Wild Crime: Ain't She Purty? | S4 Ep. 1

Hey there, 2020 podcast listeners.

This is Deborah Roberts, co-anchor of 2020.

We're back with a new season of Wild Crime, a thrilling series from ABC News Studios about

a disappearance in the Alaskan wilderness and a hunt for a killer that leads investigators

across the country.

Here's 11 Skulls, Episode 1, Ain't She Pretty? Oh, my God. I don't know if my daughter's being fed, taking care of her, if she's still alive, if she's getting in.

Alaska's huge.

Samantha could absolutely have been anywhere.

I want her home.

Keep my sister alive.

Please help find my daughter.

Secrets in the wilderness. Beautiful yet treacherous landscapes.
These are the stories of investigators who solve murders in wild places. Ingrid hit a new record.
The most snowfall for this time of year. Some folks haven't been able to get their cars out.
Working for days to remove all of the snow. February in Alaska, it's dark most of the time.
You wake up, it's dark, and you get off work, it's dark. There's a lot of things people do to get through our long winters.
A lot of people like myself drink a lot of coffee. Coffee is an important element for the Alaskan.
You'll see coffee stands and coffee shops almost on every corner.

They're usually being run by young women.

A lot of times they are working alone.

Samantha Koenig was working in a coffee stand. She's an 18-year-old girl, mostly interested in her friends, you know, prom, school.
She had a boyfriend, doing things that most teenagers do, you know, with her future and her dreams, you know, and her mind. 911, what is the location of the emergency? I am at Common Ground Espresso on Old Seward's Tudor.
My daughter works at the Common Grounds Espresso. She's been missing since she got off work last night.
What's your daughter's name? Samantha Tessalitacone. You got officers in your way.
Got a call towards the end of shift about a possible abduction. I'm a barista at a coffee shop.
I get there and talk to the barista's father and her boyfriend. What they told me was Mr.
Koenig's daughter worked at the coffee shop. She didn't come home last night.
I was concerned when he showed up at 8.15 to pick her up and she wasn't here. And I think at 11.55, he got a text message on his phone.
They received a text from her saying she was angry at her boyfriend and wasn't going to be home. I saw someone in her truck at 3 o'clock this morning.
In her truck? Yes, sir. At home? Yeah.
Sometime in the night, they found somebody rummaging through Samantha's truck that was parked out in front of her house and chased after him. But the guy got away.
Any reason we didn't report it? I just figured that she just had something to get something out of her truck. So I'm trying to put all this together.
I have a father and boyfriend who say that a girl didn't come home. Somebody broke into a car, but they didn't call the police.
That would be the most logical thing in my mind. Your girlfriend's missing, you get this weird text,

and now somebody's rummaging through her truck.

Why didn't you call the police?

I don't know.

She, some guy...

Kind of raises red flags, like, what is going on here?

Why are you reporting this?

And then getting mad at me for asking you questions.

Yeah.

So in my mind, I'm thinking,

maybe she's got another boyfriend somewhere,

and she didn't want to come home, and I'm leaning more towards that than I am in abduction. But I learned a long time ago in my career, be careful of your opinions and stick to facts.
I'm thinking, I don't know if this is truly an abduction, but we still have to investigate it as if it was.

So at that point, I call Sergeant Markowitz.

My name is Slavomir Markowitz.

I'm a retired sergeant

with the Anchorage Police Department.

I am originally from Poland

and I have an engineering degree,

but the police work was something that always fascinated me.

So I applied to the English Police Department,

and I was hired.

That was one of the happiest days in my life.

I was at my desk in the homicide unit.

The officer told me that we have a case of a missing person, Samantha Koenig. She was supposed to get a ride home from her boyfriend.
When he arrived, she wasn't there. At the Anchorage Police Department, we were closely with the FBI, and they offered their help.

I'm Kat Nelson, and I'm a special agent with the FBI.

Samantha was kind of your typical teenager to me.

She seemed to have a close-knit group of friends that cared a lot about her.

