The Day Akia Disappeared

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Speaker 4 Tonight on Dateline.

Speaker 5 We walk to our house. I get this airy feeling.
I was so afraid to walk up the stairs. It just felt like we were in a horror movie.

Speaker 6 You have a 22-year-old pregnant female that doesn't show up for her baby shower.

Speaker 8 Her family was frantic.

Speaker 6 Absolutely.

Speaker 9 Somebody please help our daughter. No one wanted to report on her story.

Speaker 10 I had someone tell me she wasn't newsworthy.

Speaker 1 No one that we knew of wanted to hurt her.

Speaker 6 She was all over social media, and that is crucial.

Speaker 13 Because when that stops that tells you something.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. We were looking at anyone close to Akia.

Speaker 8 One to a problem and all her stuff was gone.

Speaker 14 I can't tell you what happened to her. I don't know.

Speaker 6 If I was a detective, I would be looking for us too.

Speaker 15 You got one guy, two women.

Speaker 16 This is a love triangle if there ever was one.

Speaker 11 It's classic. People commit heinous acts when they're desperate.

Speaker 17 Anything but this.

Speaker 18 Anything but this.

Speaker 4 A young mom with a baby on the way vanishes a frantic family and an urgent mystery i'm lester holt and this is dateline

Speaker 4 here's josh mankowicz with the day akea disappeared

Speaker 22 The arrival of a new baby can offer promise, possibility, happiness.

Speaker 27 And sometimes those first cries from an infant are also the last moments of innocence before the hard realities of life change everything.

Speaker 20 Happiness, possibility, and hard reality

Speaker 25 AKA Eggleston was on a first-name basis with all three.

Speaker 5 She was excited about this baby shower. I'm having a baby shower.
I hope you come. And I was like, of course, you know, I'll be there.

Speaker 32 It was May 2017.

Speaker 36 AKEA's aunt Sinobia Wilson was excited for her niece, who at 22 was eight months pregnant with her second child.

Speaker 37 Akia's stepfather Sean and his wife Angelique were happy too.

Speaker 40 and impressed by how Ikea had organized her own baby shower.

Speaker 41 She planted herself.

Speaker 18 She planted herself. She paid for it and planned it.
She was ready for it.

Speaker 42 She was looking forward to it now. Absolutely.

Speaker 43 It was a day to celebrate.

Speaker 34 Akia was already a single mom to a beautiful two-year-old named Emery.

Speaker 34 Her best friend, Stephan Foster, had always been there for AKA and her daughter.

Speaker 46 Emery, she is my goddaughter. Loved her like my own child.

Speaker 18 And Akea was happy.

Speaker 22 The tables were set, the balloons filled, the guests beginning to arrive.

Speaker 32 There was just one thing missing.

Speaker 5 I got a phone call around like 2.30. Hey, we're all here.
She's not here. And I'm like, what do you mean she's not here? She's not here and she's not answering the phone.

Speaker 22 AKEA's bestie, Stefan, was supposed to be her ride that day.

Speaker 49 He says he was waiting for word from AKA akea to come and get her

Speaker 52 i started getting uh phone calls asking me where's akea where's a kia

Speaker 5 because everyone knew the condition she was in she had a very complicated pregnancy

Speaker 27 the next call was to 911

Speaker 53 what's the address emergency Yes, I could call it Mrs. Report.
Who's missing? Akia Egglestreet.

Speaker 44 Stefan and other guests decided calling 911 was not enough.

Speaker 46 That's when we all collectively decided, let's go down to local police department.

Speaker 7 You get a phone call.

Speaker 43 Her grandmother called me and she said, Akea is missing. And I said, what do you mean she's missing?

Speaker 9 Like, she can't be found missing.

Speaker 2 What'd you think of happened?

Speaker 9 I was thinking hopefully she's in a hospital. You know, a complication had arisen and she had to go to the hospital.
That was my first thought.

Speaker 9 Somebody took her to the hospital and we don't know where she is.

Speaker 2 I mean, the baby was due within, what, a couple of weeks? A couple of weeks, yeah. So, not inconceivable that the reason she's not there is she's having the baby, right?

Speaker 9 Correct. That's what we were thinking.

Speaker 2 That's what we were at least hoping. Hoping.
Yeah. I'm hoping.
Yeah.

Speaker 37 In their desperation, Akea's family rushed to her home, hoping she'd somehow be there.

