- Hi everybody! I hope you all are having a great,
powerful and majestic day.
- A missing 14 year old girl from East Dubuque, Illinois.
- I gotta go, go, go.
- Family had found a note inside of the car.
The note said, don't look for me. I don't want to be found.
- I believed she was 100% a runaway.
- I get bored, you know. But no, nobody cares.
- She had not left with her cell phone.
She didn't have shoes. She didn't have any money.
- This isn't adding up.
- I definitely thought someone else was involved.
- I'm supposed to be video connecting with a friend.
- The people she had been online with
had a sexual undertone to them.
- He's a nice dude. He's a nice dude.
- We found a YouTube video where this man comes into the room.
She stops him and she whispers something in his ear.
- Immediately I thought of grooming
or that there was a sexual relationship.
- Get away. Help!
- Her very best friend broke down into tears.
Where is she?
[Narrator]: In the FBI we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it. - Freeze!
- FBI. - FBI!
[Narrator]: But they don't know the half of it.
What really goes down?
We save that for each other,
when we're talking agent to agent.
This is FBI True.
- Kim, we haven't seen each other in years
since we were in DC.
And Wayne and Casey, it's really nice meeting you.
[Narrator]: Cindy Coppola is a 23-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked on cases that included organized crime
and terrorism, and took part in multinational investigations
into drug trafficking and money laundering.
- How did you all get together?
- The first time I met Wayne was working this particular case.
It was the Chyenne Kircher case.
[Narrator]: Casey Folks has been part of the Jo Daviess County
sheriff's office for 29 years,
investigating everything from fraud to crimes against childrn
to murder.
- So, Wayne, you get a call to join this team.
- So my supervisor approached me.
He forwarded me the email chain and as I read through it,
I thought no, this is a real case
involving a missing teen.
And yes, I want to be part of that.
[Narrator]: Wayne Jackowski was an accountant who joined the FI
to investigate financial crime.
He's been with the Rockford, Illinois resident agency
for 14 years, investigating bank robberies,
human trafficking and murder.
- I was working violent crimes against children
on the squad in Chicago.
Wayne gave me a call to tell me about the case
that he had been asked to provide some assistance.
[Narrator]: The daughter of an FBI agent,
Kim Castro spent her first decade in the bureau
working international terroris,
before joining the violent crimes against children
task force for FBI Chicago.
- Chyenne Kircher was missing 14 year old girl
from East Dubuque, Illinois which is on the other side
of Illinois from Chicago.
That happened in October of 2011.
And the local police department had started to investigate it.
I helped out a little bit initially on the case.
Family had found a note inside of the car.
- What was her home life like?
- So there was Chyenne who lived in the house,
her younger brother, her older brother.
There was Terry Abbas, who was her stepdad,
and then Laura Lyons was her mom
and Steve Staver was Laura's boyfriend.
Was the family dynamic.
- Right, so wait a minute. Let me get this straight.
The husband and she has a boyfriend at the same time?
- Yes, correct. - And they know each other.
They all live together. - They're all living together.
- Interesting. - Very interesting.
- Complicated. - Nontraditional.
- Nontraditional, okay, okay.
- When I first got this call to go over and help East Dubuque,
and when the uniform officer and I go up to the house
to ask some questions and just try to get some information,
the smell was so overbearing.
And it was a situation where I could see where a young child
like Chyenne would maybe want to take off.
- Want to run away. - Yeah.
- What did you guys do with the note? Did we examine it?
Did the FBI examine that?
- No, actually East Dubuque sent that down
to the state police lab and they examined it.
[Kim]: The note read, Mom and Dad,
you haven't done nothing wrong,
but by the time you get this letter, I will be gone.
Don't worry about me. I will always love you.
You won't find me because I don't want to be found.
So at last I say goodbye. Love, Chy.
- And they determined it was her handwriting?
- Yes, they did.
- That was written not under duress.
- Correct. Not under duress.
- Somebody who's so outgoing and so creative
and wants to be friends with everybody,
I just don't understand what would push a child
to run away and tell their parents,
"I love you, you did nothing wrong."
- We have dozens of these types of cases throughout the year
where children run away.
Dubuque, Iowa is a large city across the river
from East Dubuque.
So they thought maybe she just went over there with a friend,
you know, went to hang out, get away from whatever problem
she might be facing.
And so over at the sheriff's office we reached out
a few times to check on, you guys need any help?
They were confident in what they were doing.
They were following up on some leads.
But over the next 18 months, it went cold.
And so my chief deputy
formed this team to go a little bit deeper.
It was called the Critical Incident Response Team.
He invited the FBI.
