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 2)

Episode Date: May 26, 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 about Sarah's creativity and involvement in developing online content. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hi guys, Nancy Grace here. Welcome back to Killers Amongst Us, a production of iHeartMedia and Crime Online. 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. We start at 2.45 a.m. the morning of December 3, 2016. An abandoned car found on a New Jersey bridge. Nancy Grace, Killers Amongst Us.

I can see on my caller ID that, you know, in the answer, 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. Michael Stern, this is Sarah's dad. Michael, 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, you know, 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 1030. You know, she's either sleeping or she's out or her phone's 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 4 o'clock in the morning talking to people in Australia or London or California. So, OK, 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. 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 into the very heavily into um internet youtube and uh you know the social media celebrate online video with your friends meet your favorite creators have the time of your life create better content grow your. 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 a B as in brother. Well, let's see. There was Buffer Fest, which is another internet. What's that? I guess I'm going to have to look that up, too. Don't judge me. Did you say Buffer Fest?

Buffer Fest. Yeah, that's a, you know, sometimes when you're downloading a program or a video or something, it buffers, you know, it 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, um, let's go ask the next door neighbor. It's let's go on her, uh, 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 BufferFest? 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 such a smaller place in one way, it's now completely made the pool of people you have to look at and investigate much, much larger for investigators. And to Dr. Bethany Marshall, psychoanalyst, joining me out of California.

Dr. Bethany, this is like a whole new world, as Bobby Chacon said. It wasn't like that when I first became, entered the FBI. Now, everybody's world has blown up. And as an investigator, I'm trying to find out where Sarah, and I find out she goes to Buffer Fest and VidCon and a lot of other places. And she's up at 4 a.m. talking to her friends in other countries, specifically Ontario and Toronto. I mean, that opens up a whole world. Are people creating really alternate IDs online? Well, this is the digital version of a young woman, a 19-year-old young woman traveling all over the world and meeting hundreds and thousands of people, searching for that one person who may have

targeted her, become obsessed with her, started to stalk her, becomes a little bit like a needle in a haystack. Nancy, when I started on your show on HLN many years ago, we kept covering 13, 14, 15-year-olds who had been abducted at the hands of predators they had met online. And the conventional wisdom then was, you know, when your child goes online to do their homework or to look on the internet, make sure they're in the living room with the screen facing outward so everybody can see what they're doing. That was the simple advice we gave back then. That does not even apply anymore.

There are so many devices. And as I'm listening to Sarah Stern's father, she was at all these festivals and all these different modes of communication on the internet. Let's be clear, though. Let's be clear. We're talking about the festivals she goes to. I'm not talking about the Fry Festival or Burning Man or Coachella, where everybody's high and drunk and sleeping around. These are actual content creative festivals, as they call them, where you premiere new theatrical entries online. I mean, it's a very creative and positive thing she's doing. She's not high as a kite in some tent out at Coachella. That's not what Sarah Stern's about, Bethany.

It sounds almost like a Shakespeare festival, you know, that a bunch of... I don't know that I go that far. I don't know that I go that far. Okay. So Michael, I want to go back to Sarah's dad with me right now, Michael Stern. Tell me about her. I mean, that's quite the swing of a pendulum, me saying she's not at Coachella. You know, everybody's drunk and high. And Bethany goes, yes, it's like Shakespearean festivals. I don't think I'd go that far, Michael. Just tell me about her.

Well, Sarah is kind of hard to describe, but she loved the media and arts and creating, you know, videos and things like that, little vignettes. And that's what she was interested in. She liked the podcast type of thing that Grace Helbig and Jason Solomita, I think it was. And he was, Jason was one of the people that as soon as he found out Sarah was missing. And I don't know how big his following is. It's probably a million, million and a half people or something. And Grace Helbig has three million or so followers. They were right away, you know, within a few days, they were out there asking for asking for help to you know find Sarah

you know when you said Michael that Sarah was hard to describe I I kind of know what you mean because I've researched her and talked to so many people about Sarah. I mean, on one hand, she's this happy-go-lucky teen girl. On the other hand, I look at the photos. She's very into digital creation and photos. And some of her self-photos, and I'm not going to say selfies, because they look as if they're taken by a professional photographer, like she's silhouetted, looking out into like an afternoon sky. I mean, they're very thoughtful and kind of deep. And she'd been through a lot because she lost her mother.