Speaker 32 Instead, they found a chaotic scene.

Speaker 5 As we walk to our house, I get this eerie feeling like something's not right.

Speaker 56 Aunt Senobia says the furniture was gone, and so were Akea's clothes.

Speaker 5 And we see this hole in the wall.

Speaker 17 Something had clearly happened there, they thought.

Speaker 8 But what?

Speaker 26 The family scoured the outside area.

Speaker 9 We did a search at the nearby park close to her house with her grandparents and for us and her aunts and her friends and family. We just searched and scoured that whole park.

Speaker 43 I remember the day we did the search.

Speaker 43 I remember getting into the water, walking the shoreline of the park.

Speaker 15 And thinking, I hope I don't find anything.

Speaker 43 Thinking, I hope I don't find anything.

Speaker 18 Scared to death.

Speaker 34 Worse still, they learned no one had actually heard from Akia in a few days.

Speaker 55 With every minute that goes by and you don't hear from her, that's just a little bit more bad news, isn't it?

Speaker 9 Agony and devastation.

Speaker 33 What AKEA's family needed most right then was for police to get their teeth into Akia's life.

Speaker 50 That would mean talking with the people she knew. I can't pull this girl out of thin air

Speaker 37 and hearing stories AKA's family knew nothing about.

Speaker 8 I do not know.

Speaker 6 And if somebody is telling you that I'm hiding something, no.

Speaker 41 No.

Speaker 22 When Akia Eggleston didn't show for her own baby shower, her family knew something was wrong, really wrong.

Speaker 58 They knew she would never just up and leave, and certainly not without her two-year-old daughter.

Speaker 31 Akea had lost her own mother at just 17.

Speaker 39 And if she'd been in any kind of trouble, she'd never mentioned it to her parents.

Speaker 2 She was always good and happy and bubbly and talking about her future endeavors, but she never really told us what was going on. Everything was all rainbows and unicorns.

Speaker 44 When you would say, well, who are you going out with?

Speaker 2 Who are you dating?

Speaker 60 She'd say, I'm working.

Speaker 43 I'm having fun.

Speaker 12 There's no problems. Everything's great.

Speaker 30 Step back.

Speaker 26 Right, step back.

Speaker 41 I'm an adult now.

Speaker 31 Now, with AKA missing, they wondered what she hadn't told them.

Speaker 8 What are police telling you?

Speaker 43 Communication wasn't that great because there was always, well, we can't tell you anything because it's an ongoing investigation.

Speaker 37 Baltimore police did search the area around Ikea's house.

Speaker 38 You guys did a canvas?

Speaker 52 Yes.

Speaker 61 Nobody reported screaming.

Speaker 13 Nobody heard a fight.

Speaker 60 No.

Speaker 16 Terry McClarney has been with the Baltimore Police Department since before IKEA was born.

Speaker 52 We went through every house over here, all the houses up there, came out with maybe two dozen detectives, and then another time with about a dozen, and no one could tell us anything.

Speaker 34 As IKEA's due date came and went, Detective McClarney and his partner Jill Beauregard began to piece together a timeline leading up to Akia's disappearance.

Speaker 37 These are the last known images of her in a bank four days before her baby shower.

Speaker 63 One problem was that she was last seen on May 3rd and wasn't reported missing until May 7th.

Speaker 63 So you have that time frame and the fact that those days went empty were suspicious in and of themselves.

Speaker 26 Detectives also learned Akia's usually constant Facebook activity abruptly stopped on the afternoon of May 3rd.

Speaker 37 The last thing she ever posted was this invitation to her baby shower, which was to be in four days.

Speaker 3 And Akea's pregnancy had not been easy.

Speaker 6 And she was eight months pregnant, high-risk pregnancy. So to

Speaker 41 just disappear on her own,

Speaker 6 highly unlikely.

Speaker 13 When that stops, that tells you something.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 6 So, you know, a number of interviews are conducted, and we quickly realize that she's in a relationship with an individual by the name of Michael Robertson.

Speaker 16 Michael Robertson was Akea's boyfriend, and according to her, the father of her unborn baby.

Speaker 25 It wasn't long before he and detectives were face to face. She's gorgeous.
She's gorgeous, man.

Speaker 35 Michael and Ikea were from the same neighborhood.

Speaker 37 He was older, but they eventually started dating.

