Dateline NBC - The Stranger

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

In this Dateline classic, Brittany Tavar disappears from her home, along with her dogs, leaving friends and family baffled and worried. Keith Morrison reports. Originally aired on NBC on March 17, 2013.

She had this look of absolute terror on her face. She was scared. She really, really was afraid, and I don't really know why. She was a sunny free spirit who had yearned to make it in Hollywood. But she made headlines instead when she vanished. One day she was gone, her pets were gone. I knew that something happened. Did something drive her away? Or maybe someone? There was that old friend turned enemy. They seemed to be very passionate about hating each other.

There was the new friend, young and handsome, a man of mystery. He said, I'm not what people think I am. And I thought, I wonder what that means. Tonight, police are on the trail from her beach resort on the Atlantic to the deep woods near the Pacific. I told her this could end up killing you. A brother and sister desperate to learn the truth. It's just chilling for me to think about that.

A Keith Morrison mystery. The Stranger. They noticed at first in her favorite place, the private beach club that faces out over the South Atlantic. Took a little longer for the story to spread, up and down the historic streets of this oldest of all American cities, until it reached the ears of a young reporter named Justine Griffin. Crime beats at Augustine, Florida Times.

This one was definitely one of the most bizarre that I've covered. One day, her car, and she was gone, her pets were gone. The she Justine is talking about was a local fixture here in St. Augustine, a striking blonde of a certain age named Brittany Tavar, who had, without a word to anyone,

up and vanished. Hardly a big story at first. After all, people do come and go around St. Augustine, and this was July 2010. Heat ratcheting up. Good time to head north, maybe? Just as the weeks went on, it sort of got a little bit more strange. A little bit strange? In fact, the disappearance of Brittany Tavar was about to become the biggest and perhaps strangest story of Justine Griffin's young career.

Not just that Brittany disappeared, but that she'd vanished on such an important day for her. The day she was due to appear in the St. Augustine court and bring charges against a bitter enemy. She had an enormous amount of anxiety. This is Brittany's sister, Pat Bellamont. Pat lived clear across the country in Portland, Oregon, so she couldn't do much about her sister's worries,

couldn't help her confront her nemesis in court. But Pat had been aware since girlhood Brittany was pretty good at looking after herself. We were polar opposites. I was much more academically oriented than she was and sort of more staid and analytical. She was very agile and athletic, and I wasn't. So I spent my childhood following her up trees and trying to jump over creeks, and she could do it, and I couldn't.

Scattered family, five siblings in all, Andrew Bellema, one of Brittany's three brothers, kept track of her from his place up in the Northeast. She was very extroverted. She marched to the beat of her own drum. So when they heard she was missing, Pat and Andrew had to consider the possibility that Brittany had decided to try something new.

Well, she very much had a sense of inventing herself, you know, her whole life. Like the time she went to Hollywood years ago, wanted to be a movie star. She wanted certain things in life, and she just thought if she believed in herself and she went out and tried, you know, she would get those things.

Didn't get those things, up to now at least. But she had some family money, settled comfortably in St. Augustine, took up photography, sold real estate, bought a nice house, and joined a private beach club called the Serenata, where she developed a group of very close friends. For example, Brenda Lemke. The thing about Brittany, she was a single woman living on her own, and I just thought she was very strong and very brave. Yeah, she had money. She didn't have to

worry about that, but still, you know, she had to create a life for herself, a social environment. She was interesting. She wasn't boring. Joanna Simmons was also a friend from the Serenade. I invited her to come to choir one night at this church that I was going to, and she came and seemed to really enjoy it. And so she joined the choir. Was she a spiritual woman? I think she had a very much of a spiritual side to her. They enjoyed her personality. You know, she could be very sort of sparkly and vivacious. I was impressed that she had so many close friends who cared so much about her. So, because Brittany's family members lived so far away,

it was friends like Joanna and Brenda who first tried to solve the puzzle of her absence that week in July. I called a few times, but I didn't hear anything. And then Thursday came, and I called Thursday, and I knew. I knew Thursday that something happened. So Brenda called Brittany's family, and they asked her to go around to the house. But frankly, just looking at the place from the outside, she didn't see any sign of foul play. Back in Portland, Brittany's sister, Pat, didn't know quite what to do.

