Hi, guys. I hope you guys like my new hair.
- Chyenne Kircher, a missing 14 year old girl from East Dubuque.
Family had found a note inside of the car.
- The note was confirmed to be written by Chyenne.
- We found a YouTube video where this man comes into the room.
I think we all strongly believed was her stepdad.
- I thought there was a sexual relationship.
- I didn't believe him.
- We really believed he was just screwing with us.
- And he walks us up
this steep wooded embankment behind the house.
We filmed everything.
- All these leads, all the things
that we ran down as a team.
- What happened?
[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.
- Cheyenne Kircher goes missing.
14 year old girl from East Dubuque, Illinois.
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.
- We had covered all the leads, talked to all of our contacts
that Cheyenne had made online.
And so now we were kind of pivoting
and looking at everyone that was in close proximity to her.
- Lori Lyons, her mother, passed her polygraph.
The older brother, Colorado, passed his polygraph.
- The polygrapher is interviewing Terry.
And then what do you get, a phone call?
- A text message.
It's actually to get up here and then about probably
five or 10 seconds later, now.
- Generally, walking into an interview,
doing the types of cases I did up until that point,
I would have all my notes prepared.
I would have topics to discuss. I had none.
I was mainly a financial crimes investigator at that point.
I'd worked a few bank robberies and a couple of other things
and the reason I got selected, I think, was because I had always
expressed an interest in working missing people.
So walking into that room and not knowing anything
that was going to transpire
was a very nerve wracking feeling for me.
I remember being extremely nervous about it.
And I decided walking in, that I couldn't be prepared.
I'm just going to let him talk and then go from there.
- And our interview room is set up.
It's recorded. We have an observation room.
So there's a ton of us jammed in the observation room.
And Terry kind of lays out what happened with it
and how it went down.
- After all these interviews, all these leads,
all the things that we ran down as a team,
to all of a sudden just have that, like, here it is.
And I said, well I need more details. What happened?
- So his version of events were that she was running outside
and that she said, chase me. Chase me up the hill.
So he proceeded to chase her up the hill.
At that point he fell down,
slipped and fell somehow while he was chasing her,
and that she turned around and started laughing at him,
that somehow something must have snapped in him, that he didn't
like her laughing, and the next thing he knew,
he had blacked out and he's standing above her.
- It's all coming in so fast that I'm still trying
to process what's real, what's truthful,
what's not at this point.
So in my mind, I'm thinking, good...
It's terrible that something bad has happened,
but he is confessing to being responsible for her death.
So it's a good thing.
As for the blackout, I didn't believe it.
- We hear that blackout story a lot
when it comes to confessions.
You know, somebody will say, I blacked out when this happened.
It wasn't the truthful story at first,
but it was the truth he was prepared to give
at that moment with Wayne.
- So, Casey, what are you thinking?
You guys are in the observation room.
- Right. Totally freaking out. I mean, not expecting this.
- I don't know how exactly it all came to be, but somehow
he felt as though he could tell me his deepest, darkest secret.
- Why confess now? Was it the fear he knew he was busted?
- I think it was based on, a lot on the rapport
that Wayne had built with him.
I could tell that he really liked Wayne.
He really trusted him.
And that's really part of being able to interview people
and get them to tell us their secrets, or confess,
building rapport with them and making them feel safe enough
and not judged.
- So you never had a murder confession before obviously,
because you worked financial crimes
and this was your first murder confession.
- That's right. And what a confession it was.
- Me not ever having had somebody tell me something
like that before, I was very hurried to try to get to
where is she and would you take us there?
Because in my mind, we have our person.
We need to find her too. Where is she?
- I believed that Terry Abbas killed Chyenne at that point,
but I knew we needed to keep getting more details.
- Even though he's not being 100% truthful,
he is giving us some key information.
- I mean, this is only like, the halfway point, okay?
Now we've got more work to do.
This isn't going to go away until we find out where she is.