Speaker 37 He said it wasn't just Akia's beauty that attracted him, it was her heart.

Speaker 39 When Michael was down on his luck, Akea opened her home to both him and his children, sharing what little she had.

Speaker 39 I had literally nowhere else to go, and nobody else would help me. She didn't want nothing from me.
She just really wanted to help me out because she cared.

Speaker 50 Michael Robertson told detectives he and Ikea were not exclusive.

Speaker 26 That's why Michael questioned whether he was in fact the father of that baby.

Speaker 26 This is like three of the guys, man. That could be this kid's father.

Speaker 61 Michael said he told Ikea he would take a DNA test once the baby arrived.

Speaker 26 And that if it was his, he would step up.

Speaker 34 He told investigators, that's when Ikea started asking for more than he was ready for.

Speaker 34 Can you come to the Son of Gram? You know, things like that. I didn't want to participate.

Speaker 31 He said that's why Ikea broke up with him six days before the baby shower.

Speaker 63 She had put his stuff in bags, and he said, I can take a hint, you know, so I'm out of here. So, when you got there and your stuff was packed, did you wait for Ikea to get there? Yeah, I waited.

Speaker 63 I waited for a while. I called her and I texted her, and I didn't get no response.
And I was like, Well, okay, I can take a hint. And so, I gathered my stuff and I left.

Speaker 63 This was the Monday before the baby shower. Yeah, this was before the baby shower.
It was. So have you seen her since the last time you told her she's hard? No.
No texts, no emails, no nothing.

Speaker 63 And I haven't seen her. I haven't talked to her.
I do want to know where she is. I am worried.
I am concerned. I care.

Speaker 63 I care anything about the girl. I'm not heartless.

Speaker 26 Michael insists that he wanted to help.

Speaker 37 And he pointed investigators to someone else.

Speaker 40 Someone he said they really should be looking at.

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Speaker 64 Baltimore detectives were trying to follow the trail left by a missing mom-to-be named Akia Engleston.

Speaker 24 Michael Robertson was her boyfriend.

Speaker 22 He said they'd broken up days before she vanished, and he hadn't heard from her since. I do not know where she is.
She's not with me. I can't pull this girl out of thin air.

Speaker 34 Michael had told police about someone who might know exactly where Ikea was.

Speaker 36 Her best friend, Stephan Foster.

Speaker 24 Michael claimed Stefan was obsessed with Ikea. He was dinged trying to be with her.
So any time she called and said, jump your ass on her, he was always there to jump for now.

Speaker 15 By all accounts, Stefan is devoted to her.

Speaker 6 100%. If she needed money, he would provide her money for rent.
If she needed a ride somewhere, he was right there.

Speaker 34 Investigators learned AKA trusted Stefan so much.

Speaker 57 She gave him the passwords to both her Gmail and Facebook accounts.

Speaker 16 and a key to her apartment.

Speaker 39 Stefan was a security guard and owned a gun.

Speaker 40 That made Sinobia wonder.

Speaker 5 If he did kill her, it would be a crime of passion because he absolutely loved her.

Speaker 58 In his interview, Stefan told Detective McClarney AKA was supposed to meet with him the week she disappeared.

Speaker 58 I was supposed to give her $200 for a rent, and I was surprised he did not try to contact me at all that day.

Speaker 32 What Stefan said next was intriguing.

Speaker 55 He was so worried about Ikea, he let himself into her townhouse days before the baby shower,

Speaker 20 before anyone had reported her missing.

Speaker 20 I went in and went to her room and all her stuff was gone.

Speaker 22 Stefan said he found it all troubling, but but not troubling enough to alert police or her family.

Speaker 26 Investigators looked deeper into Stefan and IKEA's relationship. You and I were dating.
Yeah, well, uh, that didn't last long, but we stayed friends.

Speaker 40 When investigators looked at Stefan and IKEA's Facebook exchanges, they discovered explicit and intimate messages.

Speaker 6 Stefan Foster and Akia Eggleston were having sexual relations.

Speaker 15 They're not boyfriend, girlfriend.

Speaker 42 This is friends with benefits.

Speaker 68 Yes.

Speaker 6 Stephan Foster was in love with AKEA,

Speaker 6 but AKEA did not reciprocate the same feelings.

Speaker 15 That can create all kinds of things, which I know that you guys have seen before.

Speaker 2 Jealousy, anger, and sometimes rage.

Speaker 7 And murder.