I actually happened to have a longtime friend who's a police officer, so I called him, and I said, what do we do? And he says, well, you know, just get a locksmith. Send Brenda back with a locksmith and have her go into the house. Which, by now, several days after Brittany dropped out of sight, Brenda did. And inside, nothing seemed amiss.

Although she had apparently taken some of her pets, her two little dogs. Her dogs were gone, Huey and Coo Bear, her little white pigeons. But Brittany also had cats, and they were still in the house, alone. One of the doors was open for the cats to go in and out. Some people do that, it's true. But Brittany? My sister loved her cats very, very much, and she would never just go away on a trip and leave them to fend for themselves.

Where had Brittany gone? Why would she take her dogs, leave her cats, and take off, vanish? On the very day she was all set to appear in court to resolve a bitter feud, a feud which, she told her family, kept her in constant fear. It was very strange that all of a sudden the day that she was supposed to be in court, now she's gone. Coming up, what was Britney running from? And did this free spirit sometimes trust the wrong people? Over the years, eight different people lived in her spare room. Something was off. something very wrong here in the dripping heat of the St. Augustine summer. Friends of Brittany Tavar had been unable to reach her for several days.

Everybody that knows Brittany knows that she would never just take up and leave like that without telling me. So Brittany's family, frantic but far away in opposite corners of the country, called Locksmith, asked Brittany's friends to go inside her house, have a look around, and the place seemed perfectly normal. Except one or two little things didn't quite make sense. There were some anomalies, like the air condition was blasting, and she never would have left the air condition blasting.

Oh, and there was one more thing, though. It wasn't so much something wrong as it was just a little too right. One of the friends who searched Brittany's house was Tim Martineau, the man Brittany had been dating. She was a little unorganized, but the house was very clean, and so it looked like maybe somebody was going somewhere, but... Somebody had fixed the place up. Yes.

The good news was everything was tidy. There was no sign of a crime scene. The bad news is the home looked too clean. It certainly could be that Brittany simply cleaned the place more thoroughly than usual, then packed up and left, and left the back door open for the cats. The police told the family that in the absence of foul play, there wasn't much they could do. No law against a grown woman taking off without telling anyone.

We hired a private investigator who started looking around to find something that would get the police involved in the case. Well, the PI made his inquiries. Over the next few days, Brittany's family began their own investigation and soon discovered a few very Brittany-esque secrets, things she had never told them about. We didn't know that over the years, eight different homeless people lived in her spare room. She usually had some kind of an arrangement with these fellows that they would help her with stuff. Like the first guy helped with the yard work. I mean, she would never tell us that because, of course, we would say, bad idea. You know, you can't just invite strangers to live in your house, you know. That's a very interesting thing that a single woman living on her own would do.

She wasn't really practical. I mean, the risk of it, either she would have dismissed it or maybe that was what was interesting about it. But I think she really liked the idea of helping people. It's kind of like bringing home a bird with a broken wing and you're going to fix it or something like that. Right. Well, she also grew up in a family where serving people and serving the poor was just part of the environment that we lived in. Brittany had recently been hosting a handsome young man named Joe Roberts, whom she'd met at a Barnes & Noble store.

She was trying to start up some enterprise, and he was going to help her do the computer work. According to friends, Brittany was a doting landlady, bought young Joe new clothes, even a computer. Brittany's friends got to know him some when she showed him off down at the Serenata Beach Club. Here she is. Joanne, Joanne, I want you to meet the guy in the hot tub. He's so good looking. He's so nice. He seemed like he could be my brother, my younger brother. He just seemed like such a nice guy and that he was just, he just really wanted to try.

They accepted him as somebody Brittany was trying to help and who might help her. Very charming. I thought he was well-mannered. He thought the girls were really shallow his age, that they just wanted to go out and have like one night stands and he didn't want to be involved in relationships like that. He really wanted sincere relationships with women. In addition to which he was, those women could plainly see a bit of a hottie. And of course, you know how gossip can be. Good looking young guy. Brittany had treated very kindly. He stayed in the master bedroom? Where did she stay? She had a room over by the pool, the swimming pool.

She liked to listen to the fountain at night. It helped her sleep. There had been speculation there was something romantic or sexual about inviting this young man in. You know, I joked with her about it. She would always say, no, he likes Megan Fox, and no, he's not interested, I'm too old. Still, who really knew what went on behind closed doors?