So at her very young age, you guys had already battled a terminal illness, and Sarah lost her mom at a very young age. What happened, Michael? Well, Sarah was 15 when, you know, she was younger. Her mother suffered with cancer for about six years, five, five and a half, six years. And, you know, she was on the road to recovery and then she had a recurrence. And subsequently, within a year, she passed away. And Sarah, at that point, turned to art and creation, art as a drawing and photography. And also, I would say film and the whole media, television kind of junk. I want to ask you a question, Michael.

I know people ask you about Sarah all the time, but I want to talk for a question michael you know i know people ask you about sarah all the time but i want to talk for a moment about sarah's mom because hearing you describe her illness how she had fought it for so many years and thought had beaten it and then it came back i remember I remember when they called me and told me that I had a melanoma. And as you know, is the most aggressive form of skin cancer. And my first thought was, oh, dear God, please, please just let me stay here and be with the twins. Just let me stay here. And I continue that prayer so so many days of the week and I'm imagining Sarah's mom just wanting to stay alive Sarah's your only child to just stay alive to get her

through school to get her through the bumpy road of life and help her. You know, when you finally go to heaven, you know, you've done everything you can for your child to try as best as you can to give them a happy life so that they're set and they're on the path to happiness, whatever that may be. And I'm just imagining Sarah's mom struggling, just trying to stay alive for Sarah. It was a tough fight the last year. And, you know, when you don't get any better and you go through treatments and operations and chemo, it's a tough thing to go through treatments and operations and chemo. And it just, it's a tough thing to go through. And, you know, Sarah, we try to keep things as normal as possible, you know, steady, even

keel. So it didn't seem, you know, so dire, which it, it didn't seem like it was a dire in the beginning, but as months went by, things didn't get, things just weren't getting better. They were just progressively getting worse. And it was tough for Sarah. You know, she saw her mom, you know, couldn't do what she used to do and, you know, was tired all the time. A lot of doctor's appointments. So it was tough for Sarah. When her mom passed away,

she kind of found herself, she had some very good teachers in high school, photography and art teachers, who took Sarah under their wing. And somehow Sarah just developed this talent within a year. And she just became a brilliant artist and photographer, which was amazing to me. I've never seen a transformation like that. She went from hardly being able to throw up a a you know straight line with a ruler as i

would say uh she just became a brilliant artist in any media it didn't matter what it was pencil watercolor and they make whatever she took her hand to she just put her entire being into that and that's how she i i think um kind of lived to prove you know that she could be somebody you know and you know take the pain away from her mother passing away and i think that's what she did and she just threw herself into art and media and uh she she liked it and that's what kept her uh that's what she did. She just threw herself into art and media and she liked it and that's what kept her going. I mean I've looked at so many of her pieces, her photography especially and a lot of her pencil sketches and they're incredible. In fact one of her dog, it looks like the dog is about to jump off the page. It's so lifelike.

And I was marveling at her talent. When you said you tried to keep everything as normal as possible as your wife battled cancer, what do you mean by that? Well, just, you know, routines, you know, get up, go to school, you know, make lunch, take your lunch with you or, you know, buy lunch in school and, you know, whatever the activities were. Sarah was on the swim team for a season or two along with her softball. She started softball in her freshman year on the varsity team and stayed on

the varsity team throughout school with softball. So that was a good, you know, she just, she liked it. She liked the camaraderie with the team and stuff. And, you know, so we kept everything as normal as possible. Her mother would go to the games when she felt up to it, you know, the home games and stuff. So everything seemed normal as possible. Her mother would go to the games when she felt up to it, you know, the home games and stuff. So everything seemed normal. Except for, you know, the illness. So it's just kind of, you know, you don't want,

you don't want to start changing lifestyles with a, with, you know, with a young child, you know, even though there is adversity. So that's, we just try to keep things as formal as possible. We were talking about Sarah Stern's mom, Carla Stern, and I'm speaking with Sarah's dad, Michael Stern, and he is recounting the call he received down in Florida. He's only gone for seven days. He's just seen his daughter, and suddenly,

after not being able to reach her since about 10 30 that evening he gets a 3 a.m ish call telling him her car is found on the side of a bridge. When I'm thinking about this bridge and I'm looking at it her car is parked over to the far right. There is an emergency lane of sorts, so it's not blocking traffic, which makes me wonder. Also, to our special guest joining us, crime and court reporter for NJ.com and star ledger, Alex Napoliello. Alex, with the car pulled over to the side right there in that particular neck of the woods. It could have sat there for hours and nobody have noticed it. It wasn't blocking traffic.