Speaker 76 It could be, yes.

Speaker 54 Were you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?

Speaker 34 When I spoke with Stephan Foster, He insisted he and I

Speaker 47 were never really in it for the long haul.

Speaker 46 And I didn't see myself being fully committed at that time. I didn't see her being fully committed with me at that time either.

Speaker 16 Still, Stefan admitted he was hurt when he heard from someone else that Akea was pregnant.

Speaker 60 A little upset because

Speaker 60 it wasn't you, or a little upset because you thought, you know, we're friends, you should be telling me.

Speaker 8 I want to say a little bit of both.

Speaker 46 To be honest, a little bit of both.

Speaker 51 Then we got into a little argument about it.

Speaker 55 Were you ever angry enough at Ikea to hurt her?

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 51 Nah.

Speaker 46 I wouldn't even hurt her fly.

Speaker 55 As for his visit to Akea's townhouse days before the baby shower.

Speaker 54 When you go to her house and you see that all the stuff's missing, you think about calling police?

Speaker 43 At that time, no.

Speaker 46 Because I just decided, all right, I'm going to wait until the baby shower.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 46 if I don't hear from her, then I know something is

Speaker 2 truly wrong.

Speaker 54 When police asked you where you were on the evening of May 3rd, what'd you say? Where were you?

Speaker 51 Most likely at work.

Speaker 33 From the moment Akea went missing, Stefan said he was focused on helping the police investigation.

Speaker 54 You went on social media and you wrote, if I have to move effing mountains or take a life, I'll find you.

Speaker 51 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 46 I was worried for her safety. If I had to do what I had to do to, you know, find her, I would have did it.

Speaker 33 As police worked to confirm Stefan's alibi, their investigation continued into Akea's life and the people in it.

Speaker 34 That would lead to someone who was not Akeya's friend.

Speaker 31 Someone very, very angry with her.

Speaker 53 I know we gave you this opportunity. Right.

Speaker 77 That if you were honest with us, unless you're the, unless you killed her, and I just don't think I could.

Speaker 77 Oh, my God.

Speaker 36 for Akea Eggleston's parents, not knowing was torture.

Speaker 26 It had been months since they'd seen or heard from their daughter.

Speaker 40 You've got to start considering the possibility that she's not alive anymore.

Speaker 34 You're shaking your head. No.

Speaker 19 No.

Speaker 9 That wasn't an option. Our faith in God was just so beyond.

Speaker 3 They wished Akia had shared more of her life with them.

Speaker 28 Maybe they would have a better idea of where to look for her. In an effort to generate leads, Angelique tried to get Akea's name on the local news, with no success.

Speaker 10 I had someone tell me she wasn't newsworthy.

Speaker 9 No one wanted to report on her story. It was just really difficult.

Speaker 50 So Angelique turned to the Black and Missing Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to bringing awareness to missing persons of color, especially cases like Akita's that were not making headlines.

Speaker 76 We are voices for a voiceless group, and we want to make sure that the community is aware that 40% of the missing population are people of color, yet their cases are under the radar.

Speaker 34 Natalie and Dereka Wilson are the co-founders of Black and Missing.

Speaker 17 I initially spoke with Angelique.

Speaker 57 I'm guessing you could hear in her voice how desperate she was.

Speaker 13 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 78 I can hear the desperation. I can hear the frustration.
I can hear the sadness. And hearing Akea's story, we wanted to give that family hope.

Speaker 56 They did that, pushing to get Akea's story told by local newsrooms.

Speaker 78 The strategy is utilize media to apply pressure to law enforcement. That media pressure is what motivates them to add more resources to the case.

Speaker 76 We reached out to just about every local station in Baltimore, and they were not open to covering it at first, but we kept pounding the pavement.

Speaker 76 There are still few clues in the 23-year-old's disappearance.

Speaker 22 By September 2017, four months after Ikea went missing, her face was on every newscast in Baltimore.

Speaker 64 National media followed.

Speaker 26 Dateline featured Akia's story in our Missing in America series.

Speaker 37 Investigators continued mining AKA's social media and came up with their most promising lead yet.

Speaker 25 They discovered AKEA's relationship with Michael Robertson started out as an affair.

Speaker 6 He was in another relationship with a female by the name of Haley Pomeroy, and he had a child with her and was soon to have another child with her. And Haley is in love with Michael.