Anyway, they couldn't ask Joe. He never stayed anywhere very long, and he wasn't around anymore to shed light on his ex-landlady's disappearance. So, still playing amateur sleuths, Brittany's family now asked the obvious question. Was there anyone here in St. Augustine who might want to harm Brittany? And the answer was a resounding yes. Friends like Joanna Simmons told how at the Serenata Beach Club in the days before she disappeared, Brittany seemed terrified.

I saw her one day leaving the hot tub area to go into the pool. She had this look of absolute terror on her face. Why Brittany was terrified began with a very weird story about a neighbor she'd gotten to know. This woman, her name is Ann Leighton. Everybody knew Brittany. And if she stopped you, she'd want to chat and, you know, get into your life. You couldn't get away from her for a while.

No. She's a busybody. And if Anne doesn't speak very kindly of Brittany now, you have to understand it was very different at the beginning. Then they were friendly enough to become partners in a little dog breeding venture. She wanted to breed Huey with one of mine. But then, complications. Brittany began a romance with a fellow named Billy, friend of Ann and her husband's. Billy, as the new boyfriend, moved right in, and everything was hunky-dory until, well,

love is unpredictable. And in this case, it didn't last. They got into some stupid fight. So Billy calls up and said, I'm coming to get my stuff. And she said, come by yourself. But Billy didn't go there alone. He was accompanied by Ann Leighton and her husband. Brittany said, don't come in the house. And they came in. But she was cussing and screaming and whatever. And I said, okay, I'm leaving. What happened? She hit me over the head with a wine bottle. She was sitting on top of me, strangling me.

And Michael and Billy called her off. Two sides to every story, of course. Brittany said Anne and her two men refused to leave. You would think that's her house. If I say get out of my would think, that's her house. If I say, get out of my house, you should leave my house. And yes, it was true they fought, said Brittany, but in a report to police, Brittany claimed she didn't start it.

In fact, after the fight subsided, it was Brittany who called the police to accuse Ann of assaulting her. But... They went over and talked to Ann Ann and then they came back and arrested Brittany. Arrested Brittany? But why her? She admitted that she put her throat, her hand on Ann's throat and they arrested her based

on that. They charged Brittany with battery. She spent the night in jail. It was a very traumatic experience. She called me up crying. In court, Brittany was sentenced to probation, anger management classes, community service, and a one-year order to stay away from Anne Lydon. But Anne, oddly perhaps, chose to be closer to Brittany, at least physically. She and her husband joined Brittany's sanctuary, the Serenata Beach Club.

It felt so bad for her because that was a place that she really, really got peace. And she was able to socialize with people and enjoy herself there. And then, all of a sudden, here they show up in the hot tub all the time. And before long, the conflict, the growing fear, was all Brittany could talk about. She was fearful for her life, and I told her, this could end up killing you. Coming up, did Brittany's terror drive her hundreds of miles away? Her dogs were found roaming the streets. That was just the beginning of a long, strange tale.

They were following her credit card transactions. North Carolina, Idaho, Oregon. When Dateline continues. What a respite was the Serenata Beach Club. What a lovely perch from which to enjoy the brilliant sun, the warm, soothing currents. But on those summer days in 2010, events at the Serenata were perhaps a little too warm.

Day after day, the sworn enemies faced each other across swimming pools and hot tubs. And all the while, Brittany seethed with an expanding collection of insults and incidents heaped on her by her ex-friend, Anne. I was like, Brittany, can't you just let this go? And she just, she couldn't let go of it. It was so, it was an obsession, actually. Brittany accused Anne of keying her car. So she began carrying around a video camera as a kind of a visual bodyguard. Until the day when Anne, tired of being taped,

swam over to the camera, at that point poolside, inside Brittany's bag. Yes, and I knocked the camera in the pool. She pushed my buttons. She went around telling the whole neighborhood, everybody, I'm scared for my life. It was after the dunking of the video camera that Brittany launched legal action against Ann. By this time, she'd invited Joe Roberts into her house, and so she enlisted the help of the handsome young boarder to prepare a DVD of the incident to show the judge. When she got to court, said Brittany, she was going to tell that judge just how dangerous she believed Ann was, that in fact, she was afraid Ann was going to kill her. I think all her friends made very clear she was quite traumatized by this. She was just very, very much afraid of this Ann. The court date was Wednesday, July 7, 2010. The morning arrived.