He invited state police,
other local law enforcement agencies to join it.
I'm going to be real honest,
our relationship with the Rockford FBI office
over the years wasn't the best.
And so I wasn't 100% sure what Wayne was bringing to the table.
Being in a small RA.
To me, a lot of what we do is help our local partners,
more so than making a ton of big cases on our own.
A lot of times a small department,
a small sheriff's department has limited resources,
but if we partner up, we can accomplish something greater
together than working separately.
- We initially started to investigate it
by re-examining all of East Dubuque's reports.
We went up to her school. We interviewed the superintendent.
We cleared out her locker, we took all of her textbooks,
all of her notebooks and everything.
We turned over these to the East Dubuque police department
for them to go through everything
to find out if there's any notes in there,
if there's any writings where she might be passwords.
I mean, anything we could find.
We turned them over to them and said please
just look through em and see what you can find.
- Interviewed friends, people in the general neighborhood
just to see if anybody had seen her
around the time she went missing,
just to see if anybody knew something we didn't.
- Wayne called me up and asked if I could assist him.
- So did you think she was a runaway?
- I thought there was a possibility
that she was a runaway, but I definitely thought
someone else was involved.
She had been missing for about a year and a half at that point.
The question was how could a 14 year old
sustain themselves for that long?
Where would they go
and how would they be able to live?
She had not left with her cell phone.
She didn't have shoes. She didn't have her coat.
She didn't have any money.
Reviewing the police reports
and kind of following up on some of those interviews,
Chyenne didn't have a strong support system.
She was a kid that was bullied at school, made fun of.
She really craved attention.
She was a gamer and had a very strong social media presence.
- Okay everybody. I'm on Xbox 360 right now.
[Wayne]: Mainly she was on Facebook.
She was also posting videos on YouTube
and she was on another site,
one that we got interested in called Chat Tango,
where she was conversing with some people online
through that app as well.
- I'm kind of like going back and forth between the Xbox 360
because I'm supposed to be video connecting with a friend.
And I am kind of like going back and forth here to here.
So if I don't reply to you in no time, then okay!
So today is midnight hour.
You can't send!
- So the theory was that she had met up with someone
and was living with them.
- So, Wayne, what does the FBI then offer in the way of help?
- Mainly in the way of electronics.
Things need to be forensically examined,
somebody needed to go through and get the contents
of her cell phone or her computer to see
who she might have been communicating with.
And if any of that led to something that may involve
going across state lines, things that we could assist with.
- And this is where the FBI's help was tremendous
because we don't have those capabilities.
- We started quickly identifying the people
she had been online with.
At least one or two of them had a sexual undertone to them.
Which was inappropriate because she's a child.
- If she did meet someone online,
who was she in contact with?
Did she meet anyone in person? - Her life's kind of tough.
She probably met somebody online.
These are people she was talking to online
for quite a period of time.
- But I do have my friend talking on the other line.
His name is Master BC.
He's a nice dude. He's a nice dude.
Shut up, Braden. And his real name's Braden.
We're all good. We're all good.
And by the way, Braden, you're kind of on video
when I was talking to you. Just so that you know.
Don't ask!
- Makes sense she's with one of these people.
So we focused in on finding those individuals quickly
and they were all pretty much out of state.
Kim was really good and instrumental in getting leads
out to our other offices.
Find these people and see if Chyenne Kircher
is with any of these people.
So three stick out in my mind.
One was in Florida. I'll call him a younger man.
He's around 18 or 19 years old
that we had law enforcement officers
locate and interview him and he confirmed
he communicated with her online and that he may have sent some
inappropriate photos to her and asked for some in return,
but that he never met up with her in person.
Another lead was sent to Texas.
And we had that person interviewed, nothing there.
Another one was in Alaska.
So that was by far the furthest reaching lead that we sent out.
I remember being very excited for that lead.
Some type of sexual offense in their criminal history,
which led us to believe it might be the type of person
that could lure a young girl away.
So we felt that to be a very strong lead.
And did it pan out?
- It didn't. - Shoot.
- Each lead that would get covered,
you'd get the report back from the agent
or they'd call you and say she's not there.
Just was frustrating.
[Kim]: We kind of always went back to this runaway note.
The note was confirmed to be written by Chyenne,
and she was not under duress when she wrote it.
- I believed she was 100% a runaway,
had no reason to think otherwise.
- I get bored, you know.
But no, nobody cares.
So if you all have a problem with me being gone,
I don't give a flying flute, okay?
- We interviewed most of her friends and by and large,
most of them don't know where she is.
She's just gone. Don't know where she is.
