Anatomy of Murder - Sail Away - Part 1

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

Boat shows, a missing woman, and red flags everywhere you look. Did she leave her husband and head to the Caribbean to be with another man? Or … she’s gone, and the truth is something much worse?For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

Every once in a while, you find a case that's clearly suspicious, and you kind of suspect foul play might have taken place, and it's a different type of investigation. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. Today's story makes me think about really two opposite ends of the spectrum. There's a sense of hopelessness, but that there's incredible hope on the other end. And the bridge between those two was the detective that worked this case.

My name is Bob Nichols. I'm a retired police officer from Montgomery County, Maryland. I spoke with Detective Bob Nichols about the investigation into the disappearance of Cindy Vanderbeek. So in the 1980s, Cindy was always known as being very ambitious. And not only was she a talented saleswoman, she had a really good head for business. And eventually she got promoted to vice president of her company. She went out and she bought a house in New Jersey, and she would commute every single day to New York City, which she really loved doing that job. But what she also loved doing was going to the beach.

She was this petite, little, cute blonde. She was very outgoing, life at a party, liked to sing, very sweet. Everybody loved her. You know, she's the girl next door. The one thing that she used to think about and long for was excitement and love. You were at the beach, and that's where all that came in. So on one weekend trip to the Jersey Shore, she met this really handsome guy. She looked at him.

She saw him, very tan, very toned. His name was Steve Vanderbeek. Steve was younger. He worked up and down the East Coast. He traveled during a boat show circuit. This circuit would travel from city to city to city, and he sold vending items, like cleaning products, at the different shows. And he wasn't just a little bit younger. He was nine years younger than her, and he really had a wanderlust about him, which was something she craved. And she looked at this guy and the potential excitement he would bring, and she felt just head over heels.

And within weeks, they moved in together. He was charming, and they fell in love and they got together and she kind of gave up her world of the New York fashion industry and she began to travel with him. He was telling Cindy that she was such a good salesperson, that she would do so well in this arena selling with him and they could spend it together. They could travel to all these different cities. He was really setting her up for what she believed, according to her family, is a great life. They were on the road a lot, basically about eight out of 12 months a year. They would be on this boat show circuit. During the four months that they weren't on the circuit,

they resided somewhere in Broward County, Florida. Almost like a gypsy lifestyle. While everyone say, well, wait a second, she had everything and success, but now she's fallen for this guy and wants to start living the life of a boat show. But I do get it from her perspective that now she had this rugged, exciting guy and this gypsy-like lifestyle, and she just would beam from ear to ear. He had a sailboat. They moved around.

They lived in Hilton Head, South Carolina. They lived through New Jersey. They were in Florida. So it was an exciting kind of lifestyle if you're into that, where you're constantly on the move and you're doing different things, meeting a lot of different people. That was exciting. Something different for Cindy that she'd never really experienced. They got married. The two went off to the Virgin Islands and they eloped. They got married on the beach, just like they met at the beach in the Jersey Shore. And her family was really concerned about her giving up the success and stability for this much more wandering

like lifestyle. And how many of us out there have had that experience that the person you bring home, whoever they are, that they're just not good enough for, you know, your mom or dad's little girl or boy. And sometimes they're right and sometimes they're not. Well, what had happened was towards March, Cindy and Steve were up in Portland, Maine, and they were ending the circuit up in New England. And Cindy had been talking to her sister who was having a christening for her son. And Cindy agreed to be the godmother for Cindy's nephew. And she had planned on her and Steve stopping in Maryland, in Montgomery County, in the city of Germantown. And they were going to stop on their way back from Maine to Florida, where they live. And they were going to spend some time with Cindy's family.

So the family in their planning of this christening was reaching out to Cindy, and they're living on a boat, really can't reach them on a landline, so they had pagers. So Cindy's family was paging her incessantly to try to determine, is she going to make this christening? Can she come on the specific dates? And they weren't getting an answer. And then the day of the christening came,

neither of them showed up at the door. You know, imagine a loved one is supposed to be there, and they're not there. Cindy's family has to go to kind of plan B to move forward, and they're panicking, knowing this is not like Cindy. You know, she was excited. She really wanted to be a godmother. She loved her family, and this was out of not like Cindy. You know, she was excited. She really wanted to be a godmother. She loved her family.