Ann came with her attorney, sat in court, waiting and waiting. And Brittany did not show. No, that was the very day she disappeared. A convenient reprieve for Ann? Too convenient? Bizarre, thought the crime reporter Justine Griffin, in light of how important that court date was to Brittany. She had become very obsessed with this restraining order.

Everything she was doing was to basically make sure this restraining order was going through. Perhaps Brittany was afraid to show up, afraid of what might happen? These were not necessarily genteel ladies then. No, no. They seemed to be very passionate about hating each other, especially toward the end. So in the days following Brittany's disappearance, some people around town

wondered just how much Anne Lydon knew or what she might have to do with it. After all, if anybody had a motive, it was Anne. Had all the anger,

the emotion, the bitterness finally culminated in some violent confrontation? Were they looking at you as a suspect, do you think? The media? Of course. That's the first thing you're going to think of. I'd already had all the news and the helicopters and all that, you know, filming the front of my house. The local police department got wind of it, of course.

That's basically where detectives started asking questions. But not very many questions, and not for long. In fact, according to Ann, there was really only one thing those detectives asked her. Did she know anything about where her arch enemy had gone? What did you tell them? I haven't seen her. He goes, that's all I need to know. Never heard from him again. And poof, just like that, the police ruled out any involvement on the part of Ann Lydon. There were other reasons, too, of course, for doing that, one of which was that Brittany was just fine

the day before she failed to show up in court. There had surveillance footage at this gas station that showed her getting out of her car, putting gas in it, and then driving away. Nothing unusual. And between the time that video was recorded on July 6th and court the next morning, it turned out Ann Leiden had an unassailable alibi. So, what could Brittany's family do? For all their efforts, they couldn't persuade the police that a crime had occurred, that something bad may have happened to Brittany. And thus the investigation stopped.

So, those who loved Brittany had no choice but to follow what leads there were on their own. We were keeping cool heads and being vigilant and trying to do everything possible, coaxing them to do things they hadn't done. Did my sister go on a cruise? Did she leave town for a week or something? Search this area. You haven't searched this area. Why haven't you done this? But they had also hired a private investigator, remember, and he had an idea. If they couldn't find Brittany, maybe somehow they could find her dogs. We were checking the pounds. We were doing anything and everything you can possibly imagine.

Word about the dogs spread. And a week after Brittany's disappearance, a call came in. And what do you know? A tiny white dog. It looked like a rabbit at first. Her dogs were found in Columbia, South Carolina. Ah. Without collars, just roaming the streets.

And they were both found separately. How did they manage to connect two dogs in Columbia, South Carolina, without collars, just roaming the streets. And they were both found separately. How did they manage to connect two dogs in Columbia, South Carolina, to her? She had the microchips implanted in the dogs with her information on them. So the veterinary clinic were able to scan them and figured out that these dogs are from Florida. And belong to Brittany. Now, all of a sudden, the case broke loose because one of the dogs is found two or three states away. No tags. Now finally there's probable cause.

There's no question. That was a key break. That was enough to get the police involved. But unfortunately, at that point, it was 11 days after she disappeared. Finally, St. Augustine police took over from the band of amateur sleuths. Pat flew to Florida to do what she could to help, met with the police, did the rounds of local media, tried to keep the search for her sister front and center in the public mind. The family long ago ruled out any possibility that this is just a purely innocent

departure for her. I mean, you know, that just is not possible that she would abandon her pets and, you know, stop calling her friends. I really felt that it was a short, a brief window of opportunity while there was still some publicity about the case. And then people will move on, there will be other stories. Quite reasonable worry, especially when the search for Brittany seemed to be going nowhere. Her picture had been everywhere. And had she been anywhere, somebody in Florida, somebody would have seen her picture. That's why we started to think she really has disappeared. And then suddenly a break. Almost two weeks after Brittany disappeared, the police

finally picked up her trail. Looked like she was on a long, winding road trip. What they found were her credit card transactions, which headed north from Florida to South Carolina, where her dogs were found. They were following her credit card transactions. There were transactions in North Carolina, Idaho, Oregon. The question was, was Brittany alone? Or was she with someone else?