Samantha was living at her father's house.

Her boyfriend would also stay there as well. James Koning is Samantha Koning's father.
He's also known as Sonny by his closest friends. And he's a really sweet person.
A biker-type fellow.

Loves his Harley.

In a lot of people's minds, if you're a biker guy, of course you're a bad person.

Samantha was his only biological child.

Samantha was his world.

I've got 100% custody of Samantha, and I have had since she was about two years old. Her mother's around.
She is worried for Samantha's safety. My name is Kaylee, and Samantha is my younger sister.
We have the same mom. When we were younger, we did live together.
She wanted to make everyone laugh. I was always like the shy one.
Samantha has the confidence, so it's almost like she got me out of my bubble. She would like to write music, write poems.
She was really good at it. Samantha and her dad were very close.
James Koenig said that it would be totally out of her character to just walk away and not inform him. But on the other hand, it's a coffee stand

right in the center of the big commercial area.

It would be very unusual for someone to, you know, disappear

without anybody noticing.

From the very beginning, the police are wondering,

well, how true can this be?

If you're that frantic about this missing 18-year-old, you don't call the cops, like, what is going on here? Several officers were at the scene. We searched the coffee stand, collecting evidence.
I worked and worked and and worked trying to find evidence of any kind inside that coffee hut. I threw fingerprint powder everywhere, and I was looking for anything and everything, not just fingerprints.
I was looking for items a suspect may have left behind, items she may have left behind, and I couldn't find anything. Not only did I not find anything, there was no sign of struggle.
Now, there was another barista who was supposed to come in and open up that morning, which she did. But cash was missing out of the cash drawer.
It's really abnormal to walk in and find everything, you know, not taken care of, not closed up. You know, Sammy was a diligent worker.

There was talk about whether it was really an abduction

or was it a boyfriend or was it somebody that she knew and they were just stealing the money to go away somewhere. It seems like Alaska has more than its share of missing persons cases.
And a lot of that is not crime related, but just wilderness. Anchorage is a city, but we're surrounded by mountains and forests and there's still very much a kind of remote feeling to it.
It can be very difficult to find somebody who goes missing in Alaska because it is such a massive wilderness. There are bears and moose.
There are huge parts of the state that are not even on a road system that you can only access by plane. During the winter, there are people that fall through ice on snow machines.
A lot of people go missing and are never found. There was no idea where Samantha was.
She disappeared from Anchorage, but Samantha could absolutely have been anywhere. Rapper Sean Diddy Combs was a kingmaker.
He had wealth, fame, and power. What's up? Welcome to New York! Until it all came crashing down.
Federal investigators raiding two homes owned by hip-hop mogul Sean Diddy Combs. I'm Brian Buckmeyer, an ABC News legal contributor.
As Diddy heads to trial, we trace his remarkable rise and

fall and what could be next. Listen to Bad Rap, The Case Against Diddy, a new series from ABC

Audio. Listen now, wherever you Robin Roberts here.
Hey guys, it's George Stephanopoulos here. Hey everybody, it's Michael Strahan here.
Wake up with Good Morning America. Robin, George, Michael, GMA, America's favorite number one morning show.
The morning's first breaking news, exclusive interviews, what everyone will be talking about that day. Put some good in your morning and start your day with GMA.
Good morning, America. Put the good in your morning.
GMA 7A on ABC. The night that Samantha disappeared, Samantha's boyfriend got a text message on his phone from Samantha's phone.
Text said something to the effect of, I'm going to spend a couple of days with friends. Let Dad know.
Twain tried to call her. He sent texts back to her.
He was totally confused. So we're wondering, who are these friends? What's her circle look like? Is there any truth to that text message? Samantha's dad certainly was suspicious of that text message.
The way the text was written didn't sound like Samantha at all. Things just didn't seem to add up.
And a little bit later, in the process of talking to everybody in this investigation,

I asked about video because I saw there was video cameras there.