It was late at night when it was called in around 3 a.m. And what can you tell me about the area? I mean, it's near Asbury Park, right? Isn't that where Bruce Springsteen started and the Stone Pony and Neptune Beach? What can you tell me about the area? Correct. So Neptune City is a very tight-knit... Ah, Neptune City. Thank you.

It's a very tight-knit community at the heart of the Jersey Shore. About two miles north is Asbury Park, where, as you said famously, Bruce Springsteen got his start playing the clubs in Asbury. Just to the south of Neptune City is Belmar, which is an extremely popular summer destination. It's where many people in New Jersey go to vacation. They grow up. Kids grow up going on the boardwalk in Belmar. And so this is a could tell you, was well known in the area because they owned and operated an independent bookstore there. And so in turn, Sarah was a well-known teen in the area. She worked at local businesses in the area. And so she was too. She was well known. But the bridge where the car was discovered, as you said before, was off to the side. It could go unnoticed for hours because it wasn't in any of the travel lanes.

It was simply pulled over. I just last week I was driving over the Route 35 bridge and there was a truck pulled over and I didn't even think twice about it. I just kept on driving because it's not that uncommon. You know, when people hear Neptune Beach or the Jersey Shore, everybody thinks of the reality show, the Jersey Shore. This area could be, could not be further from that stereotype. Couldn't be further. Because this area where you guys live, Michael, it's beautiful. There's beautiful yards, very well-kept, tidy, perfectly manicured homes,

really nice residential areas where you see people out walking and jogging and children out with their scooters. It's nothing at all like the Jersey Shore gang where everybody's passed out drunk on the beach. It was nonstop party. This is a real family area. Do I have that right, Michael? Yeah, pretty much family area. You know, um asbury park is going through a like a gentrification and uh it's coming back you know from where it was years ago kind of uh buildings falling apart a lot of uh million dollar investments going in along the beach. So it attracts a lot of people to the area. And Asbury Park, also a very small ocean grove, which is part of Neptune. And then you've got Bradley Beach and Avon, Belmar, Spring Lake.

So there's a lot of small, small towns. If you're driving through, you can pass through, you know, in 10 minutes, you could pass through five towns. So, but it's, you know, there's some middle class, some, you know, some upper class areas. And it's just a good mix of people and businesses. And it's just, you know, it's a nice place. The beach is nearby. Yeah. And I guess the point of my analysis of the area is, you know, I see everything through the eyes of a felony

prosecutor and a crime victim. And immediately, you know, Dr. Bethany Marshall, psychoanalyst out of LA, what wrong or right, when you see a beautiful neighborhood and children out on their scooters and people walking and cars pulling into the driveway, it gives you a sense of security and safety. And that's the backdrop for finding her car stashed on the side of the road with the keys in it. I mean, this is an area where there's a low crime rate. So right or wrong, we start trying to figure out where Sarah, she's not in her car and she's left the keys in the car. Nancy, a part of good mental health is living one's life with the illusion that the world is a safe place. This is one of the things we're taught at the beginning of our training as

psychologists and psychoanalysts, that people who come into treatment who are nervous that their car is going to plunge off the road or they're going to lose all their money, they're going to be a victim of a crime, usually have anxiety disorders. So in a case like this, you have a car parked on the bridge, you have a tranquil, calm, beautiful neighborhood, as you said, children on scooters. You want people in a community like that to live with an illusion of safety because that imparts a sense of well-being. And furthermore, when someone then sees a car on the side of the road, they're not going to think the worst in a case like this. They're going to think, well, maybe somebody got sleepy or tired, so they pulled over to take a

nap because they didn't think they should keep driving. So in an unfortunate way, this illusion of safety or that nothing bad can ever happen is the kind of environment in which these kinds of crimes can blossom because nobody's looking over their shoulder. Nobody's looking to say, is somebody stalking Sarah? Is somebody obsessed with her? Is somebody targeting her? They're just thinking of a beautiful, young, artistic woman in a tranquil community enjoying her life. That's what people are thinking.