Was she the driver? The willing passenger? Or was there something else going on? And what about that young drifter who disappeared along with Brittany? He said, I'm not what people think I am. And I thought, I wonder what that means. A spouse is late for dinner. A teenager stays out all night.

The awful sinking feeling when a loved one is out of touch. Usually, of course, everything writes itself. But not for the family of Brittany Tavar. In July of 2010, they found themselves stuck fast in the purgatory of missing persons. The place where families must go to wait for what they do not know. You alternate between it's not real, it isn't really happening, to having these terrible, terrible moments where you realize that something irreversible has happened. Brittany's two little dogs had been found abandoned by the side of the road three states away in South Carolina. Brittany loved those dogs, would never abandon them. And yet, the credit card record made it look like she had done exactly that, that she'd been driving her car clear across the country.

At last, a nationwide alert was issued for Brittany's car. Now, with the whole nation's law enforcement on watch, the answer to what happened to Brittany Tavar should not be long in coming. The family held its collective breath and waited and hoped. We were dealing with the bank authorities. They were talking to the police. If there's any activity, one guy had a pager on him with one of the cards. If anybody tries to put anything through on this card, our guy's pager is going to go off. But now the local police had been joined by U.S. Marshals and the FBI. And attention now turned to the young man who'd been living at Brittany's

house, the one she'd been showing off at the beach club, 26-year-old Joe Roberts. Seems that Joe had left around the same time as Brittany disappeared. And police now had to consider the distinct possibility that Brittany had simply washed her hands of the feud with Anne Lydon and taken off on a cross-country trip with young Joe. For Justine Griffin, that only made the story more interesting. I mean, living in her house for free, so... Makes you think, doesn't it? They thought maybe the two of them had just left, could have just gone on a trip together, just left town. No, really, it was all speculation. In fact, nobody had a clue what those two did.

And then another lucky break, or it seemed lucky. The good news, in mid-July, police found out that just four days after Brittany vanished, a cop stopped her Toyota on a highway out west. But Brittany wasn't driving. Joe was. On July 11th, Roberts was actually stopped by police in Wyoming for speeding. The bad news? That cop stopped the car before the alert went out. He wasn't looking for the car or Brittany or anybody. He said he didn't recall seeing a passenger, but then he wasn't looking for one. They let him go with a warning. And now that car and whoever was in it was long gone.

But that stop triggered a serious effort to find Joe Roberts. It was after that that they had released an arrest warrant for him with grand theft charges. So the investigation took a turn. The police hoping that finding Roberts would lead to finding Brittany. Once again, her family went to the public for help. What we really need is for the broadest possible audience of people to be looking for Joseph Roberts, because that's the linchpin. That's the key. That's the only way we're going to get an answer. The police went on TV, too, hoping to raise public awareness. We believe that the car is going to relate to people more so than him because it's a RAV4 dark blue color vehicle

with Florida tags. He pretty much can blend in with any crowd. Trouble was, police soon discovered, that only a few days after Brittany disappeared, just after the time of that traffic stop, the credit card trail abruptly ended. They must have stopped using the card. And without the credit card trail, the police had no idea where Roberts and Brittany were now, or if they were even still together. And if not, where was she and what was he up to? where Roberts and Brittany were now, or if they were even still together. And if not, where was she and what was he up to? What we're concerned about is, did he meet someone else at a coffee shop?

And is he living in someone's house right now? And that's why I think it's very important to get this story out as much as possible. And all that effort finally produced another break. Or what seemed like a break, and Justine's next big story. Police discovered somebody caught Roberts on videotape just four days after he and Brittany disappeared. There was surveillance footage of him walking into a Walmart in Ontario, Oregon, and him buying a tent and some clothes. Just him, no Brittany. But again, by the time somebody found the Walmart video and got it to the Florida police, Roberts was nowhere to be found.

So they had alerted police in that area, had started putting out flyers. It looked like from once he got to the Walmart, he was going to go off the grid with his tent to live in the woods. But just who was this kid anyway? What was his story before Brittany took him in? So, a lesson in recent history seemed in order.