It's 2012. It's not like 80s or 90s where you build your cases only by fingerprints and witnesses.

You know, now you look for video evidence.

That's the first thing you do.

Later in the afternoon, when we finally had the video,

we played it in the Cyber Crimes Unit office.

We all wanted to see that video.

The lieutenant, the captain, patrol officers,

and some detectives from my unit.

We played it time and time again. In the video, you can see Samantha is closing up for the night in the coffee stand, cleaning and wiping things down.
It's late at night, so there aren't many coffee drinkers that are driving up to the stand. And then you can see somebody walking up.
You don't see a lot of people just walk up as people are driving a vehicle. Samantha goes to the window.
So she starts making coffee. And she appears to be engaging with the person.
At one point, she turns towards the window, and she reacts. I vividly remember Samantha doing this and putting her hands up.
She then walks across the coffee stand and turns the lights off. Samantha took the money from the cash register.
Then Samantha puts her coat on. That was the moment where a lot of detectives focused on.
She casually pulled her hair from behind the coat and spread it around the coat. Some detectives were saying, well look, you know, she just behaves normally, You know, there is no fear.
She's, you know, just like getting ready to go out. And then this individual just jumped straight into the coffee hut.
The windows on the coffee huts are usually pretty high up off the ground. So this individual just leapt into the coffee hut through the window just very effortlessly.

It had to be somebody that was taller and definitely very physically fit to be able to do it with such ease.

There's no audio to the video. What is he telling her? What is she saying back to him? And then they both leave.
They walk side by side through the parking lot. It looked like they both walked out peacefully.
There's no struggle. We didn't know what to make of it.
There are police watching this, some of whom are theorizing that this is planned and staged and that Samantha is in on it. Some officers thought that, you know, there was no resistance, there was no fight.
He seems calm and she seems calm. Do they know each other? Maybe she took the money and just wanted to have a good time somewhere.
Did she leave willingly? Did she not leave willingly? Also, right next to the light switch, there's an alarm. If she was in danger, why didn't she hit the alarm? She had a perfect chance to press the alarm button.
She didn't do that. All of the investigators, both APD and FBI, were trying to really understand what the circumstances were of that video.
The text message from Samantha's phone saying that she was not going to be coming home. Between that text message and the video where you can see Samantha walking out, she's not being dragged.
This is a well-traveled, well-lit area. Who would do this in the wide open stretches of, you know, Anchorage.

There was definitely debate.

Did Samantha leave willingly or was this a situation

where she was being forced out?

My background is in psychology and forensic psychology.

I applied to the Bureau and got in in 2004 and was fortunate enough to get assigned to Alaska,

and I've been here ever since.

When I first started in the Bureau,

Jolene was already an agent at the office.

She was obviously a phenomenal agent. It was always my dream and my goal to work a case with her.
I was very happy that Catherine was going to be involved. She's just kind of got a brain and a knack for picking things up and putting pieces together.
Working in Alaska, we're working with our local and state partners all the time. My name is Jeffrey Bell.
I came up here in 1984. I worked in Prudhoe Bay in the oil fields as a operator in a refinery up there, and then I applied to be an Anchorage police officer.
I worked for the Anchorage Police Department, but I was also sworn as a U.S. Marshal slash FBI investigator.
We rely on each other a lot. We work together a lot.
It's a very, very close working relationship. And that really is what solves these cases.
As we were analyzing the video, we focused on the moment that she walked out with somebody. Initially we're focused on the very first part of it.
When we first see this person coming into contact with Samantha when they're initially leaving... And that was about 8.20 p.m.
We were able to see her leave the scene, so looking at the rest of that video would not have been necessarily the highest of priorities early on. But when we looked at that video for longer time.

We noticed that there was like a light showing up on the counter.

The light would come on, and then it would disappear.

So we thought that it could be a phone.

