is. Hey, I'm trying not to cry. All she knows is that the family member

she's with now is her mom. Now I've told her the story. She'll obviously maybe find out one day, maybe not, but she is thriving. When it comes to cases like this, recognizing coercive control isn't just about spotting red flags behind closed doors. It's about understanding how deeply that need for dominance can embed itself into every interaction. For someone like Henry Steiger, that control didn't stop when Cassandra was gone. It followed him into the interrogation room.

He sat across from detectives, trying to steer the narrative, manipulate the moment, and walk out untouched, just like he had done in his relationship. But here's what also stood out to me. His tactics may have worked in private, but they didn't hold up under the real weight of an investigation. This case is a reminder that coercive control doesn't end with an act of violence. It continues until someone draws the line and exposes the truth. And in this case, that line was drawn by the investigators who refused to let the lies stand in the way of justice for Cassandra.

Murder. Here, one life lost and another forever altered. Cassandra was killed in her one-year-old child deprived of her biological mom. Every loving parent wants their child to be loved and to thrive. So I think we should end where Cassandra would likely have wanted us to, on her daughter. Cassandra loved her little girl, and to hear that she's being cared for, loved, and thriving, that is everything every parent, especially in their absence, would want. Cassandra, your love for your daughter will forever be part of who she is, and let's all hope that she will forever continue to thrive. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original

produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. This episode was written and produced by Darryl Brown, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa and Philjohn Grande. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?