The curious story of young Joe Roberts. He said to me something really interesting, which I thought was kind of stopped me for a second. He goes, I'm not what people think I am. And I thought, I wonder what that means. Coming up, that strange and charming drifter, was he hiding a shady past? The more I got to know him, the more he started scaring me. When Dateline continues. It's a strange thing, rather cruel actually,

how an answer so desperately sought can slip away just at the moment of capture. Police had finally sniffed out the trail left by Joe Roberts, the one person who seemed to know what happened to Brittany Tavar. But before they could catch up to Joe, he was gone in a puff of Oregon fog. Investigators had alerted police and law enforcement all the way up through Washington, past Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, because they thought he was headed in that direction. Meanwhile, investigators warned Brittany's family. What they were telling me had a history of falling off the radar screen.

And sure enough, that's just what he did. And days turned into weeks. Summer turned into fall. No sign of him. Police suspicions turned darker. I think it's important for us here in Florida not to lose interest and to not just be thinking and putting it off as this guy is 2,000 miles away

because he might still be in our backyard or coming back to our backyard for all we know. Life went on for the rest of the world, but not for those who loved Brittany Tavar and who knew full well that time is not on the side of the missing. I really did feel that the more time went on, the less likely we would be to find him. Brittany's family found themselves in a kind of limbo,

a barren landscape shared by more people than they had ever imagined was possible. People would say to me, oh, you need to talk to so-and-so, his sister disappeared. There are hundreds of thousands of missing persons, all heartbreaking stories. And you're just a number in a pool of people who are going through this, who have gone through this. Back in Florida, police had been digging up everything they could find about Joe Roberts.

As crime reporter Justine Griffin learned, Joe had been on the road, roaming the country, ran out of money about the time he got to St. Augustine, where he began living off the kindness of local women. He came here and got a job working as a clerk at a kangaroo gas station. And I guess when he couldn't afford to stay at a local motel, he would just sleep in this car. But this is how he came to know a few other women in St. Augustine. One of them was a co-worker, a single mother named Cheryl Davenport. Since Joe needed a place to stay, Cheryl invited him to her place. Put him in a spare bedroom right down the hall from Cheryl and her two little children.

He was a nice guy. He was always really good around the kids. So Cheryl wasn't worried about Joe. No reason to be, apparently. Joe has too much of a pretty boy face, wasn't very intimidating at all. I think I was more intimidating than he was. But then Cheryl began to tell us some rather more disturbing things about Joe. He told me that the reason why he left home, he had run some type of internet scheme to where he was getting people's credit card numbers and stuff like that. And they had found out. And so he took off. He confessed this to you? Yeah.

And he said that him and his family don't get along because they believe he has mental issues, severely messed up in the head, and that he was convinced he didn't have issues. When he moved in, said Cheryl, he told her he used to have a drug problem, but swore he'd stay clean. Certainly, at least while living with Cheryl and her family. He actually looked for a job for the first month. And then he slowly just got lazier and lazier. What was he doing?

He was going on drug binges. That's when the anger started coming out. The more I got to know him, the more he started scaring me and the more he started upsetting me. And that's when she says she demanded that Joe get out of her house. And then he was about this close into my face and he went like this, like he was going to punch me in the face. And I just looked at him with a dead stare and I was like, Joe, I was like, I swear to God, if you hit me, I will take you down. So he left and found Brittany,

who police would learn told her friends not long before she disappeared that she was getting a little exasperated with Joe, too. She said that she would come home and he would have gone through her stuff and that they got in a few little fights. I was kind of worried. I asked her about them. Like, you know, she would go, no, it's okay, it's okay.

Did you warn her? No, I did, I did. I warned her about having people into her house. And now, still no word. We still didn't stop believing that there was a chance that she was alive. Police rededicated their efforts to find the elusive Joe Roberts. We've run out of leads, frankly, when it comes to his trail going west. It's less populated than we are, and if he doesn't have his vehicle on the road and he's keeping a low profile, hopefully somebody will see him in a store when he goes for some provisions or groceries.

And that's what we want to turn up the heat on I mean he you know We are looking for him, and there's no question about that then Sure enough we figured it would be something trite or petty that he did caught for Sure enough, that's what happened Coming up the drifter makes a mistake and britney's family learns the truth it's just chilling for me to think about that for three long months britneyavar was just missing.

And all the searching since by agencies from the Canadian Mounties to the FBI have produced no sign of Brittany or Joe Roberts, the young boarder who disappeared along with her. Nothing. Not a thing. And then, on October 12, 2010... He was caught in Seattle in a grocery store in the area trying to steal lunch meat. His captor was a clerk in a grocery store. He wasn't a sheriff. He wasn't a police officer. He was somebody that was employed by a grocery store to deter theft.

