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Missing Kansas City Woman Found in Box After Suspected Fentanyl Overdose · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Picture a quiet suburban evening. Right. It's May, best time
0:04
of year exactly. The air is just starting to carry
0:07
that early summer warmth, and well, the whole neighborhood is
0:10
just setting down for the night.
0:11
Speaker 2: Totally normal, right, And.
0:13
Speaker 1: A twenty two year old woman steps out of her
0:15
family home in Gladstone, Missouri. She's holding her rescue cat,
0:20
a little black and white cat named Izzy, tuck securely under.
0:23
Speaker 2: Her arm, which is such a specific, vivid detail.
0:27
Speaker 1: It really is. She walks over to a gray bmw
0:29
idly in the driveway, opens the door, climbs inside, and
0:34
the car just simply drives off into the dark, just.
0:37
Speaker 2: A standard Tuesday night, basically exactly.
0:39
Speaker 1: If you were looking at your window, it would look
0:40
completely unremarkable, just a young woman heading out. But that footage,
0:45
you know, captured on a routine family ring doorbell camera,
0:48
that would actually be the last time her family ever
0:50
saw her alive.
0:52
Speaker 2: It's a profoundly chilling image precisely because of its normalcy.
0:56
I think, Yeah, it's that sharp dividing line between ordinary
0:59
munday life and the precipice of a complete nightmare.
1:03
Speaker 1: One second, you were in the safety of suburbia and
1:05
the next You're just gone. Today we are taking a
1:08
granular look at the tragic disappearance and death of Abbi
1:12
Rain Schafer. We've got a massive stack of source material here,
1:16
and we are going to unpack not just a devastating
1:18
missing person's case from the Kansas City area, but really
1:21
the actual mechanics of a modern digital cover.
1:24
Speaker 2: Up, which is fascinating and terrifying.
1:27
Speaker 1: Truly, we're going to push into the absolute limits of
1:30
forensic science when a body is left to the elements,
1:34
and we are going to confront the harrowing structural reality
1:38
of the synthetic opioid crisis.
1:40
Speaker 2: Because you really can't separate those things in this case.
1:43
Speaker 1: No you can't. So, whether you a listener, are trying
1:46
to comprehend the sheer scale of the fentanyl epidemic in
1:48
America or you were just fascinated by how digital breadcrumbs
1:52
interact with physical investigations, this deep dive will give you
1:55
the full, unvarnished picture.
1:57
Speaker 2: And we are really examining this now because just days ago,
2:00
go on April twenty, twenty twenty six, a major legal
2:04
milestone was reached in this case, right the sentencing exactly
2:07
a sentencing came down that ostensibly closed one of the
2:10
most agonizing chapters for the Schaeffer family, but it also
2:15
laid bare some incredibly uncomfortable truths about the American justice system. Oh, absolutely,
2:21
especially what happens when physical evidence decays.
2:24
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because to truly grasp the scale
2:28
of what happened, we need to look at the massive
2:31
forces at play beneath the surface of that single ring
2:34
camera video.
2:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. If we establish the overarching architecture of this tragedy
2:39
right from the start, this case represents the deadly intersection
2:42
of three distinct things.
2:43
Speaker 1: Oh, lay them off for us.
2:44
Speaker 2: So first, the inescapable grip of modern synthetic addiction, Second,
2:48
the cold calculus of self preservation, and third, a legal
2:52
system that is actively grappling with the realities of decomposed evidence.
2:56
Speaker 1: It's a story where the technology we rely on to
2:58
keep us safe, our cameras, our phones or GPS, right,
3:02
all that stuff, it ended up merely recording a tragedy
3:05
rather than actually preventing it. But before we can even
3:08
begin to understand the crime, the cover up, or the
3:11
convoluted legal battles, we really have to understand the person
3:15
at the center of this void.
3:16
Speaker 2: We have to know who was lost in that gray
3:19
BMW Right.
3:20
Speaker 1: Abby Schaeffer was only twenty two years old. Who was
3:22
she really?
3:23
Speaker 2: Well, looking at the sources, she was a walking contradiction,
3:25
but like in the most vibrant way possible.
3:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, the profiles we have on her described a young
3:30
woman who was intensely confident yet surprisingly sensitive exactly.
3:36
Speaker 2: She was strong willed, occasionally stubborn, but compassionate to a fault.
3:40
Speaker 1: Her family actually noted she was the kind of person
3:43
who would literally hand over her last dollar to a
3:45
friend or even a stranger who needed it.
3:48
Speaker 2: More, just without a second thought.
3:50
Speaker 1: I noticed that duality too when reading through the material.
3:53
She was this vibrant outdoor force. She'd love camping, beach visits, swimming,
3:59
float trips on the Missouri Rivers.
4:01
Speaker 2: Oh in, hiking too.
4:02
Speaker 1: Right, and she was a passionate gardener. But then indoors
4:05
she had this entirely different energy. She was known as
4:08
an amazing impriv chef.
4:10
Speaker 2: I love that specific description me.
4:12
Speaker 1: Too, Not someone who follows a recipe, but someone who
4:15
just you know, walks into a kitchen, looks for whatever
4:17
is in the fridge, and whips up something unique and delicious.