And this was out of character for Cindy. And the family knew it. Then a few days later, they did get a knock at the door. But it wasn't Cindy, but it was Steve. By himself, which was the first time ever that Steve arrived at the in-laws by himself. Obviously, the first question is, where is Cindy? So Steve has a story that essentially tells them that they were working their way back

from New England, coming down to Maryland. And when they got to Philadelphia, that there was a communication from somebody. Cindy was offered a job to do a quick job out in Wisconsin. So Steve dropped Cindy at the Philadelphia train station. She took a train to Wisconsin. She told him to go to Maryland. She'll just be a day or two, and then she'll meet Steve in Maryland. So that's why Steve now shows up at Germantown, Montgomery County, Maryland. And her family, just like all of us are cocking our head hearing this, so did her family. But again, they couldn't say for sure. It wasn't true. So Steve spends the next two days kind of hanging around the house. When the family is away from the house and they return,

Steve says, hey, Cindy called earlier today and she's tied up. She's doing really well. She's not going to be able to come back right now. So she told me just to head back to Florida and she's going to meet me in Florida. She's sorry. She'll catch up with you guys soon. So the family's like, that's really weird. Definitely red flags are up. They are not happy with what Steve's response is because that is not something Cindy would have done. When you hear it, where's your head going? On the surface, it's suspicious,

but there's not enough to really hang your hat on because the lack of communication back in those days, it's not like she could have called 15 friends with cell phones, although she could have called friends who could have walked over to the home and said, hey, Cindy just called me too, and she's okay. But that didn't happen. So you have to rely on what the family is thinking

because they know her best. There was no proof. There was nothing that they really knew except they did say to Steve, she better get in touch with us soon because we are worried. And when you speak to her next, tell her to call us and get in touch with us immediately because they just had this feeling that something was wrong. But the suspicion did grow a little bit more before he left because there was a couple of errands that Steve ran that day that made them even more suspicious. And I think that's an important fact to tell our listeners. He goes to a local bank where they had a safe deposit box.

He takes out about $5,000 and some family papers. So on the day that Steve is set to go back to Florida, he runs a couple of errands. And one of those errands really caught the attention of the family. He emptied her safe deposit box. And in addition, Cindy's mom, Camille, had been holding some money from them, a couple thousand dollars, and he asked for that too. So now when Steve left, her family no longer thought, let's just wait and see. Now we've got a report permissing. But that's also where the frustration begins, because no one wants to take the report. They knew that they resided in Broward County. So they contacted the Broward County Sheriff's Office, tried to get law

enforcement down there to take a police report. And, you know, the Broward County law enforcement officials essentially looked at it and said, well, wait a minute. She's not missing from Broward County, let alone in Florida. Last time you talked to her, she was up in Portland, Maine. And checking our records, we don't even see any evidence that they even live here in Florida. So Broward County was not very anxious in taking a missing person report. So when Cindy's family gets nowhere with Florida PD, next they go to Maine because they knew that they had last been up at the boat show in Portland, Maine.

So now they call up there and they say, okay, we know she was up there. And they just assumed they would take the report. Portland, Maine basically says, hey, look, she was here for a boat show. You talked to her. We know everything was good. The show ended.

She left. You know, she's not missing from Portland, Maine. She's missing somewhere between Portland, Maine and Maryland where she didn't show up. So they didn't want to take a police report. Scott, let's just go sideways a little bit here and talk about that. You know, just about why it is that everyone is looking to pass the buck here. It's all about jurisdiction, Anna Seagate. It's all about the ability of an agency to say the person actually was here and hasn't left here or was here and left under circumstances that may be suspicious. Now, this is one of those frustrating issues for me, and I'll even call it a pet peeve. Several agencies ping-pong back and forth. And if the family believes foul play may be involved, take some action. for me, and I'll even call it a pet peeve. Several agencies ping pong back and forth. And if the family believes foul play may be involved, take some action. Put out what we call an ATL, which is an attempt to locate. Put her in the system. That is the professional thing

to do. That is the caring thing to do. A family is asking for help. Document it. Follow up. And in my opinion, at this point, that's what should have happened here. So now her family is scrambling. They're even more panicked because more time is going by. So while she had never come to visit them, they go to the only place they can think of next. They go to their local police. So they made a police report

to the Montgomery County Police Department. A young officer by the name of Kent Smith comes to their door and they say, listen, she wasn't here, but we're striking out in Florida. We're striking out in Maine. We have no idea where she is, but we just know that there's something wrong. Please, please, please help us. And this guy, to his credit, you know, I'll give him the shout out here because he said, I know there's no real connection to Montgomery, but he felt bad for them.