Speaker 15 But he couldn't stay away from Akea.

Speaker 6 And he couldn't stop lying to her or to Haley.

Speaker 8 What did Akea think of Michael Robertson?

Speaker 6 She was in love with him.

Speaker 7 This is

Speaker 15 a pretty classic love triangle here.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. She finds out about Ikea and she loses it.
And Haley has a temper, an extremely volatile temper.

Speaker 47 On Facebook, Haley's scorn for Akea was easy to see.

Speaker 20 She called Ikea a home wrecker.

Speaker 58 The stakes got a little bigger when just three weeks before she disappeared, Akea posted a 3D sonogram of her baby.

Speaker 6 And when when Haley sees it, she loses her mind because she took one look at the sonogram and said,

Speaker 6 that's Michael's baby.

Speaker 6 That's Michael's nose.

Speaker 33 Investigators wanted to know if Haley's rage led to Akia's disappearance.

Speaker 44 They brought her in.

Speaker 44 I don't know anything. I know we gave you this opportunity.
Right. That if you're honest with us,

Speaker 53 unless you killed her, and I just don't think the f ⁇ . Oh my f ⁇ ing.
No. Is she pretty?

Speaker 53 No.

Speaker 77 We don't know that, but we're assuming she is. Where is she?

Speaker 63 I think being interviewed by us was very emotional for her. She would be combative with us.
Then she would collapse and cry.

Speaker 40 Does she deny that she pretty much hated Ikea?

Speaker 18 No.

Speaker 63 She didn't deny that.

Speaker 77 Are my feelings hurt that you

Speaker 77 slept with my husband, my fiancé, and you there's a possibility you're carrying this child.

Speaker 53 Yeah, my feelings are hurt.

Speaker 77 Am I going to do anything to you?

Speaker 41 No.

Speaker 79 I mean, let's be quite honest. How the f ⁇ am I going to,

Speaker 79 how?

Speaker 79 I don't have a vehicle.

Speaker 77 Nothing. Like, how?

Speaker 77 I don't even have the brain capacity to deal with that.

Speaker 63 None.

Speaker 63 We would go pretty hard at Haley at one point, thinking

Speaker 63 she's going to tell us, and she didn't.

Speaker 36 So police let Haley walk.

Speaker 34 They hoped her cell phone records might ultimately show if she'd told the truth. But that kind of data would take months, sometimes years, to subpoena and analyze.

Speaker 6 We couldn't proceed forward without the results of those records.

Speaker 21 Baltimore police were about to gain a powerful ally in their investigation, courtesy of Akea's aunt Sinobia.

Speaker 36 Desperate for help, she had picked up the phone and called the FBI.

Speaker 5 I kept calling, I kept calling. And they eventually gave me this lady named Summer.

Speaker 6 I got a phone call from a concerned relative of Akia Eggleston.

Speaker 34 FBI agent Summer Baugh.

Speaker 15 Something made you want to get involved here.

Speaker 6 I heard the voice of her family member, and that was impactful.

Speaker 28 It turned out to be a good fit.

Speaker 26 Agent Baugh is an expert at analyzing social media and phone records.

Speaker 32 Akia had plenty of both, connecting her to dozens of people in the months before she went missing.

Speaker 6 If there was a record out there that could tell us what someone was saying, where they were located, almost what they were thinking based on their communications, we were going after that.

Speaker 17 Veteran FBI agent Patrick Dugan also came on board.

Speaker 16 It

Speaker 12 appeared to me from the get-go that foul play was involved in one way, shape, or form.

Speaker 25 In the United States, the leading cause of death for pregnant women isn't some medical complication.

Speaker 26 It's homicide.

Speaker 37 And while Faith may have kept her family's hope alive, investigators were no longer searching for IKEA.

Speaker 22 They were looking for her body.

Speaker 12 She stopped communicating with everybody else. And because of the state of her pregnancy, she was not going to walk out the front door and disappear into the sunset.

Speaker 44 That made her death all but certain.

Speaker 7 This is a case without a body. Right.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 12 DNA evidence recovered from clothing, from skin, from any sort of contact that a suspect may have with a victim. It's evidence that you always want to have.

Speaker 15 That slows everything down when you don't have that.

Speaker 7 Sure.

Speaker 11 Sure.

Speaker 32 2017 came to an end.

Speaker 33 Then 2018.

Speaker 61 To AKEA's family.