And then we looked further at video, and I was surprised. We saw that after 11 p.m.
the person came to the coffee stand. That person was wearing a headlight, you know, like right in the center of the head.
He spent some time in the coffee stand looking for something. Samantha left her cell phone at the coffee stand, and so it appeared that the individual went back to the coffee stand to retrieve her phone.
That also coincided with the fact that the first text from Samantha's phone came at 11.30pm. So you have that person entering the coffee stand after 11pm, 11 p.m.
and then 11.30 p.m. So we have that person entering the coffee stand after 11 p.m.,

and then 11.30 p.m.,

a text comes from Samantha's phone.

Once we found that somebody returned to the coffee shop

and took her cell phone,

obviously we became very concerned

that something bad had happened to her.

Someone has clearly abducted Samantha,

and the clock is ticking. We're hoping to find Samantha.
We believe that we will be able to find her alive and and we carry that hope within us. The first 48 hours or so in any case is important to try to develop as many leads as you can.
Because James Koenig and Wayne didn't report her missing the night before, we were already way behind the power curve in Samantha's disappearance. Friends and family describe Samantha as someone who makes you feel like a best friend.
She's funny. She's out there.
I was surprised on how many people actually knew her. The city of Anchorage was on heightened alert.
I can't believe this happened here in Anchorage. For it to actually happen so out of the blue, I mean, it's scary.
Not as a priest, just as a young lady. Samantha was last wearing a pair of furry black boots.
If we can cover two miles square radius from fireweed. It's important for people to see that she's still out there and we still need to keep looking.
The response from the public was overwhelmingly supportive of the Koenig family and trying to do anything that they could to help.

Samantha's mother, Darlene, was part Indigenous,

and that made Samantha Koenig part Indigenous.

And so that rallied a lot of the community

and the Indigenous community here in Anchorage.

The family, James Koenig and some volunteers,

started to distribute flyers about her being missing.

There's people putting flyers up that knew her and there's just tons of them.

We haven't heard anything and my stepdad saying that he knew something was wrong.

Like he had that passion to get the word out there quickly.

I spent a lot of time putting flyers on cars.

You couldn't go around a street corner

and not see a business that had freed up their space

on their billboard to show her missing picture

and information.

It was everywhere.

Coworkers work to cover every inch of town

with this poster. At that point in the investigation, we learned that Samantha Koenig and Dwayne Tortolani had a joint bank account.
And they both had debit cards for that bank account. And on the night of Samantha's disappearance,

Duane saw a man in Samantha's truck.

It looks like he was searching the vehicle,

looking for something.

Duane told us that nothing appeared to be missing.

But we looked at the bank records,

and we saw that Samantha Penning's debit card was used.

We realized that it was Samantha's debit card that was missing. A few minutes after it was taken from the truck, the debit card was used to check the balance.
The account was accessed, but no money was taken. That was interesting.
Someone had to know the PIN number. Why not take the money from the council?

The person was in a mask, had a big puffy jacket on, so you really couldn't tell how big that person was.

It wasn't exactly clear that it was the same individual

from the coffee hut, but there weren't enough things

different between them that would completely exclude that as being a possibility.

But there was another key detail

that really raised red flags for the investigators.

Some of them felt that James was a truth-teller,

that he loved his daughter,

that he would never have harmed her,

while the other half

thinking something isn't right here. Please look into him.
As a matter of routine, we would want to investigate James Koenig's home, where Samantha lived, to look for any information on her computers or tablets, which is pretty standard in the missing persons case, especially with younger kids.

And he refused to let the police department do the initial search.

He came to the door, opened it, shimmied himself through a little crack, and then closed it behind him.

And then when they asked to speak to Duane, it was the same thing. Do they have something to hide? I'm still suspicious.
If you are an investigator who, from day one, has found this guy suspicious, this looks really bad. And it's reinforcing your theory of the case, that James was somehow involved.
Statistically, when a young woman is going missing, 80 or 90 percent of the time it's a boyfriend or husband or someone very close to her. So we had to look at Duane.
Duane told us that he had called Samantha right before the end of her shift and told her he was going to pick her up. We saw in that video that's what happened.
He came to the coffee stand about 8.30 p.m. and he walked around the coffee stand.
I called her phone a couple times. I was looking to see if she left it at work.