Montgomery County has nothing to do with this Montgomery, but he felt bad for them. Contact Florida and try to give this report to them because there's nothing for us to do. First thing I did, I contacted the family and had a mother and sister come to my office. And I said, bring some pictures. I want to know if you have any pictures of Steve, any pictures of Cindy, any, you know, phone numbers, addresses in Florida. There's got to be something, friends, associates. You got to give me something because I really have nothing. I think for an investigator getting in deep into a case, you need to establish a feeling about who your victim may be and a feeling about who your suspect may be. After spending the evening with Cindy's mother and sister, they gave me a lot of background.

I learned a lot about Cindy and I learned a lot about Steve. It became pretty obvious to me that one of two things happened and it was still early. One, she was afraid of him and didn't want to be in his life. So she was laying low off the radar. Or the other option was something happened to Cindy. She was deceased and a victim of foul play. And if she was truly deceased, obviously Steve was, to the best of my knowledge, the last person known to be with her. He would be my number one suspect. He wanted to talk to Steve. He wanted to get information direct from him about the whereabouts of his wife, when he last saw her, when he last talked to her.

So he had his pager number, and Detective Nichols started paging him and paging him. And days and days and days went by with no answer. And that is a bit suspicious. When somebody's missing or there's a homicide, the first thing you do is you look at, is it for love or is it for money? And if it's for love, you look at the boyfriend, the husband, the family as somebody who may have something to do with this. So Steve is clearly on the radar from the family. Hearing the story from the family, Steve is clearly on my radar and it's just common sense

that Steve's got to be somebody we've got to look at. So next, Detective Nichols had to try to backtrack. Well, where did he know Cindy had last actually been? And that came to the boat show, and he knew she had last been in Portland, Maine. But let's think about that for a second. It's not like she was working in a store

up there that's there all year round. It's a band of people that move from place to place. Well, we were only able to verify, yes, there was a boat show. Yes, Cindy and Steve had a vending table there. One of the things I asked, was there any disturbances? Was there a domestic dispute? Was there a police report? There was no record of anything. Steve and Cindy, basically, I learned from the different vendors, they were having some marital problems. Cindy confided in several of her girlfriends at the show that she and Steve were going to part ways at the end of the season and they were going to get divorced. I now talk to somebody that actually says, hey, I just sent Steve a package. He was in Davie, Florida, and here's his address. Now is my first break. Now I know where they're basically living.

He found out that they lived at a place called the Seminole Health Club and Resort. He found out exactly where it was. I ended up speaking with the property manager. She loved Cindy and wanted to be really helpful. And she gave me a lot of background on the two of them, but said, look, you know, Steve's not been here for a while, but I'll call you when he does. All this is going on, and right now we just have a missing person. Potentially a crime, but it's still just a missing person's report. So there had to have been a lot of pressure, I believe, from the supervisors within Detective Nichols' office about, okay, you're spending a lot

of time chasing this. Do you really believe something happened here? You need to focus on other cases. If Cindy was alive, I had no record of it. If Cindy was dead and found by law enforcement, I had no record of it. If Cindy and Steve, since they're connected to the boat show circuit, he could have put her on a boat and take her into the Atlantic Ocean and dropped her, and I'll never find a record of that. It's not your typical investigation. Most everything I'm doing is on the phone. It's not like I can go down there and talk to next-door neighbors. I can't go talk to the boss or supervisors. And, you know, in police work, you don't like to do anything on the phone. You like to sit down with people face-to-face, look at them, read them as you're explaining something, and you get a feel for whether the person's being truthful.

The next turn in the story is May of 1995, when Cindy's mom receives something at her house that is quite shocking. It's what I would consider another red flag. It's a package that arrives to the home, and it's a gift for Cindy's nephew for his christening. The gifts were clothing, and it was like a theme of baseball. But this family is all about soccer, and nobody's in the baseball. So the family kind of thought, like, that's kind of odd. Why would Cindy send these baby clothes? And there was something else. Also contained in the package

was a greeting card. It had a little, you know, hey, enjoy, sorry I missed the christening, talk to you guys soon, love Cindy. And when you looked at the word Cindy as she wrote her name, the family immediately recognized there was a problem with that signature. It looked like somebody was trying to trace it or write it, copy it. And it was real slow. And you could see, like, start and stop points in the signature, which means somebody, you know, doing this job for 33 years, this means typically that somebody is trying to copy or forge the signature.