But it wasn't until after the Seattle police showed up and arrested Roberts on the shoplifting charge that they discovered, this was one very wanted man. And so called the police in St. Augustine, Florida. Sometimes we just have to count on luck and sometimes we have to count on their mistake. And in this case, I think he made a mistake and we had a little luck on our side. And then a little more luck. They had found Brittany Tavares' car parked in like a North Seattle library parking lot. The keys had been locked inside of it, actually. So the police had the car, but no Brittany. It wasn't long before policemen from Florida were sitting in a Seattle interrogation room with young Mr. Roberts.

Her family waited again. It's time to hear what Roberts would say. Only he could resolve the mystery, why she'd been out of touch for months. You always hold out a small amount of hope that she would be alive, and you never give up hope. And then, within three hours, there in that police station, Joel Roberts finally answered the question that had been hanging over everybody half hope, half dread. What happened to Brittany Tavar? The answer was perhaps the most dreadful story this young crime reporter had yet written. Taken right from the confession, Roberts gave police. She woke up early in the morning of her court case and woke him up very angry that something wasn't done correctly or that he didn't do it at all and was bugging him early in the morning, trying to get him out of bed, yelling at him.

Now, why would she do that? Didn't take but a minute for her friends to figure it out. This whole big argument with Joe was about him not being able to get this DVD or CD up to perfection about what they were going to take to court. The court case against Ann Lydon, that is. And so her friend speculated about what happened that last morning of her life. Said she must have vented her temper on the man who, according to a former landlady,

had a drug habit, possible mental health issues, and an anger problem. I think it just got to the point where he got pushed to the point of no return. In a statement to police, Roberts said they argued the night before her disappearance, and then the next morning, Brittany went off about something. Which is when... He grabbed a hammer and hit her in the head a couple of times that anger issue again right and she was laying on their kitchen on the kitchen floor bleeding and in the report he says there was lots and lots of blood and at first he tried to stuff her body in the attic of their house but he said that she was too heavy for him to carry all the way up those stairs and then decided he was going to leave town and dump her body in the woods.

Roberts would tell investigators that he brought the dogs with him to buy him some time because he knew people that knew her well would think it was strange that she just left without her animals. It was a shock, of course. And then Joe Roberts answered another question, this one with no good answer. Where was Brittany? She was found on a state road, sort of where some homeless camps in the area, but it's mainly just woods. One of the most terrible things would be to know that someone you loved died in fear,

you know, died in a moment of terror and pain. And that was a very, very hard thing for me to accept. It just was, even today, it's just chilling for me to think about that. But at least... We never would have found the body if he hadn't told us. You know, I mean, it was in a forest somewhere. I mean, the likelihood, you know, maybe it would show up in 20 years, but we wouldn't have found it. Having offered his detailed confession to the police,

Roberts pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. But ultimately, his case did not go to trial. After years of legal wrangling, Roberts pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on an amended indictment in May 2014. And you still believe this plea is in your best interest? Yes, sir. And was sentenced to 30 years in a Florida state correctional facility. As Brittany's family struggles with the aftermath of her loss, her friends look after Brittany's dogs.

They're in great shape, happy, healthy. They're really good dogs, you know. Brittany would have wanted that. She would have wanted, you know, somebody that loves them to have them. And her friends mourn, as does her family. My sister was the one that my parents worried about the most. You know, she was the one they were concerned about because she had the hardest time getting her feet on a path in life, finding her way.

We never, ever, ever dreamed that anything like this would happen, that anything violent would happen to her. I guess you have a point from which you move on, but there really isn't closure. And that actually is something that the homicide detectives know. There really isn't closure. You know, that's a cliche that people use, but there's no closure. Brittany Tavar lived life on her own terms. Naive, maybe. Reckless, sometimes. And it cost her dearly. She just thought she was invincible. She didn't think anything bad would happen.

Well, that's part of who she was. She did have a very big heart. So she did, and lived out loud and was exuberant and generous. And for those who loved her, is eternally missed for all of those things. She was my sister, and I've been robbed of the rest of my life with my sister and I've been robbed of the rest of my life with my sister. I've been robbed of that relationship. I've been robbed of those conversations. You know, I've been robbed of that friendship. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.