Speaker 27 It seemed police were not taking the case seriously.

Speaker 9 To us on the outside looking in, we just didn't see any movement, any traction.

Speaker 26 Two years after Ikea disappeared, Black and Missing booked Sean on The View,

Speaker 57 where he criticized the investigation.

Speaker 12 We're not going to stop badgering them

Speaker 20 until they give us what we want.

Speaker 63 There was a time when I think Sean thought we quit.

Speaker 15 You did not. No, no.

Speaker 6 It's just that we cannot share everything with the family as we're going through the investigation.

Speaker 22 Over those years, investigators would interview more than 100 people and examine thousands of digital records.

Speaker 32 Bit by bit, they got closer to solving the mystery and finding the person they were looking for.

Speaker 6 Every time we would show him another piece of forensic evidence, yes, he would say, well, this definitely looks bad for me. And then I would say, and wait, it gets worse.

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Speaker 37 In 2021, almost four years after Akia vanished, investigators believed they were finally close to getting answers about the day she died.

Speaker 35 They believed it happened May 3rd, 2017.

Speaker 31 four days before that baby shower.

Speaker 38 They even thought they could pinpoint the time she was killed, 5.22 p.m.

Speaker 6 She was mid-conversation when all of her social media stopped, and the last thing that she sent out was her baby shower invitation.

Speaker 22 And combined with phone records, that little morsel of digital truth gave investigators some clarity about the people they'd been looking at.

Speaker 15 Where's Stefan at 5.22?

Speaker 63 He was seen at work and he's there. He's in uniform.

Speaker 6 And his location data puts him at work as well.

Speaker 13 Where's Haley at 522?

Speaker 6 Haley is with her mother taking care of her newborn baby and their already one-year-old daughter.

Speaker 49 Where's Michael Robertson at 522?

Speaker 6 Michael Robertson is in Akia Egleston's apartment alone with Akea.

Speaker 22 Michael Robertson, Akia's boyfriend, the man she was in love with, was the only person who could not be ruled out.

Speaker 22 I don't know where she is.

Speaker 64 Three days after Akia vanished, Robertson abruptly changed his cell phone number.

Speaker 25 He also refused to speak with Akia's parents and didn't join in the search for her, even though she was carrying a baby police believed was his.

Speaker 6 She's eight months pregnant with his son, and he doesn't even search for his own son.

Speaker 61 He initially told investigators Akia had broken up with him.

Speaker 32 Except, AKEA never mentioned that to anyone.

Speaker 37 Just the opposite.

Speaker 20 Days before the baby shower, she texted friends saying, she and Michael were moving in together.

Speaker 31 That bank visit, investigators say, was to get cash for a deposit on an apartment.

Speaker 83 What AKEA either didn't know or didn't want to think about was that Michael Robertson was the kind of man who uses and discards women.

Speaker 83 He already had several different children with several different girlfriends, and it seems he offered many of them little in the way of financial support.

Speaker 83 All of that makes Akia's decision not to tell her parents who she was involved with a little easier to understand.

Speaker 36 On that final afternoon, Akia's phone records show she called Michael and then ordered a lift to drive him to her house.

Speaker 21 Maybe that's when he told her there'd be no apartment or that he was going back to Haley.

Speaker 62 And maybe that's when Ikea Eggleston realized exactly what kind of man the father of her child was.

Speaker 33 Investigators believe a fight started. They think it ended quickly and violently.

Speaker 58 They also believe Robertson's internet searches hinted at what he did afterward.

Speaker 6 Michael Robertson does like 18 Google searches where not just trash goes, but where does dumpster trash go.

Speaker 37 About 30 30 paces from Ikea's house is this dumpster.

Speaker 34 The police theory is that Michael Robertson waited until dark, then carried Akea out.

Speaker 50 She was less than five feet tall, and even with the baby, she weighed perhaps 120 pounds.

Speaker 6 We believe she was wrapped up in a blanket that probably came from her bed. Her dresser is also missing, and we believe that he jockeyed

Speaker 54 because there were holes in the wall.

Speaker 6 We also believe he used her dresser then to ultimately cover up her body.

Speaker 40 And she's gone before anybody starts looking for her.

Speaker 54 That's correct.

Speaker 34 A compelling murder theory.

Speaker 26 One without a ton of evidence to back it up.

Speaker 37 Investigators really needed a confession.

Speaker 20 He looked different now.

