Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Killers Amongst Us: 19-year-old artistic beauty disappears after car found abandoned on bridge. What happened to Sarah Stern? (Part 1)

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

19-year-old Sarah Stern, a New Jersey woman disappears. Police find her abandoned car on a bridge with the keys inside. Did she jump off the bridge, committing suicide? Was she kidnapped. Today we hear from her father, Michael Stern, who while on vacation, gets that one phone call all parents fear. Where is Sarah? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Hi guys, Nancy Grace here. Welcome back to Killers Amongst Us, a production of iHeartMedia and Crime Online. We start today in the story of Sarah Stern, a beautiful teen girl who loses her mom after a fight with cancer and was trying to find her way in the world. She disappears from home without a trace, leaving behind so many questions and so few clues. You will hear from Sarah's dad, Michael, about his anguish learning his little girl is missing and how the search for Sarah begins. You hear from a local reporter on the scene, Alex Impugnielo, who covered Sarah's disappearance from day one.

FBI Special Agent Bobby Chacon and renowned Hollywood psychoanalyst Dr. Bethany Marshall weigh in with expert analysis on Sarah's disappearance. We start at 2 45 a.m. the morning of December 3, 2016. An abandoned car found on a New Jersey bridge. 911, where is the emergency? Not an emergency. Actually on the Belmar Bridge right after heading south in the middle of the bridge, there's a car that's abandoned. It's off to the side of the road. The Belmar Bridge being the 35 Bridge?

Yeah, the 35 Bridge would be going over the, going from north going south. Nancy Grace, killers amongst us. So what kind of car is it? Kind of looks like an old, beat-up, light tan-colored sedan. And was there anybody inside the vehicle? I looked, no. Unless they were sleeping. I couldn't see them by their head being up.

Nobody looked like they were in it. A light-colored sedan parked on an obscure bridge. That is the beginning of the story of the disappearance of a beautiful young girl, Sarah Stern. But why there? Why that bridge? And what, if anything, does it mean? I'm Nancy Grace. Thank you for being with us. Today, the mystery of Sarah Stern's disappearance. But what do we know about Sarah? Alex Napoliello. Alex, thank you for being with us. Crime and court reporter for the NJ.com and Star Ledger.

I've watched the body cam footage. I've listened to it very, very carefully. Explain to me how the police were first alerted to this sedan parked on the side of a bridge, and what time of the day was it, and why was that so unusual? So police were called to the bridge shortly before 3 a.m. on December 3rd in 2016. They were alerted to this car parked on the shoulder at the top of the Route 35 bridge in Belmar by a couple rideshare drivers who were in the area. So it's important to note that that bridge at the base of the bridge is a popular nightclub called The Headliner. That bridge goes from Neptune Township into Belmar. So it's pretty well trafficked even at 3 a.m. So it wasn't uncommon for a ride share driver to be in that

area and call it into police. Hold on. Are you talking about an Uber? It was an Uber person? I believe that it was Uber and he was doing both Uber and Lyft. And was it the driver? I thought it was the driver, not someone who was actually ride-sharing. It was the driver, yeah, the ride-share driver. You know, to FBI special agent Bobby Chacon, first of all, as I always told juries, nothing good happens after midnight, period. Okay, let's just start with that. It doesn't affect me one way or the other other than me trying to establish a timeline that they first spotted this tan sedan, this light-colored sedan, on the side of the bridge at 3 a.m. That does not mean to me that that's when it was parked there by any means. Oh, no, not at all.

I mean, even if it's heavily trafficked, you'd be surprised at how many people don't report cars on the side of the road. It's become a pretty routine occurrence. I mean, I probably see it every day on my commute. So you don't always have a proper timing of when that car was left simply by the reporting of the car. It is somewhat dependent on the time of day, but if 3 a.m. is a heavily trafficked time, then you may not have... Okay, I don't know what alternate universe you're living in, but 3 a.m. out on an obscure bridge, I do not think would be heavily trafficked, which leads me to another point, Bobby Chacon. With me, Alex Napoliello, crime and court reporter for the NJ.com and Star Ledger and Bobby Chacon, FBI special agent. That leads me to another point. I find this bridge, based on all my research, to be fairly obscure. I mean, in the big scheme of

things. And I noticed on the original 911 call, which we're going to play for you shortly, even the cops were not sure which bridge they're talking about. And when you say it could be, I don't know if it was a highly trafficked time, let's just rephrase here. It's December 3. That's Saturday at 3 a.m. in the morning. Now, the few times I'm out on the highway at that time of the morning, it's still dark and nobody's on the road, Bobby Chacon. What are you talking about? Well, Alex just described it as a heavily trafficked bridge in an area where people do use that bridge.