And it was very clearly not Cindy's signature. Think about someone close to you. When they write their name and you see it on paper, you know that it's there, whether it's a distinctive scrawl or neat and scrolly, however it is someone writes, if you know them well, you know it. And this one just didn't fit at all.

And as he's thinking those things, he gets a call from the Seminole Health Club, and Steve's back. When I got the notification that Steve was back home, we got on a plane and arrived in Florida, I think within like 48 hours. But when he gets down there, he doesn't find exactly what he was looking for.

But what he did find was monkeys. So then one day, Detective Nichols gets a call. It's from the Seminole Health Club, and they said, Steve's back, but no Cindy. I went with one of our homicide detectives,

Joe Madano. The two of us traveled down there, and our directions were try to find the agency, specifically the Davie Police Department, and turn this case over to them. Detective Nichols really wanted to ask Steve why hasn't he returned any of his calls? Why didn't he answer the multiple pager messages that he left for him to call him. Why wouldn't someone whose wife's family believes she's missing return law enforcement's call? I reached out to the Davie Police Department and, you know, I made arrangements with them that we, Montgomery County, wanted to come down there and interview him and we would like their assistance. So they were fantastic. The Davie Police Department couldn't have been greater.

So we go meet with the Davie Police Department. We have an agenda. Our agenda is to talk to Steve. And they had found out a bit more about the Seminole Health Club before arriving. The Seminole Health Club is actually, it's kind of an interesting story, it's a nudist trailer park. And it's what we'll term a clothing-optional community. People would come down. They're not Florida residents. They come down, spend a couple weeks in parks like this, and then they go back to their normal lifestyle.

Of course, when I knew I was going to a nudist trailer park, so when Joe and I were going down there, a lot of people were like, oh, okay, this will be interesting. So coming into it, we stopped and talked to Jan at the front, and she identified where Steve's home was, so we drove into the park to go down and find it. And as we did, we get to see the colony and all the residents, and it's exactly what you would expect. And this is just not something that I'm comfortable with or Joe Madonna was comfortable with. I've never been to a nudist colony before.

It was, they were very nice people. Lived their life very free and free of clothing. So each is their own, I guess. So they're making their way to Steve's trailer. They knock on the door. He's not there. But we are told

Steve's around. So they decided to wait. And as Detective Nichols tells it best, while they were waiting for Steve to return, they saw a very interesting sight. We're standing across from Steve's trailer and there's a lake. And in the middle of the lake, there's this little island and there's monkeys all over the island. So we're kind of sitting there kind of like thinking, wow, we're in a nudist colony. There are monkeys over there on the island. And Steve's not here.

What are we going to do? And lo and behold, here comes Steve, fully nude, walking on up the driveway, coming to the trailer. So we introduced ourselves. And Steve couldn't have been more accommodating. He totally understood what was going on and he wanted to help us in any way he could. So I said, Steve, get dressed. We're going to get in the police car

and we're going to go to the police station. So our goal was to get Steve out of the park, back to a police station where we can be more in control. Detective Nichols and his partner tells him to go in and get dressed. But in any officer safety situation, you don't tell someone to go in somewhere where you lose sight of them because of the fact Steve could go into the trailer, arm himself,

or he could try to destroy any evidence. Of course, Steve had the choice whether or not he's going to let the officers in or not. You know, unless there's a search warrant, police don't have the right to go into your home unless there's some emergency circumstance. But remember, Steve was completely cooperative and said, no problem, come inside. I'm just going to go into the back and get dressed. What Detective Nichols and his partner also got was the side benefit of getting to somewhat scope out the inside. When he went into the trailer to get dressed, I was able to see that Cindy's clothing was there.

Her clothes were in the bedroom, bottles of perfume and makeup, her toothbrush. Things that, like, if Cindy was leaving and said, Steve, our marriage is over, she would have taken these things. So it throws up a red flag to me that she left without taking any of her personal property. That was an indication to Detective Nichols and his partner that she may not have left under her own will. We get to the police station at the Davie Police Department. We sit down with Steve. We do a nice interview with him. And he essentially tells us that Cindy and Steve were up in Portland, Maine. He was concerned because Cindy was spending a lot of time talking on the pay phones and getting a lot of strange pages. And he was suspicious.