So there is a point that we keyed in
on her very best friend,
a person was always described to us as being
her very best friend, that they were inseparable.
And this friend had moved, unfortunately, to Wisconsin,
so several hours away.
But we knew we probably need to interview that friend.
Quite honestly, I'm hoping Chyenne's with her.
Thinking if her life's kind of rough, she ran away.
Maybe the family took her in and she's in Wisconsin.
And that's why nobody in the local community has seen her.
So I went up and interviewed the friend.
I was pretty blunt with her, I looked at her friend like,
"Where's Chyenne? She's here, isn't she?"
And immediately the friend became extremely emotional
and broke down in tears and very upset.
"She's dead. She's dead." And my heart sank.
And I said, "What do you mean, she's dead?"
We're so convinced we're going to find her alive and well
and that she just ran away.
And now it would seem that was going to be most definitely
something else, something far worse.
- Hi guys! I hope you guys like my new hair.
It's got highlights as you'll see.
Hi Dad.
I hope everybody likes this video,
likes my new hair.
I got it done last Sunday, I think.
Yeah, last Sunday.
- I had no doubt Chyenne was absolutely a runaway.
And now we have our very best friend saying,
I think she's dead.
It was a little unnerving.
I said, "What do you mean? Why do you say she's dead?"
She said, "She would drive me crazy.
She would communicate with me via Facebook and text message
and phone call so many times a day that she drove me nuts.
And I started to hate her at times
because she had to be in contact with me that often.
And if I haven't heard from her by now, she's got to be dead."
It was tough leaving that house. I felt dejected.
But I knew I needed to call Casey and Kim
and kind of explain what we came up with
and where I thought we were.
- I remember exactly what you said that day.
You said she's dead.
I know she's dead. - Yeah.
- And we're all very vested in this at this point
because we've spent so much time getting to know her
and how she grew up.
And so it does become super emotional and personal.
- Totally, totally.
- So then what do you turn to? You go back to family members?
- Yes.
- Who did you look at there?
Who were the family members you had to look at?
- The mom, Laura Lyons.
We didn't know at that time if there was motivation,
but you can't rule her out.
Terry Abbas would have been Laura's husband.
And then Steve Staver, well, he's the boyfriend
in the whole situation.
So what could possibly be his motivation
for wanting to do something to Chyenne?
And Colorado, her older brother.
- Warning, this man may kill you.
[Casey]: Even though he was young at the time,
we were told that he was potentially violent,
that he was potentially dangerous.
[Laughing in pain]
Oww! Stop! That hurt.
- So we wanted to focus on everyone
until we had a reason not to focus on them.
- The family up until that point,
were they concerned like what happened,
like, did the family follow up on this?
- Not as often as what we thought they should have.
And there was not many phone calls made from the family
asking, initially asking for updates
or anything along those lines.
Even after the actual team got involved,
there wasn't a whole lot of calling from the family.
- Never any sense that they're frantic.
Or "What have you found out? What do you know?
What's new today that you didn't know yesterday?"
Never a whole lot of urgency.
- Did they have any other family members nearby?
- So there was a grandmother next door and I thought
that was kind of a key.
During one of the many visits I made over to the house,
I just happened to wander over and talked to her.
And said, "Hey, has anybody ever talked to you
about what's going on in the house over here?"
And she said, "No, they really haven't."
I said, "What's going on over there?
Just kind of a strange household."
And she said, "Let me tell you this.
If Terry Abbas was out of that house
and Chyenne could come back, she would come home."
- And that's her stepdad? - That's her stepdad.
- And so I asked her, "What do you mean by that?"
She said, before Chyenne went missing, she told me
Terry would peek at her when she was in the bathroom
and in the bathtub.
And other times she'd barricade her door to try to keep him out.
- So while you're reviewing different material,
let's say, online,
did you start then looking more in-depth
at some of the work that she did like any of her YouTube videos,
any of her postings that she was doing?
Actually, we had assigned one of the task force members
to do specifically that.
And during his investigation of that,
he found a YouTube video of Chyenne
where she was sitting in her room, she was on her bed.
She was, you know, talking to the camera, interacting with it.
- You know, I'm really bored.
I wonder if I've got anything to do.
[sighs] Man...
[gasps] I know what I can do!
[Casey]: And this man comes into the room.
All you see is his waist down.
And she gets up and they kind of come together
and it looks like he goes to put his hands around her
and she grabs his wrists and she stops him
and she whispers something in his ear.
[inaudible whispering]
You can hear a man's voice, but it's very muffled.
It just makes you feel uncomfortable,
because it appears to be an adult male,
even though you can't see who the person is.
But it just leaves you with an uneasy feeling.