- We needed him to show us where her body was.
- I was immediately wanting to put him in a vehicle.
Like, are you willing to show us where she is right now?
And he said, yeah, you've got to drive me, but I will take you
to the exact spot, and I'm ike. let's go.
- And so we take him down to the booking room.
And 'cause I arrested him for the murder of Chyenne Kircher.
We drove over to East Dubuque. We pull in. We cuffed him.
We filmed everything.
And he walks us up this steep
wooded embankment behind the house.
We walk past this depression in the ground
because he takes us up in there, and I asked him,
I said, is that the grave? Is that where Chyenne is?
Is it right here?
And I asked him, I said, Terry, how far down did you bury her?
I didn't believe him.
[distant train whistle]
I'm thinking she's two feet down,
three feet down, but she's not five feet.
And there's no way that this happened.
That he dug the hole the same day as the murder.
But that's what he told us.
- And then we took him back to the jail
and put him back in the custody of the jail,
and that's when we called FBI forensics.
We called state police forensics to start excavating the scene
and working up on search warrants and all that stuff
that we're going to need
to do what we needed to do to bring her home.
[Wayne]: We need just to recover her remains
and bring some closure for everyone.
- With the excavation, it's very meticulous.
I mean, they're just taking layer by layer, and all the dirt
is getting sifted, and every little nugget
is being looked at and examined.
It became very frustrating because we had a lot of people
out there working around the clock to try to find her.
And we're not finding anything.
And usually we would find something by now.
- This isn't adding up as far as what his initial confession was,
digging the hole that same day as the murder.
- We believe that we have the right location.
But we really don't know.
- What if he's lying about the location?
We really believed that he was just screwing with us.
- Terry Abbas, who was Chyenne's stepdad, has been in lockup.
Wayne and I go bustin' tail over to the sheriff's office.
We pull him out of the holding cell.
- Just based on the information that our ERT team had said,
usually people are not buried so deep in the ground.
So was he being truthful, was he not being truthful?
- And this dirt is clay.
And it's hard and it's just it's compacted.
He confessed that he had actually dug the hole
the day before he killed her.
- That's what he said? - That's what he said.
I don't think really any of us believed that.
It would have taken a lot longer than a day.
And then I think later that evening,
we came upon like a slipper or a shoe
and were able to identify that it was hers.
- How long did it take? - About three days.
- Took about three days.
[Casey]: And so now, again, the meticulous nature of the dig
has picked up again.
And they're exposing the body inch by inch.
It was a total of five feet down.
Once we finally expose the body, she's face down.
He just, after he killed her,
he just dumped her in
and then he just put the dirt back on top of her.
- So, Kim, what do you think was his motive?
- He was molesting her.
He was afraid that she was going to
report it in the physical or they would actually find
physical evidence or maybe she was pregnant.
- It was a matter of time and then he's been outed
and he can't afford to let that happen.
So, the only way for him to make sure it doesn't happen
is to silence her and to do it permanently
so he doesn't have to worry about that anymore.
And so the note was maybe one of the very first steps
that he took with this whole thing.
[Wayne]: We asked Terry about that.
And his explanation was that he and Chyenne created that note
as a prank to be played on her mother.
- When this all went bad and she ended up dead,
he remembered he had that note
that would come in handy for a time like this.
- Is this the hardest case you ever worked?
- It probably is.
It's one of those things where it's rewarding
that we were able to get closure for the family
and the community and get justice for Chyenne.
But it will forever be overshadowed
by the terrible thing that Terry Abbas did to her.
- I mean, it's a child,
and she was abused and taken advantage of.
So it was very emotional.
And this kind of defines
why I was an FBI agent.
- I've been on the job now 29 years,
and when this team came together,
egos were checked at the door.
It didn't matter if you were FBI, county cop,
state police, local detective, it didn't matter.
We all put our heads together and forged ahead.
You catch the bad guy, you put him away,
you give the family closure,
and you do what you took the oath to do.