And he was intimating to them that she may have been having an affair. So he tells us basically the same story that, you know, we learned from Cindy's family. At this point, Steve is still, you know, the loving husband and he's just doing what his wife asked him to do. He says when he's driving south towards Florida that he gets a page from Cindy and says, hey, meet me in, I think it was Jacksonville. So they meet at a hotel. Cindy informs Steve that she met somebody else. He's got a sailboat. They're going to go down to the Caribbean,

and they're going to live on the sailboat, and the marriage is over, and sorry, I don't love you anymore. He said to them, you guys are concerned about Cindy? I am too. But he said it from the standpoint of a man who was having a tough time getting over his wife, who's now left him from another man. Steve is a very low-key guy.

When he responds, he responds in three to four words. His body language, he sits in a chair and he slouches down. You know, nothing here is going to bother me because I'm not concerned about anything. That is sort of a signal that someone's not trying to be trapped into a story or trapped into giving too much information out or being too cooperative. But the other side of that is they didn't know Steve very well, and maybe that's the way he talks normally. Now, his story about Cindy, where do I begin to look in the Caribbean for an unknown guy

living on a sailboat? It's the foundation of Steve giving you a plausible story, but one that cannot be verified. My experience, my training, my partner's experience, his training, we knew that something was not right here. We're on the right path, but we've got a long road ahead of us. So they decided to give him a voice stress analysis. This to me as a prosecutor is pretty cool because I've never even heard of this before. Working as a detective, one of the investigative tools we can use is a polygraph, but some departments was actually beginning to play with it. There is something called a voice stress analysis.

But this is a, what they call a CVSA, which is a pseudoscientific technology, which basically is able to detect stress in your voice. It uses a computer program and it looks at the pattern or the waves of your speaking into a microphone

and determines inconsistencies in your voice pattern waves to determine what are lies and what are truths. So the operator gave him the test and it came back that he passed the test. He wasn't showing any signs of being deceitful. I did not expect Steve to pass it. I was hoping it would show deceit so we could then do the interview over again, but he passed it. I had to move on to something else. Detective Nichols made a very important next move. It was pretty obvious Steve kept a lot of things. Dirty dishes, trash, pizza boxes sitting on the dining room table. He was a pack rat.

He just really did not throw things out, which was great for us. And when we took him back to the Seminole Health Club, we had been talking all day and he had told me that he had no problems with me looking through the trailer and his vehicle. And so while searching inside Steve's car, Detective Nichols found something major, something that was going to put him on a path he hadn't been able to get down before. We went through, we started in the trailer, we found something that really jumped out at me. There was a notebook near his bed, like on a little table. And I, you know, kind of flipped through the spiral notebook. And I noticed that there were signatures of Cindy. I felt that that was Steve writing Cindy's name, practicing to sign it, which goes along with the greeting card that the family received in April, where we feel that that

signature was a forged signature. So we talked about that. And Steve says, no, I was just, you know, I love my wife. I miss her. I was doodling and drawing and doing different things you see within the book. And yes, I wrote her name. I miss her and I'm thinking about her. And I don't know about all you out there, but I can remember certainly back in the day that sometimes, you know, that other person I was interested in just kind of scribbling their name over and over while I sat in class.

And so, again, it's like Detective Nichols talks about these vague things that he says that he doesn't buy, but you can't really verify that they're wrong. And at this point, maybe it's something or is it just nothing at all? In between the trailer and his vehicle, which was like a big Sub, a blue suburban, I gathered up as much as I could. And as I'm looking at different, I guess, pieces of trash, debris that's in these vehicles and his trailer, I'm seeing years worth of receipts. Between the seats on the floor, up on the visor, in the center console, There's papers everywhere, including all over the trailer. Papers and garbage and things all over the place. But within there is a treasure trove of what could be evidence. I'm noticing gas receipts, and gas receipts going back several years.

Hotel receipts going back several years, showing that, you know, they're up and down the East Coast and they're doing these boat shows and where they're going. Well, you know, it would take me hours to go through this. And I didn't want to do it in front of Steve. So we took, I think it was probably four full bags, I'll call it trash, and we packed it up with us and took it back to Maryland. When I left Florida, I felt Cindy was no longer alive, and I felt she was deceased and at the hands of Steve.