Dwayne worked at a restaurant,

and he had an alibi for that day.

Fairly quickly, I realized it was very unlikely that he had anything to do with it.

Ultimately, investigators got a search warrant

to search Mr. Koenig's house.

At the time, we thought maybe he was hiding

a marijuana grow or something, but that turned out to be nothing. I think that James Koenig, he's having a really tough time trusting the cops.
I don't know if my daughter's being fed, taken care of, if she's still alive, if she's getting any sleep. Please help find my daughter.
It was just so obvious how much her father cared about Samantha and what a close relationship they had. James was devastated that his daughter was missing and he had no idea where she was or what had happened to her.
And he wanted her to come home. I also grew up in this area.
I know what it was like being a teenager in Alaska. You know, the reaction that her dad would have at her not coming home is a reaction my dad would have at me for not coming home.
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Streaming on Hulu. It's been three days since 18-year-old Samantha Koenig disappeared from her job at Common Grounds Espresso in Midtown Anchorage.
It wasn't like a normal missing person case. We are becoming more and more concerned.
So we started to expand our investigation. One of the normal protocols would be to go and canvas the area,

look for other surveillance videos.

We ultimately recovered video from the Home Depot store,

which is across the street from where the kiosk was.

You could see a couple walking through the parking lot near a busy restaurant and go into a vehicle, a white Chevy pickup truck. Samantha and the suspect got in that vehicle and then drove from the Home Depot parking lot onto the road.
Once Samantha leaves with this unknown individual, we start picking up the surveillance from the street cameras. There was a really great image of this white pickup truck.
However, the license plate was unreadable on the video. So we knew it was a white Chevy pickup truck that the suspect was using.
The traffic unit was then vehicle by vehicle trying to identify all the white trucks in the city that you're making model. There are 700 white Chevrolet pickup trucks in Anchorage and the area.
So of course course, when you have that many vehicles, it takes a long time. Investigators say surveillance footage shows a stranger dressed in a black hoodie.
It was a stranger abduction. During that time period, we told the media, we have a video, and it's apparent from the video that it's kidnapping.
Anchorage police are not sharing what they say is proof. Samantha Koenig was kidnapped, not even with her family.
We have not seen any surveillance. This is just unbelievable.
And there was a lot of public demand. You know, we want to see the video.
Why doesn't police department want to release the video? Police say it will not help them solve the crime. If we were to present them now, it would have the effect of tainting a jury.
Samantha Koenig's mother says she is living a nightmare. They have detectives on it, but to me, they're not working fast enough.
We keep waiting for some good news. I feel like the whole time I was wanting to stay as positive as possible.

We're going to find Samantha.

She's going to come home to us.

James asked me if I would build a Facebook page for Samantha.

There were, of course, trolls like there is in any social media. And people can be so cruel.
There were people that had their own view that she wasn't actually missing. It's not easy when people are telling you, oh, this is fake, this isn't real.
For someone to fake this would be messed up. As police continue to search for clues on why Samantha was taken from common grounds, the family says they're optimistic she'll be found alive.
I got to keep my spirits up and know that my heart still feels her and she's okay. Corey Allen Young, CBS 11 News.
I would say with James, he was definitely frustrated. I know as the days went on, there was more law enforcement added to the case.
James Koenig did what I think anybody would do. He went online, he went to the internet, he used it to publicize his daughter's disappearance.
Right now, we're probably getting two or three tips a day. Whenever we got what we thought might be evidence, we forwarded on over to the police department.
Whether they're helpful or not, I really can't decide. I don't know what avenue the police are taking in the investigation.
James Koenig established a reward fund. There was a lot of people that knew the Koenigs, and so a lot of money started rolling into Mr.
Koenig's account. There's a $41,000 reward for her safe return.
James Koenig pretty much called me daily. Slav, do you have anything new for me? Slav, is there anything we could do? He would tell me about his fundraising efforts.
Of course, I had a lot of sympathy for him. My daughter at that time was working in a coffee stand.
So, you know, I'm a police officer,

but I'm also a father,

and my daughter is in a very similar situation.