Speaker 75 In the years since Akia's disappearance, Michael and Haley got back together, moved to Michigan, and had two more children.

Speaker 30 Now he was back in a police interrogation room facing FBI agent Baugh and Baltimore Detective Beauregard.

Speaker 79 We have spent years reconstructing everybody's life that was involved, which is what led us here to you.

Speaker 20 First, Michael's breakup story.

Speaker 75 They told him they had proof that he saw AKA two days after he claimed they had split.

Speaker 79 We know this because not only do we have the phone records to prove it, but we have the Lyft driver identifying you as the individual.

Speaker 79 Okay, so now you're with Akia. You're at her place.
She's at her place. What do you guys do that night?

Speaker 31 On the tape, he doesn't answer right away.

Speaker 33 He stares at the table.

Speaker 6 His head drops.

Speaker 6 And I think we were both holding our breath. waiting for him to admit it.
And it is profound in that moment. The room is so silent you could hear a pin drop.

Speaker 6 And when he picks up his head, he says, That was the night we got into it.

Speaker 6 That's when we got into it.

Speaker 60 Which is an admission that they fought that night.

Speaker 6 Yes, in her bedroom.

Speaker 32 Robertson told them Akea stepped out of the shower and caught him texting Haley.

Speaker 34 That's when she drew a line.

Speaker 84 He's either be with me or be with her.

Speaker 84 But you can't have both of us.

Speaker 84 So I chose Haley.

Speaker 79 What could have happened to Akia when she stops sending messages at 5.22 p.m. and you're at the apartment?

Speaker 79 That's what doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 84 Nothing happened between us.

Speaker 34 Michael stood by his story despite all that circumstantial evidence.

Speaker 31 He didn't crack.

Speaker 79 You want me to explain against all of this and I can't.

Speaker 14 I can't.

Speaker 14 But I can't tell you what happened to her. I don't know.
And I did not do anything to her.

Speaker 8 I didn't.

Speaker 79 Do you understand that these records are like DNA?

Speaker 79 Do you understand this?

Speaker 84 I didn't kill her. I didn't hit her.
There was no accident. I didn't push her.
I didn't bump into her and knock her in the street.

Speaker 14 I didn't do anything to her.

Speaker 38 There would be no confession.

Speaker 7 What there would be was a trial.

Speaker 25 Michael Robertson was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, one for Ikea and one for her unborn son.

Speaker 20 His plea?

Speaker 20 Not guilty.

Speaker 56 For prosecutors, this would be an uphill battle.

Speaker 21 They had no body, no fingerprints, no DNA.

Speaker 20 In fact,

Speaker 31 no proof a crime had occurred at all.

Speaker 54 You ever do a no-body case before? No, sir.

Speaker 32 No one can truly be prepared for the place Akea's family now found themselves, because now they knew for sure she was gone.

Speaker 43 The hope was done.

Speaker 9 Every little hope that we had that we were going to find her was done after that.

Speaker 44 AKEA was presumed dead, but but without a body and none of the evidence that comes from that.

Speaker 42 Michael Robertson was arrested for her murder, but it would be one tough case to prove.

Speaker 34 On a hot Baltimore summer day in July of 2023, Michael Robertson finally stood trial.

Speaker 57 Kurt Bjorklund was lead prosecutor.

Speaker 54 You ever do a no-body case before?

Speaker 7 No, sir.

Speaker 44 A lot harder.

Speaker 11 Yes, in most murder cases, usually the body's on the scene.

Speaker 15 And that body normally tells you a story.

Speaker 11 You can learn a lot from the body. And most importantly, you know that they're dead.

Speaker 11 When there's a no body case, for a lot of people, there's always that lingering thought, well, how can we actually prove that they're deceased?

Speaker 50 Bjorklund argued Akea would never have simply disappeared.

Speaker 22 Someone had clearly harmed her.

Speaker 37 And what Bjorklund did have was the mountain of digital evidence carefully compiled by investigators over the years.

Speaker 29 The most damning damning of that was cell phone information from the hours just after Akia stopped posting on Facebook.

Speaker 6 One of the most compelling pieces of information we have is AKA's phone and Michael's phone moving together away from her apartment after the time when all of her communications stopped.

Speaker 22 Investigators said cell phone tracking showed Michael left Akia's house after killing her and took her phone to get rid of it.

Speaker 21 It was the one piece of evidence Michael Robertson could not even try to explain away.