I would have to determine how obscure or not obscure the bridge would be. But you do start making those kinds of judgments on what the chances are that the reporting of the missing car approximates when it was actually abandoned. And so you do factor in traffic patterns. And local authorities would obviously be very familiar with those local traffic patterns. Well, that leads me to another issue. Alex, joining me, crime and court reporter, NJ.com and Star Ledger. Alex, I don't believe that the car was actually reported missing. If it hadn't been for this Uber driver driving along and seeing it, it would not have been reported. I mean, did anybody report it stolen? Yeah, no one reported the vehicle stolen. And, you know, whether or not we know if that vehicle would have been reported, we don't know.

But an Uber driver found it unusual enough that he did report it. And when he reported it, it was just as a disabled vehicle. He didn't believe at that moment that there was anything suspicious in nature. And just to go back to some earlier points, this bridge, it's the Route 35 bridge. The reason there was some confusion was because over the Shark River, where that bridge runs over that body of water, there are three bridges in that area. There's one bridge over Ocean Avenue along the beach. There's another bridge called, commonly referred to as the Belmar Bridge, and then there's the Route 35 Bridge. So those names often do get confused. So how does this compare? I mean, is there a lot of traffic?

Is there a lot of traffic there at 3 a.m.? I don't think there's a lot of traffic at 3 a.m. The bar that I mentioned earlier, the Headliner Club in Neptune, gets out at 2 a.m. So I guess you have some people trickling out still at 3 a.m. and hopping in cabs and Ubers to head home for the evening, early morning. But no, I mean, at 3 a.m., I wouldn't say it gets more traffic than it would middle of the day. Listen. Do you see if we have any contact info that they are around? I don't know. Just try to give them a phone call before they show up again.

To Dr. Bethany Marshall joining me, psychoanalyst out of california at dr bethany marshall.com dr bethany you know chican's right i passed abandoned cars on the side of the road all the time and i typically will call 9-1-1 if i see there's a crash and people are standing around or somebody's standing by their car but But if I just see an abandoned car, I don't think anything of it. I think they've run out of gas or they had a flat tire and they've gone to get help. I would not report it. Why? Nancy, it depends on the bridge. We have two bridges here in California, the Golden State Bridge. And then there's a very famous bridge as you drive into Pasadena, where one of my offices is located. And those bridges are notorious for people committing suicide. So if you were going over one of those bridges, you might report. But now this seems to be a very

rural area, one nightclub nearby, people ride sharing, going back and forth. It seems like perhaps it was an older car. In this case, I don't think anybody would report. And the reason people do not report, Nancy, is that they think that they've made it up. They think that they're overreacting. And often people under report all kinds of crimes and mysterious happenings because they don't want to get another person in trouble. We see this with underreporting of domestic violence and child abuse. And I would imagine it would be same with an abandoned sedan on a bridge that you feel like you're going to look foolish. Maybe there's a homeless person in there that couldn't have,

you know, afford a hotel or another place to spend the night. And you don't want to alert the police and get somebody into trouble unnecessarily. So what do we do now, Bobby Chacon? The police can't ignore it. They've gotten a call from an Uber driver. Here's the car. They make their way after much confusion to the correct bridge. And what happens then, Bobby? What do you do with an abandoned car? What is SOP for cops? Well, the first thing you do is run the license plate. If they have a license plate on the car, see who the registered owner of the car is. See if you can make contact with that registered owner. If there's not a license plate on the car, you can run the VIN number, which is visible from the windshield.

You run the VIN number. That could also lead you to the registered owner. What you want to do is find out who the registered owner is and then who had last possession of the vehicle. They could have borrowed it. It could have been lent out. Whatever the status of that vehicle is, you have to start with the registered owner of the vehicle. And so you do that. You try to determine that either through the license plate or through the VIN number, the registration of the car. They find the VIN registration. That means they can find out the owner of the car. A VIN is a number that's on your car.

It's like a fingerprint. Every car has their own VIN number. VIN. No car will have the same one. When you go to a chop shop or you're dealing with stolen cars, they scratch out the VIN number. It's very difficult to do on a car. It's welded in there. It's hard to get it off.