You know, if it happened to Samantha,

it could happen to somebody else.

As days pass by, we are following up the leads, and we are hitting a wall everywhere.

Where is Samantha? I mean, that is still the big question. Where is she?

This entire time, ever since the night of Samantha's abduction, we were

monitoring activity on

her phone at the FBI.

We had gone

three weeks without anything.

And suddenly we get this

big break.

Samantha's boyfriend got a text message from Samantha's phone.

The direction that this text message gave was to go to Connor Park.

Connor Park is a dog park in Anchorage.

And it said, Connor Park, sign under pic of Albert, ain't she purdy. Nobody knew what that meant.
We believed that it was in fact from the person who had taken Samantha or at least had her phone at this point. Finally something has happened.
Anchorage Police Department responds. And we're asking ourselves, is Samantha alive? Is she dead? There's a bulletin board that's near the dog park.
Under a sign of a golden doodle named Elbert, There was a Ziploc bag that had a white piece of paper folded over. It's the first big break that happened in the case since obtaining some video evidence three weeks earlier.
It was a ransom note typed on an actual typewriter. The note suggests that Samantha is alive.
30K to be deposited to CU1, which is Credit Union 1 account, has the full card number, expiration 1-2015. There is a credit card number that is attributed to Samantha's account.
In the know, he is telling us that once he collects $30,000, in six months to a year, then he will give information potentially where Samantha's at. Along with the ransom note, there was a photo, potentially a proof of life photo.
It was one single piece of paper. On the first side it had the actual typed ransom note, and then on the second side was the actual picture.
There was a photo of a young woman. She's naked, she's bound, her hair is braided, she's got duct tape over her mouth.
The photo was very disturbing. It was a thumbnail-sized image.
The more we enlarged it, the more grain it was becoming. Is this young woman alive in the photo, or is she not? You certainly could not say with certainty one way or another.

I contacted James Koenig.

If it was really his daughter,

I knew that it was going to be heartbreaking for him to see that photo.

It was just me and James Koenig in the interview room.

And I put the photo in front of him. He stared at it for a long time.
And then he said, yes, it is Samantha in the photo. I saw him as a grieving father.
He was worried sick and it was, you know, genuine. I knew that.
At that moment, I had no doubt that James Koenig was not involved. Hey, I'm Brad Milkey.
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Every week, I'm going to unpack the biggest true crime story that everyone is talking about. ABC's got some unique access here, so I'll talk to the reporters and producers who have followed these cases for months, sometimes years.
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Continue on ESPN ABC. Now we knew what the suspect was doing.
The suspect wanted us to put the money in Samantha's account. He had Samantha's debit card and he would be able to withdraw the money from ATM machines.
Now we have something that we could potentially use to try to lure the subject out. Police departments don't have ransom funds.
Maybe we could use the money from the reward fund. So I talked to James Koenig about it, and he agreed to put $5,000 into the account.
We have the bank set to be able to track her ATM card, so we will know at any institution that it's used within about 10 minutes of it being used.

So having a deposit is what we wanted.

On February 29th, the money was deposited.

And within six hours, just before midnight,

the debit card is used.

He withdrew $500.

Bankridge had about 500 ATM machines.

We needed to be there within minutes, if not seconds, after using the ATM card.

Our officers rushed to the scene. But the suspect is gone.
But we are able to access the video. The individual is covered in mass, so you can't see any real facial features.
The eyes are covered.

There's some type of hat or hood on and a big puffy jacket.

It says Marine Corps on the back.

It does appear to be male.

It does appear to be taller, which is consistent with the height of the individual that walks up to the coffee stand.

Appears to be thin, not somebody who's out of shape.