Speaker 79 Here's why it gets worse, Michael.

Speaker 79 These are, I'm back to Akia's records. IKEA's phone that she never uses again

Speaker 79 is located downtown too.

Speaker 84 Oh hell no.

Speaker 79 It happened, Michael. These are maps of the records.
I know. It is bad.

Speaker 15 He wasn't thinking about the fact that her phone could be tracked even though she wasn't alive anymore.

Speaker 6 Because he never expected us to outsmart him.

Speaker 58 In court, Kurt Bjorklund told the jury it was the investigators who'd outsmarted Michael.

Speaker 11 It can only be him, and that's just looking at the cell phone evidence, the cell site evidence.

Speaker 15 You presented this as a kind of an emotional crescendo for him. Like this love triangle had reached a kind of a breaking point.
Yes.

Speaker 11 Imagine the weight upon Michael Robertson. This is what finally got him to do this.
He couldn't find a way to extricate himself from the situation.

Speaker 15 Haley was putting pressure on him. Akea was putting pressure on him.
And his lies were going to catch up to him.

Speaker 11 People commit heinous acts when they're desperate.

Speaker 7 He cracked.

Speaker 11 It was too much for him to handle. And that's why he planned to do this.

Speaker 34 Robertson's attorney, Jason Rodriguez, took issue with the whole case, arguing arguing there was no evidence any crime had been committed.

Speaker 7 You think there's the slightest chance that Akia Egleston is still alive?

Speaker 19 I very much hope so.

Speaker 19 I think...

Speaker 15 Well, I very much hope so, but I don't think she is.

Speaker 19 You know, unlike most cases, no one's able to have that ultimate certainty that there normally is.

Speaker 54 Because there's no body. Correct.

Speaker 19 Not only no body, but there was no trace evidence of a body.

Speaker 34 Rodriguez also argued others might have had a motive to kill Ikea.

Speaker 15 The defense tried to make a suspect out of Stefan.

Speaker 1 They tried.

Speaker 11 There was no evidence of that.

Speaker 49 Even so, a prosecutor's confidence can never forecast a jury's verdict.

Speaker 59 As the case winds down and the jury has it, what'd you think?

Speaker 10 It was tough.

Speaker 18 It was tough.

Speaker 5 The trial was three and a half weeks long.

Speaker 5 Just being there every day,

Speaker 5 I felt like I was being tortured.

Speaker 37 After two days of deliberation and six years since Ikea failed to show up at her own baby shower, the jury came back.

Speaker 31 Michael Robertson was found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder.

Speaker 18 They came back with a guilty verdict, and it was like a sigh of relief for that one moment.

Speaker 43 But still, we don't have Ikea.

Speaker 9 The weight is still there.

Speaker 43 Yeah, it's definitely still a weight there.

Speaker 75 As final resting places go,

Speaker 29 no one should wind up here.

Speaker 24 A landfill in northern Virginia.

Speaker 58 Investigators say this is where Ikea's journey ended.

Speaker 64 After Robertson put her in the dumpster by her house, it's now too unsafe.

Speaker 29 to excavate.

Speaker 22 Akea and her unborn son will forever remain missing.

Speaker 47 That's something Stefan will always struggle with.

Speaker 13 You know, if she'd picked you instead of Michael, she'd still be alive.

Speaker 46 Yeah, I've relived that

Speaker 46 to this day, actually.

Speaker 7 I know you think about that.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 8 Quite a bit, you know.

Speaker 34 Akea's family learns the same lesson every day as they walk out of their home, past this yellow ribbon. A reminder that Akea is still not here.

Speaker 26 She's still part of your family.

Speaker 41 Oh, she's absolutely part of the family.

Speaker 33 They're still looking back at what they didn't know, what they weren't told.

Speaker 57 The warnings that exist now only in hindsight.

Speaker 4 Parents know your children.

Speaker 43 Children don't be afraid to talk to your parents. Love on each other and never be afraid to say the truth.

Speaker 31 Because if you knew the truth, you'd start your daughter.

Speaker 18 Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 11 And that's the truth.

Speaker 4 That's all for this edition of Dateline. And check out our Talking Dateline podcast.

Speaker 4 Josh Mankiewicz and Keith Morrison will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 We'll see you again next Friday at 10 9th Central.

Speaker 11 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 4 For all of us at NBC News, good night.

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