They track the VIN or they track the tag number, and then they find out who owns the car. Alex Napoliello explained to me what was unusual about the car. Did they automatically know that the car was not just abandoned? What was found in the car, and what deductions do you make? So police arrive at the bridge. They pull up behind the vehicle. The officer walks up to the driver's side of the vehicle,

shines a flashlight in through the vehicle, sees the keys still inside the vehicle, but sees nothing else. There's no one around there. They run the registration. They run the VIN number. They find out that the car is registered to a Lillian Stern. Lillian Stern is Sarah Stern's grandmother. They also learned that Lillian doesn't drive this car anymore, that she had given it to Sarah, and Sarah was the one who typically drove the vehicle. So the officer gets back to his car, calls dispatch, and shortly

thereafter, thinking that there was nothing suspicious with this vehicle, he calls it to be towed from the scene and then radios other officers to respond to the Stern resident in Neptune City. Now, isn't it true that the keys were in the car? Is that right, Bobby Chacon? And what do you deduce from that? Yeah, well, if I saw the keys in the car, I would automatically think that, you know, there's something suspicious about it. Because if the car was broken down, most people that leave, if they have a flat tire, if they're out of gas, you know, they'll secure their vehicle before they walk off to get assistance. I mean, most people would simply call AAA or another vehicle repair service. But once I saw the keys in the car, I would not probably have that car touched until we

could do some kind of forensic exam on the car. If the keys are in it, it just raises the level of concern for me to think that somebody who abandoned their car or simply walked away from their car on their own would leave their keys in their car. It's just not a common occurrence. And so it would ratchet up my concern about what's going on with this vehicle. So I would start taking a look around the vehicle, on the floor, on the ground, around the vehicle. And then I would start thinking about maybe we need to process this. Because remember, if it is in fact a crime scene, you lose anything if you step past that process. So you have to be very cautious about how you proceed.

Well, wait, you just kind of glossed over that. When you say you lose anything if you gloss over the process, what I take that to mean is you don't destroy any potential evidence in the car, such as fingerprints, fluids, hair, fiber. All of that remains in the car. So while you look in the car, you see the keys are in there, you've got to be very, very careful about, for instance, taking the keys out of the ignition, looking in the trunk. You don't want to destroy any potential evidence.

Let's take a listen to our friends at 20-20. This is a small town. Word travels fast. The cops know, obviously, a lot of people in this small town. They have a car parked on a bridge, and they quickly find out it's normally driven by a 19-year-old by the name of Sarah Stern. Phone rang around three o'clock in the morning. I said, do you know anything about the car, the gray Oldsmobile? And I said, yeah, my daughter drives that car. A million things go through your mind. You were in Florida.

Yeah. You drove from Florida back to New Jersey. At 3.30, 4 o'clock in the morning, there's no traffic, so you can drive pretty quick. Sarah Stern was very well known to the community due to the fact that her family was very well known. Sarah was a kid that everybody knew. She was always around. Kind of threw everybody off with that car just being left at the top of that bridge with absolutely no good rhyme or reason as to why. No one knew where Sarah was, and they didn't know why they couldn't get in touch with her.

She was attached to her phone like most 19-year-olds are, and there would be no reason for why her phone was off, and she wasn't taking calls, taking text messages on a Friday night. No answer on her phone. Police then immediately start investigating and this becomes not just an abandoned car on a bridge, but a missing person. There's this 19-year-old girl who has gone off the grid, and no one knows why. Joining me now, a very special guest, Michael Stern.

This is Sarah's dad. Michael, why were you in Florida that night of all nights? Well, I was on vacation for a week down at Disney World. Do you recall that phone call when you learned the car was missing and what went through your head? Well, in the beginning, when the call came in, and I've explained this a few times, but the call came from what appeared to be the Monmouth County Sheriff's Department. And it was, you know, awakened out of a sleep, and the call was kind of a high-pitched voice, and it was a little, it almost sounded like a prank call in the beginning.

And they just asked, they said, Monmouth County Sheriff's Department were inquiring about a car uh drove you know an Oldsmobile and I said uh yeah my daughter drives that car and then the call hung up so I called it back and I could see on my caller ID that you know when they answered it was the Sheriff's department, except I got a recording that said that the hours are from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and call back or leave a message. So right there, I knew it was, you know, it was called from an official phone, but didn't have any details. And that's how the whole thing started. And, you know, I hadn't been able to get in touch with Sarah.

So, you know, I thought something at that point might be wrong. How long had you been trying to reach her? From about 1030 the evening before. So that would have been Friday night going into Saturday morning. And is that normal for her to go that long without you talking to her? No, not necessarily, but it wasn't unusual because she had been away the week before. She was in Florida the week before with her cousins and aunts and stuff. So I left the day after she came back, which was Black Friday, I picked her up at the airport. And then the following morning, I left for Florida driving at 5.30 a.m. So I only,

you know, been in touch with, you know, I talked to her that day and I said goodbye to her that morning and, you know, talked to her during the week. But nothing seemed unusual at that point. What were her spirits like that week when you talked to her while you and uh you know talk to her during the week but nothing seemed unusual at that point what were her spirits like that week when you talked to her while you were on vacation for a week she had been on vacation for a week let me understand that she's in florida for a week with relatives friends she comes back you pick her up the airport you pretty much leave shortly after that to go to florida yourself and y'all are in touch every day by phone? Yeah, either on the telephone with voice or text. Right, right.