Because she's young. She's 14 years old.
- Did I say you were in this? No, you weren't.
Get away! Help! See how abusive?
No, he's not abusive.
- You could hear her whispering something to him.
But we had to play the video over and over and over again
to actually understand what she was saying.
- Do you remember what she whispered?
There's a level of comfort that you would see
between two people who are having a relationship.
There's a lot of touching, very close contact.
When I first saw it, immediately I thought of grooming
or that there was a sexual relationship
between the two of them.
- So we have all these clues, but who is it?
- The day the video was discovered,
someone called me in Chicago and sent it to me.
And watching the video over and over and over.
I immediately felt
something weird was going on.
[Chyenne]: I'm doing a live show, be careful.
[man]: Okay.
[Casey]: Listening to a little bit of his voice,
you could hear after we all listened to it many, many times.
By the time we all did, we are all in agreement that
likely based on body type, clothing, voice, everything
and accessibility, being in the same house,
that is likely Terry Abbas, we're all in agreement.
- When we all saw it, I think we all strongly believed
it was her stepdad.
[Kim]: And as the video goes on, she kind of jumps on the bed
and there's a little slapping amongst the two of them
and kind of playful wrestling,
which again, was inappropriate and just way too comfortable.
The way he touched her, the way that she touched him.
There was still a level of comfort between the two of them
that just wasn't realistic
based on the information that we had known
about their relationship.
That he was the stepfather, that she was afraid of him,
that he didn't have a lot of contact with her.
She avoided him.
- Well, going back to what the grandmother said,
that she would run away or, you know,
wouldn't want to be around him, did that confuse you at all?
- Working those types of cases
and knowing the level of secrecy that usually if an adult
is molesting a child and especially in the household,
there will be kind of an agreement of secrecy.
It made sense.
- It was in her bedroom, in the house,
there seemed to be at least some other relationship
behind what led up to this.
This definitely wasn't a one time thing
where all of a sudden let's be really touchy feely.
- And at that point we learned before she went missing,
Chyenne had disclosed to friends
that Terry Abbas was sexually abusing her.
- I told her that she needed to go to teachers.
She needed to go to somebody she trusts.
She needed to go tell somebody. Because I couldn't help her.
- So the East Dubuque police department opened
an investigation on that.
Chyenne was taken down to her local CAC.
She was interviewed, she didn't disclose.
And where we're at,
child victim doesn't disclose, you don't have a case.
And then the school needed to set up
a physical for her and for whatever reason,
Terry Abbas, who was her stepdad,
was the one who was supposed to set up
all of this stuff with the physical,
and he kept dragging his feet and he wouldn't do it.
- Was he afraid that maybe she would tell a doctor
or tell somebody or they would find something?
- Absolutely. - I totally agree with that.
Because when a child goes in to have these physicals,
I mean, doctors can ask them,
who knows what a doctor's going to ask them?
- That's a turning point for you guys.
Definitely a turning point. - Where we pivot.
- You pivot. And what do you do next, then?
- We'd applied for a warrant
to get a GPS tracking system for his truck,
because one of the things is we had talked about in theory
was that if he did kill her and he dumped the body somewhere,
he's going to go back and maybe revisit the body
because we're starting to shake the trees a little bit harder.
I fired it up and we're able to track him a little bit.
And at one point in time, he's going across
the Julian Dubuque Bridge and the signal stops dead.
Just shuts off. Like it ceases to exist, right?
So I'm freaking out because it's like, okay, we did all this work
and now the GPS system isn't working.
Did he find it and toss it in the river?
That's what I thought he did.
What we found out later, it was still on the truck.
We were able to get it back. It just turned off.
So what do you do next?
- Line up our polygraph examinations.
I think at that point the first round of the three simultaneous
was Laura and Terry Abbas and Colorado, her older brother.
- Polygraphs are going on.
The polygraph guy texts Wayne and he says, "Get up here.
Terry Abbas, he wants to talk to you."
It was "Get up here now."
- So what's going through your mind when you get the call
and say you need to go talk to Terry?
- More things than I could ever recall.
My mind was going a million miles an hour,
trying to prepare my mind for anything he might tell me
or any possibility.
I didn't want to fail the family.
I didn't want to fail Chyenne,
our team or the FBI for that matter.
The pressure was high
and somehow, some way I had to deliver.
[Narrator]: Next time on FBI True.
- All these leads,
all the things that we ran down as a team.
- I need more details of what happened.
I didn't believe him.
And he walks us up this steep wooded embankment
behind the house.
I mean, this is only like the halfway point.
We really believed he was just screwing with us.
This isn't going to go away until we find out where she is.