In October 2015, a teenage girl in Little Rock, Arkansas, called her older brother, and he knew immediately that something was wrong. She sounded terrified, distressed. She told him she was lost, that she didn’t know where she was. He asked if she was alone, and she couldn’t even really answer that.

But she told him one thing. She was in her car. Then the call ended. Nothing was ever heard from Ebby Steppach again.

Days later, they found the car, but Ebby was gone. Police searched the area. Her family searched the area. Years passed.

Eventually, a retired investigator took another look at the case and became obsessed with one question: what if Ebby never left the place where her car was found? Let’s talk about Ebby for a moment, because before she was the girl at the center of this mystery, she was just an eighteen-year-old trying to figure out her life. She loved photography, SpongeBob SquarePants, and apparently Hot Pockets sandwiches. She was funny, fiercely loyal, and very into makeup.

And not just mascara and some lip gloss tossed in a bathroom drawer. She worked part-time jobs and saved her money for the really good stuff. She took care of her things. Remember that, because her makeup would be one of the first signs to her mother that something was terribly wrong.

Ebby lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. She wanted to become an esthetician, and she talked about getting into real estate, but for now 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.

So there was some tension, nothing that seemed necessarily alarming at the time. Then came Friday, October 23rd. 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 his phone. The next day, Saturday, October 24th, 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 she had been messaging the men who were at the party, telling them she was going to report them. This would eventually make her stepfather wonder about something. What if Ebby, instead of going to the police station, 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, and then she left in a hurry.

After that, a huge gap appeared in the timeline. For years, no one could account for much of what turned out to be the last hours of Ebby’s life. But investigators have now revealed part of that mystery. Cell phone tracking data released by the Arkansas Attorney General’s Cold Case Unit shows 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. Police have not yet said what they think 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 get truly strange. Ebby sounded confused. She told Trevor she was lost.

She seemed panicked. In fact, she seemed to think she was in front of his house. So he ran outside to see her, but she wasn’t there. He called her back and asked, “Where are you?

Where are you really? ” But Ebby didn’t seem to know. He asked if she was with someone. Again, he couldn’t get a clear answer.

All she could tell him was that she was in her car. Just before the call ended, she told him, “I’m a mess. ” Trevor tried calling her again. There was no answer.

That was the last time anyone in Ebby’s family heard her voice. It was clear something was wrong. So Trevor called his parents and told them Ebby was in trouble. Now everyone was trying to reach her.

Her mother, her stepfather, everyone was calling her. They called her friends. They started trying to figure out where she had been and who she had been with, but without success. No one seemed to know anything.

Eventually, they went to the police. According to her mother, Lori, they were initially told to wait at least 12 hours before filing a missing person report. Lori says police were thinking of it as maybe just an eighteen-year-old girl who decided to take off for a while. But her family didn’t 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 was abandoned in the parking lot, and the battery was dead. 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 20 to 25 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. And that makeup immediately caught her mother’s attention.

Because some of it was broken and scattered across the seats and the floor of the car. Remember, Ebby loved those things. She had worked and saved her money for them. And according to her mother, if she had run away of her own free will, there was no reason for her to leave all of that behind, especially her contact lenses.

She needed them to see. This is where you would expect the investigation to kick into high gear. But that’s not what happened. By the time police responded to the security guard’s report about the abandoned car, by the time they connected it to Ebby, several crucial days had passed.

Police searched Shalimar Park. They didn’t find her. And according to her family, investigators continued to treat the case as a runaway situation. Meanwhile, her family and friends were putting up flyers.

They were talking to people. They were posting her story online. They were trying to figure out what the police hadn’t. Then something happened that seems almost impossible to believe given what we know now.

A woman returned to the park with her daughter. Her 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 you don’t mistake. It was coming from a storm drain.

The smell of decomposition. They called 911 immediately. Police showed up. They dismissed it.

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

But they didn’t connect it to Ebby’s disappearance. As more months passed, the investigation began to lose momentum. But here’s the frustrating part. It’s not that police had chased down every possible lead and hit a dead end.

Important witnesses were never interviewed. Surveillance footage wasn’t collected right away. And by the time investigators realized they needed some of that footage, it had already been wiped. So years later, when the Cold Case Unit reopens Ebby’s case, they are starting almost from scratch.

And there is one place the lead investigator keeps returning to. Shalimar Park. More specifically, the spot where Ebby’s car was found, because her car had been parked very close to a manhole cover. And that manhole was an entrance to the underground sewer system.

There had also been heavy rains around the time Ebby disappeared. So, in May 2018, investigators returned to the park. At 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. And now the investigators were back at the same park where her car had been found. But this time, they would be going underground.

They sent a camera into one of the sewer pipes from one direction, then another camera from the other side. Deep inside the pipe, they hit something. An obstruction. They couldn’t see exactly what it was.

So the lead investigator said, “We have to dig. ”

Public works crews arrived at the site. They dug out a section of the sewer pipe. They opened it up, and inside, they found human bones.

It was Ebby. She had been there the whole time, about 60 feet from where her abandoned car had been found. Finally, the mystery of where Ebby went was solved. But now, there was a much bigger question.

How did she get inside that pipe? At one point, investigators looked at whether she could have entered the sewer system on her own somehow. Remember how confused she sounded during that last phone call? So they were thinking, “Okay, was she disoriented?

Was she trying to hide? Could she have gotten down there by herself somehow? ”

Well, Katherine Townsend, a journalist and private investigator who investigated Ebby’s case for the “Hell and Gone” podcast, went into that sewer system herself. On “Dr.

Phil,” she explained it in detail. Just imagine what it would take. You’d have to remove the manhole cover, which is very heavy, of course, climb down a ladder, and then maneuver inside this incredibly narrow pipe. Would this 18-year-old girl really have done all of that?

And think about the timing here. She was about to report a sexual assault. Police say they questioned those men, and no one was ever charged. Not with the assault, not with her murder.

But the Arkansas Attorney General has publicly stated that investigators are looking at the case with fresh eyes, re-interviewing some people who had been interviewed before. So this isn’t just another cold case sitting untouched in a filing cabinet. They’re saying someone is actually actively studying it again. But sadly, there is another loss in this story worth mentioning, because Ebby’s disappearance isn’t the only loss her family has suffered.

Trevor, the brother who heard her voice in that last phone call, died suddenly of a heart attack in April 2019. He was only 35 years old. Their mother has had to bury 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 she was, who she was with, or what happened between those early morning hours and her final phone call on October 25, 2015, you are asked to contact the Little Rock Police Department.

Because after all this time, there are still so few answers.