Okay, so that evening you started trying to contact her around 10.30 p.m., which would have been, I guess, a Friday night. Okay, let me go back just a little. Sarah's grandma, my mother, had called me and said she hadn't been able to get in touch with Sarah all day. And she was staying at my sister's house because she was recovering from being in the hospital. So she was over there for 10 or 12 days to recover. So she wasn't home and she talked to Sarah every day. She had seen Sarah during the week.

But she said she hadn't been able to get in touch with her so I said, well, it's Friday night. It's 10.30. She's either sleeping or she's out or her phone died or something and she's charging it. Sarah always had things going on, it seemed like 24 hours a day. So she'd be up at four o'clock in the morning

talking to people in Australia or London or California. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. I just got to ask you, it's neither here nor there, But why is Sarah up at four o'clock in the morning talking to people in Australia? Well, they were friends. They were her YouTube and internet friends that she had met at VidCon, Buffer Fest, BookCon, Comic-Con. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I'm learning. Tell me about all the cons she went to. I just went to Comic-Con and took the children. We had the best time. But what were the other cons she went to? Well, VidCon, which, you know, is in, I guess, in different places.

I don't know. It was California, Anaheim a couple times New York, Toronto So she was kind of jumping around all over the place Along with going to the people she liked Grace Helbig and Jenna Marbles And Hannah Hart Autograph parties and things like that That they would have at bookstores signings and stuff so she

was uh into the very heavily into um uh internet youtube and uh you know the social media okay wait i just had to actually look up vidcon and my son who's the techie in this house i mean michael you would laugh so hard. Bethany and Bobby, you already know this. Alex, I have twins, boy, girl, John, David, and Lucy. I once, and it's my fault because I won't take the time to learn how to make the TV or the remote or anything else technical work. I'm like, guys, I'll handle the legal business. You handle the TV and the remote control. Can you do that? And they're like, yes. Whenever there's any tech related event or incident, I call now my 11 year old son. He's like a monkey. You give him the device, whatever it may

be, and he finds the answer. So I'm looking this up. He would be so disappointed that I didn't know what this is. Celebrate online video with your friends. Meet your favorite creators. Have the time of your life. Create better content. Grow your channel. Break into the industry. Meet fellow creators. Wow. Okay, so I'm learning all about what this is VidCon. And I guess everyone, all the YouTubers, all the TikTokers, all of them show up at VidCon. So do I have an understanding of what VidCon is, Michael Stern? Yes, that's exactly the way it is. It's kind of an international, national media thing where it could be local or a distance. And Sarah had friends in Australia, London.

Oh, yeah, I'm looking at it right now. Australia, London are the ones they mention. So she's all over the map. Now, you mentioned another thing she liked to go to. What was that? It started with the B as in brother. Well, let's see. There was Buffer Fest, which is another internet what's that but

i guess i'm gonna have to look that up too don't don't judge me did you say buffer fest buffer fest yeah that's a you know when sometimes when you're downloading a program or or a video or something it buffers you know it's just you see the little circle going around. Well, Buffer Fest was kind of a takeoff on that thing where it was an Internet thing where you just learned about the different things that were going on. I looked it up. I had to look everything up.

Buffer Festival is a four-day theatrical showcase of theatrical screenings that celebrates video premieres from acclaimed digital creators. Okay, yep, that says annually in Toronto or Ontario. Okay, so she's all about digital. And see, the reason I'm curious about this, Michael Stern, and I'm going to get back to her car being found, is, Bobby Chacon, help me out here. I need everybody on this. The bigger her circle is, okay, the more people we've got to look at that may know where she is or what happened to her. See what I mean? So it's not no longer just, let's go ask

the next door neighbor. It's let's go on her on all of her devices, her phone, her laptop, her desktop, her iPad. And who is she talking to? Who are her best friends online? She's heavily, heavily involved in, and in a fun, good way, in creating video content. Bobby Chacon, I mean, that's a little overwhelming for an investigator because there's so many directions in which to go looking for information about where is Sarah. Do I have to go to VidCon and Buffer Fest? I mean, it really does. It's created a complete new way of having to investigate these cases

that wasn't in existence when I started in this business. And so you always look at the world of the missing person, the world of whoever you're looking at. And while the Internet has made the world such a smaller place in one way, it's now completely made the, you know, the pool of people you have to look at and investigate much, much larger for investigators. Where is Sarah Strong? Nancy Grace, signing off. Goodbye, friend. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.