We were able to get video of a vehicle to party. There was a silver Nissan Xterra SUV.
We believe the person that used the car had gotten out of that vehicle, walked over to the ATM, and then came back and got in that vehicle and left the area. The FBI were looking for that white pickup truck.
This vehicle is a completely different vehicle. Seeing the silver Xterra come into play just added one more confusing element to this case.
For the next several days, we were constantly doing surveillance on the ATM machines in hopes that we can be present for the next withdrawal. But right after the ATM withdrawals, we weren't getting any new information in once again.
We had no additional clues, no ATM withdrawals, no leads. Everything goes cold.
Our hope to find Samantha is still strong, but it is very discouraging when you're not having strong leads to work off of. As the search for Samantha Koenig goes into month number two, attacked as an officer, working around the clock to figure out who took her and why.
Time is obviously of the essence. As time goes on, things get cold.
People's memories fade.

You are not sleeping.

You're not eating because you're too focused on the bigger picture of finding Samantha.

And it affected me tremendously.

The more time that went by, the more concerned everybody was for Samantha Koenig. And then Samantha's card lights up.
It came as a total surprise. We get an alert in the middle of the night

that Samantha's debit card was used at an ATM in Wilcox, Arizona.

It shocked all of us that now this case had clearly left all of Alaska behind.

And now we're in the lower 48, in a completely different state that we never had on our radar. How did we get to Wilcox, Arizona? And is Samantha alive? Wilcox is a little town on the highway I-10.
The highway that connects California to Texas. We were able to get video from Wilcox, Arizona.
And based on size and height and that type of thing, it appeared to be the same person, but again, fully disguised. So no real distinct identifying features of the individual.
You can see in a distance a small white car. That photograph was sent back to our lab in Quantico.
They were able to tell us it was a white Ford Focus. Our belief is at this point that if the individual was from Alaska and is now down there, that it's probably a rental car.
So that ATM withdrawal happens on March 7th. There's another one that day in Lordsburg, New Mexico.
And then on March 10th, there is an ATM withdrawal that's made in Humboldt, Texas. So once again, things have continued to move east.
And then the next day, there's another withdrawal in Shepard, Texas. So, in coordination with the Texas Rangers and the FBI in Texas, we put out a BOLO at

Be On The Lookout. in Shepard, Texas.
So in coordination with the Texas Rangers and the FBI in Texas, we put out a BOLO and be on the lookout for the information that we had recovered from each ATM that he had used along the way. It has detailed information about the White Ford Focus.
I mean, couldn't find a more common vehicle and we didn't have a license plate on it, so we didn't even know what state it was registered in.

It's an absolute need on a haystack.

During this whole time, we're asking ourselves, is Samantha with this individual? Is she in the vehicle? It's still a mystery to us. My name is Brian Henry, and I'm a retired Texas Highway Patrol Sergeant.

I happened to be in the office, and Ranger Rayburn caught me in the hallway and started telling me about this case.

He showed me this bolo. He tells me about Samantha and that it's a kidnapping and that the ATM card had been used starting out west all the way to a small town south of us, which I believe was Shepherd.
The person had a hoodie on, glasses, something covering his face.

I could kind of tell it was a white male.

And I remember it had a fuzzy white vehicle in it.

Rager Rayburn said that FBI believes it's a Ford Focus.

I get in my patrol car, just take off patrolling.

Just kind of doing my job, and now the bolo's kind of the back of my mind.

Just as I drove around, I looked to my right, and the first thing I look at is a white fork focus. So I called the ranger, and the FBI was in his office.
We dropped everything we were doing then

and we told Ryan,

do not lose that car.

Blood starts pumping.

Because you're thinking, wow,

is this even possible?

We may have found the person that abducted Samantha. This has to be the guy.
Let this be the guy. This is Deborah Roberts.
You can catch Episode 2 of Wild Crime in our feed next week. The series was produced by Lone Wolf Media for ABC News Studios.
You can stream all four seasons of Wild Crime on Hulu. And while you're there, of course, you can always find more from 2020.
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