On an October evening in 2015, a teenage girl in Little Rock, Arkansas called her older brother, and he knew instantly that something was terribly wrong. Her voice was panicked, fractured. She told him she was lost, that she did not know where she was. He asked if she was alone, and she could not even answer that.

But she told him one thing: she was in her car. Then the call ended. No one in her family ever heard Ebby Steppach’s voice again. Days later, searchers found the car, but Ebby was gone.

Police searched the area. Her family searched the area. Years passed, and eventually a retired investigator took another look at the case and became obsessed with a single question. What if Ebby had never left the place where her car was found?

Before she was the girl at the center of a mystery, Ebby was just an eighteen-year-old trying to figure out her life. She loved photography and SpongeBob SquarePants. She was fun, fiercely loyal, and serious about her makeup—not the kind of serious that means a tube of mascara and some lip gloss sitting in a bathroom drawer. She worked part-time jobs and saved her money for good products.

She took care of her things. Her mother would later remember that fact, because the state of Ebby’s makeup would become one of the first signs that something was profoundly wrong. Ebby lived in Little Rock and wanted to become a cosmetologist. She had also talked about getting into real estate, but for the moment she was trying to figure out what came next.

She wanted more independence. She had moved out of her mother’s house and was staying mostly with her grandparents and friends. There was some tension, but nothing that seemed alarming at the time. Then came Friday, October 23.

That night, Ebby went to a party, and something horrific happened there. She said she was sexually assaulted. Four men were involved, and one of them recorded it on a phone. The next day, Saturday, October 24, Ebby told her stepfather what had happened.

She texted him that she wanted to report the assault and asked him to meet her at the police station. She never showed up. Later, her family learned that she had been texting the men from the party, telling them she was going to report them. That would eventually make her stepfather wonder about something.

What if Ebby, instead of going to the police station, had decided to handle it herself? What if she went to confront those men, to try to get that video back? To be clear, it was never officially confirmed that Ebby went to meet any of them. But after that, she vanished completely.

Her grandparents were the last family members to see her in person. That Saturday evening, they went out for frozen yogurt together. Then she left in a hurry. After that, a large gap opened in the timeline of events, and for years, no one could explain much of what would turn out to be the final hours of Ebby’s life.

But investigators have since uncovered part of that mystery. Cell phone tracking data released by the Arkansas Attorney General’s Cold Case Unit showed that between 7 p. m. Saturday and 3 a.

m. Sunday, Ebby’s phone was in the area of 53rd Street and University Avenue in Little Rock. Eight hours. The police have not yet said what they believe she was doing there, or who she might have been with.

Then, around 5:30 p. m. on Sunday, Ebby’s family finally heard from her, through her brother Trevor. And this is where things become truly strange.

Ebby sounded confused. She told Trevor she was lost, and she sounded panicked. In fact, she seemed to think she was in front of his house. He ran outside to see her, but she was not there.

He called her back and asked, “Where are you? Where are you really? ” But Ebby did not seem to know. He asked if she was with someone.

Again, he could not get a clear answer. All she could tell him was that she was in her car. Just before the call ended, she said, “I’m a mess. ” Trevor tried to call her back.

There was no answer. That was the last time anyone in Ebby’s family heard her voice. Trevor knew something was wrong, so he called his parents and told them Ebby was in trouble. Everyone tried to reach her—her mother, her stepfather, her friends.

They started trying to find out where she had been and who she had been with, but no one seemed to know anything. Eventually, they went to the police. According to Ebby’s mother, Lori, they were initially told they had to wait at least twelve hours before filing a missing person report. Lori said the police seemed to think it might just be an eighteen-year-old girl who decided to leave for a while.

But her family did not believe that, not after that phone call. Within days, they would be proven right. A security guard working near Shalimar Park in west Little Rock noticed a silver Volkswagen Passat. It was Ebby’s car.

It had been abandoned in the parking lot with a dead battery. The car had run out of gas, and the keys were still in the ignition. The park was on the other side of Little Rock from the area where her phone had been pinging that Saturday night into Sunday morning. It was a drive of about twenty to twenty-five minutes.