Oh, and I don't know if you've seen her picture, but I've studied it very carefully. The long, black, silky hair. She had perfect skin and beautiful eyes. And she was, I mean, compared to me, who's 5'1", she seems tall. She had perfect skin and beautiful eyes. And she was, I mean, compared to me, who's 5'1", she seems tall and thin and statuesque. She looks athletic. So, Bobby Chacon, with that in mind, with the area in mind that Alex and Michael are describing, you don't think immediately crime. I mean, in that area, I would think, oh, disabled car. Well, yeah, you try not to jump to any conclusions. And as an investigator, you go in with,

you know, open eyes, but you also don't want to go in too naive because as we say, you know, in those early minutes of an investigation like that, if you don't handle it properly, there are things and steps that you lose if you don't take them and and you can never go back and so you do want to you know an investigator this is why maybe investigators suffer from you know certain anxiety disorders but we always you know think the worst and hope for the best because if you don't think the worst and you you skip steps you could lose valuable evidence and valuable information that you just won't be able to go back and get. And so when you see a car like that and it's

parked there and it has the keys in it, it does start to raise that level of concern. And why would the person leave the keys? If this is a disabled car and they're going to help, you would secure the vehicle before you walk away. Exactly. So that's my first thing that would elevate my concern in this case. Take a listen to our friend Tony Yates at Channel 7, WABC. Our top story this half hour, the mystery of a missing 19-year-old from Monmouth County. Sarah Stern was last seen late Friday night. Now, her car was found, but searches for her have turned up empty. Now her family and

authorities hope a reward will help lead to clues. New Jersey reported Tony Yates in Belmar, the very latest on this story. Tony. Yes, exactly. No word, nothing. No one's heard anything from 19-year-old Sarah Stern. Of course, the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office has taken over this investigation, but we're here in Belmar right now because you see this behind me, the Route 35 bridge. That is where her car was found on Friday night. She's 19 years old again. She is from Neptune, where she lived with her father and a grandmother. Her father, Michael Stern, actually told us by phone today that he was with investigators trying to come up with anything that may lead them to his daughter.

She left home on Friday night. Then hours later, almost in the morning, her car, according to published reports in 1994, Delta 88 was found on the bridge over the Shark River Inlet. The New Jersey State Police Missing Persons Unit and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are also assisting in this investigation. A reward is now being offered in this case. Of course, police are saying at this point, if anyone has any information on the whereabouts of 19-year-old Sarah Stern from Neptune,

to please give police a call. With all of this swirling, Michael Stern, I can only imagine what was running through your mind when you decided to pack up and come home and drive through the night, starting around 3 a.m. to get from Florida all the way back home. Well, it was a little bit of panic set in. And I started making phone calls even before I left, just trying to get all the couple luggage and some things into the car so I could, you know, we could get moving, you know, on the road.

And making phone calls to try to find out if anybody knew anything else, you know, where Sarah was. You know, we had already, you know, made a few calls and nothing came out of that except that nobody could find Sarah. She wasn't with friends. She wasn't with neighbors. She wasn't with family. So it was just kind of a panic for hours during the drive. How did you control that feeling when you were driving? Because I remember when I had just packed up the children, everything,

and we had flown back home to New York and got everybody bathed and in bed, and my mom called. It was about 11 o'clock at night and she said, they put your dad on life support. And I remember standing in that exact spot in our apartment and I said,

Daddy, just hang on. I'm on the way. I'm coming right now. And I remember it sounded like a siren in my throat screaming, okay, everybody get your clothes back on right now. Get yourself packed. And I started throwing everything back in our bags we had just unpacked. In about 15 minutes, we were all out at 11.15 at night on the sidewalk trying to hail a cab. And I didn't know how we were going to get home at that time of the night,

but I had to get home. And the next hours were like a horrible odyssey. When I was far away from my dad and I couldn't get to him. What was going through your mind and your heart and your body as you're driving that very, very hours and hours from Florida back to New Jersey? Well, we were all just trying to figure out, you know, what happened and why the car was up there. And that was, you know, whether it was ran out of gas or mechanical problems.

And Sarah was just, you know, she was hiding and didn't want anybody to find her because, you know, she felt bad. Sarah would take things to heart, and she would feel that sometimes if things were her fault, she just wanted to disconnect from the world. But nothing seemed right. Nothing at all seemed right from her grandma calling me to see if I could get in touch with her and find out what's going on. But it was kind of police, the Coast Guard. There was a lot of people involved in the search and looking for her to try to find out where she was.

And the panic just stayed. And it just didn't get any better during the day because we still couldn't figure things out. There was a lot of strange things. Right. Police then doing an alternate investigation. Take a listen to police body cam audio as they enter the Stearns' home. There's a teenager that's supposed to be driving.

It's parked on top of that bridge. We're getting no answer at the house. I have an open door at the house. I might go inside and make sure everything's kosher. I want to make sure we don't have a jumper. All right, man. Snout yourself real well. That's it, safe boys!

Hello? Hello? That's it, safe boys! Police go to her house. The back door is open, and the lights are on, and there is no sign of Sarah. Hello? Where is Sarah Strong? Nancy Grace, signing off.

Goodbye, friend.