But I could not prove it. Let's go sideways for a second and think about Detective Nichols' superiors. They had been hoping that he was going to say that now Davie police were taking over this case. But instead, they had their detectives come up with bags and bags of garbage. I was unable to turn the case over to the Davie Police Department in Florida. So when I brought it back, my sergeant's looking at me going like, I thought I told you to get rid of this case. I'm like, nobody wants it. And I'm sure when he walked into the D Bureau with bags and bags of these receipts, supervisors were like, this is going to take you days, if not weeks to go through. And what about the other cases that you're working? This is a missing person that I feel is

most probable a homicide. So it is getting a bulk of my attention, but it's tough because I have a lot of cases. And I want to talk about Detective Nichols a little bit more here, Scott. And I think it's a great question to you because you have been in those shoes. Is it odd for a detective, and I think you and I both know the reason, but like you to explain it, to work so hard in a case here where even his superiors are telling him to just sideline it. It's a case that wasn't even in his jurisdiction. Every person who signs on to become a member of law enforcement knows their dedication is important to the victims. And if you've got a sense and your experience starts to take you down a road, then you become laser focused on finding the answers that keep you up at night.

Finding a way to go back to that family and say, we've done everything we could possibly do to get you those answers. Because ultimately, that's what it's about. It's serving the people. You know, when you get on a case, you have to do your best to bring it to some kind of conclusion and see that justice is done. And I learned from some great detectives. I watched and I learned great police work. I think

that helped establish what I wanted to do with my career and how I wanted to be as a detective. And if my family relative went missing, I would have expectations. And the expectations are what I try to lay a blueprint for to follow. Oh, it was at the police station, and I took over an interview room with all the stuff that I had brought back. And I was essentially making piles of things, trying to show it in a timeline, date-wise. This is not something I sat down and in four hours I had it figured out. This is something that took several days to sort out what I had, trying to retrace their steps. And when you talk about it not being glamorous,

I think everyone can guess and every detective can confirm that their work is most often definitely not glamorous. I mean, they certainly go through a lot worse than going through garbage and receipts. But that's what he had here. These receipts were balled up. They were dirty. There was food stains on them. It wasn't like this couple was staying at five-star resorts. So they were handwritten. Sometimes it said a date. Sometimes it didn't. You know, and I'm not familiar with this area. So, you know, eventually as I sort out their route, you know, I'm not familiar with this area. So eventually as I sort out their route,

I'm starting to pin on a map every time I saw that they stopped at a Burger King and they were in whatever city or state they were at, I'd mark it. I'm getting a pretty straight line as they left Portland, Maine and they're heading through New York. I'd like everyone to close their eyes for a second, unless you're driving,

but close your eyes for a second, unless you're driving, but close your eyes for a second and imagine this big board in this Detective Bureau conference room. And these receipts are being pinned on this board, and he's starting to develop a travel pattern. And he has Steve locked into the story of where he traveled, what road he traveled, and what days he traveled? So now you're developing the timeline and you're finding the holes. At this point, you know, I've got a story from Steve. So I've got his route. So now as I'm going through all this paperwork, in reality, I'm starting to show that he's doing something different than he told us. And one of the first things I'm able to verify, I'm showing that he's lying.

So now we have the first real discrepancy. We have Steve saying he never veered off I-95 South. So the paper trail that I actually have shows that when they are leaving the main area, they head west and they're heading towards Albany, New York. They spend the night in Hunter Mountain, New York, as like a resort. And they spent the night there, I think it was on March 22nd. Now, the interesting thing about that particular receipt,

which really jumped out at me, was it showed that there's two occupants that the hotel clerk had marked as two people staying in the hotel that night. So now I can show that when Steve and Cindy left Maine, there's two of them. Two people checked in under the name Vanderbilt. They checked out on the 23rd. And on March 24th in Clarksburg, West Virginia, I have one person.

Now he had literally held in his hand the answer to what his gut had been telling him all along. He now had the proof that Cindy was no longer alive. So now he knew the where, but that where could be anywhere within a span of 500 miles. Tune in next week because the path this story takes is far from over. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original, a Weinberger Media and Forseti Media production.

Sumit David is executive producer. you