And the truly strange part was everything left behind in the car. Her purse, her phone, her contact lenses, her makeup. Everything was still there. Those cosmetics caught her mother’s attention immediately, because some of them were broken and scattered across the seats and floor of the car.

Ebby had loved those things. She had worked and saved money to buy them. According to her mother, if Ebby had run away on her own, there was no reason she would leave all of that behind, especially her contact lenses. She needed them to see.

This is the point where you would expect the investigation to kick into full gear, but that is not what happened. By the time police responded to the security guard’s report of the abandoned car, and by the time they connected it to Ebby, several crucial days had passed. Police searched Shalimar Park, but they did not find her. According to her family, investigators continued to treat the case as a runaway situation.

Meanwhile, her family and friends were hanging posters. They were talking to people. They were spreading her story online. They were trying to figure out what the police had not.

Then something happened that is almost impossible to believe given what we know now. A woman returned to the park with her daughter. The daughter was a friend of Ebby’s, and they wanted to search the area where Ebby’s car had been found. And there, they smelled a smell that cannot be mistaken.

It was coming from a storm drain. The smell of decomposition. They called emergency services immediately. Police arrived, but they dismissed it.

They simply said, “Oh, it’s not what you think. The cadaver dogs have already been here, and if there were human remains, they would have alerted us. So maybe it’s sewage. Or maybe a dead animal.

” They did not connect it to Ebby’s disappearance. As more months passed, the investigation began to lose momentum. But here is the frustrating part. It was not as if the police had followed every possible lead and hit a dead end.

Important witnesses were not interviewed. Surveillance footage was not collected promptly. And by the time investigators realized they needed some of that footage, it had already been erased. So, years later, when the cold case unit took another look at Ebby’s case, they were starting almost from scratch.

And there was one place the lead investigator kept returning to: Shalimar Park. More specifically, the spot where Ebby’s car had been found. Her car had been parked very close to a manhole cover, and that manhole was an entrance to an underground sewer system. There had also been heavy rain around the time Ebby disappeared.

In May 2018, investigators returned to the park. By this point, Ebby had been missing for more than two and a half years. Her family had appeared on national television. They had offered a reward.

They had begged people to come forward with any information. Now the investigators were back at the same park where her car was found, but this time, they were going underground. They sent a camera into one of the drain pipes from one direction, then sent another camera from the other side. Deep inside the pipe, they hit something.

An obstruction. They could not tell exactly what it was. The lead investigator said, “We have to dig. ” Public works crews were brought to the site, and they dug up a section of the drain pipe.

They opened it, and inside, they found human bones. It was Ebby. She had been there the whole time, about sixty feet from where her abandoned car was found. At last, the mystery of where Ebby had gone was solved.

But now, there was a much bigger question. How did she get inside that pipe? At one point, investigators considered whether she could have entered the sewer system on her own somehow. Remember, she had sounded confused during that final phone call.

So they wondered: was she disoriented? Was she trying to hide? Could she have gotten down there by herself? Catherine Townsend, a journalist and private investigator who looked into Ebby’s case for the “Hell and Gone” podcast, entered that sewer system herself.

On “Dr. Phil,” she explained in detail what it took. You have to remove the manhole cover, which is extremely heavy, of course. Then you have to climb down a ladder.

Then you have to maneuver inside this incredibly narrow pipe. Would this eighteen-year-old girl really have done all of that? And consider the timing. Ebby was about to report a sexual assault.

The police say they interviewed the men from the party, but no one was ever charged—not for the assault, not for her murder. However, the Arkansas Attorney General has publicly stated that investigators are looking at the case with fresh eyes and re-interviewing some of the people who were questioned before. So this is not just another cold case sitting untouched in a filing cabinet. They are saying someone is actively working on it.

But there is another loss in this story worth mentioning, because Ebby’s disappearance is not the only loss her family has suffered. Trevor, the brother who heard her voice on that final phone call, died suddenly of a heart attack in April 2019. He was only thirty-five. Their mother has had to bury both her son and her daughter, and she is still trying to find out what happened to Ebby.

If you know anything about this case—especially where Ebby was, who she was with, or what happened between the early morning hours and her final phone call on October 25, 2015—contact the Little Rock Police Department. Because after all this time, we still do not have many answers.