4:20
Speaker 2: And she had these wonderful, highly specific quirks that completely humanize.
4:26
Speaker 1: Her, like the elephant collection.
4:28
Speaker 2: Yes, she collected elephants. She loved makeup and clothing, and
4:32
she turned her creativity into physical art, particularly handmade gifts
4:36
for her family.
4:37
Speaker 1: There are mentions of these incredibly memorable, personalized Father's Day
4:42
gifts she would make.
4:43
Speaker 2: And she cherished antiquing with her mom, Belinda right, and.
4:46
Speaker 1: Then there was this fascinating obsession with graffiti.
4:49
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that detail really stood out.
4:51
Speaker 1: She would actually force a stop during family vacations just
4:55
to photograph striking pieces of street art.
4:57
Speaker 2: That's such a great detail, the juxtaposition of antiquing with
5:00
your mom and then pulling over to document urban graffiti.
5:03
Speaker 1: It paints such a clear picture of her. She also
5:06
apparently hated country music, which is just a funny, relatable
5:10
little trait.
5:10
Speaker 2: Definitely, and her diet. She loves spicy food.
5:13
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, gas station takeis Mexican candy sweet or hot.
5:17
Speaker 2: She was legendary in her family for making late night
5:20
runs for street tacos in South Kansas City.
5:22
Speaker 1: And she would always bring back candy and talkies and
5:25
give hugs to her younger siblings whenever she had been away.
5:28
Speaker 2: But the thing that really stands out as crucial to
5:30
the actual mechanics of this case is her empathy for animals.
5:34
Speaker 1: This is huge. She had a profound connection to animals, specifically.
5:39
Speaker 2: The broken ones right the rescues.
5:41
Speaker 1: She rescued animals that had quarks and traumas of their own,
5:45
animals that had lived hard lives and needed patients. And
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her absolute soulmate was her cat Izzy.
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Speaker 2: She carried Izzy literally everywhere.
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Speaker 1: Took in a handbag on errands, on trips to quick trip,
5:57
on those late night taco bell runs. A bit chory
6:00
states Izzy and Abbi were kindred spirits.
6:03
Speaker 2: So when she steps into that gray BMW on May
6:06
twenty three, twenty twenty two, she naturally has Izzy with her.
6:09
Speaker 1: Right, and that brings us to the disappearance timeline. She
6:12
leaves in the twenty third. Next day, the family doesn't
6:15
hear from her, which is out of character, very out
6:17
of character. So what is the modern family's first instinct?
6:20
They turned to their phones. They used a location tracking
6:23
app called Life three.
6:25
Speaker 2: Sixty, which is incredibly common now, I mean millions of
6:28
people use it, and that.
6:29
Speaker 1: App successfully pinged her phone's location at a very specific
6:34
residential address in Jackson County.
6:36
Speaker 2: But after May twenty four, the phone permanently stopped pinging.
6:40
Speaker 1: The signal just vanished. Hof Gone.
6:43
Speaker 2: I want to pause on that technology for a second.
6:45
I really want you, the listener, to think about your
6:48
own digital footprint right now. Think about the apps you
6:53
use to keep track of your kids, your partners, your
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aging parents.
6:56
Speaker 1: Everyone has something like it, right.
6:58
Speaker 2: We treat modern digit tracking apps like an invisible, unbreakable tether.
7:03
It gives families this profound, almost bulletproof, false sense of
7:07
security that their loved ones are always within reach.
7:11
Speaker 1: You look at a screen, you see the little avatar,
7:13
and you think, oh, she's safe, she's right there exactly.
7:16
Speaker 2: But how does a tracking app actually work when things
7:19
go wrong? Like why does a signal just die?
7:21
Speaker 1: Well, it's a vital distinction. Apps like like three sixty
7:24
don't operate on magic.
7:26
Speaker 2: They rely on a constant handshake between the phone's GPS receiver,
7:30
nearby cell towers, and Wi Fi networks. They drain battery
7:33
quickly because they are constantly broadcasting location data.
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Speaker 1: To a server right constantly updating.
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Speaker 2: So when a signal permanently stops pinging. It usually means
7:42
one of three things. The phone was manually powered down,
7:45
the phone was physically destroyed, or the battery simply died
7:49
and no one.
7:50
Speaker 1: Recharged it, which is terrifying.
7:52
Speaker 2: In a missing person's context. That sudden digital silence is
7:55
a paralyzing transition for a family. One moment you have
7:59
a little real time map of your loved one's existence,
8:03
and the next you are staring at a blank, static
8:05
screen from twenty four hours ago.
8:08
Speaker 1: How does that shift the way police investigate? Because I mean,
8:11
in the old days, a missing twenty two year old
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meant printing flyers and knocking on doors asking, hey, did
8:15
you see this girl.
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Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is how digital tools have entirely inverted
8:21
the initial stages of an investigation. Well, thousands of young
8:24
women vanish annually in this country. In the past, the
8:27
search radius was essentially infinite. Here the technology eliminated the
8:32
search radius entirely.
8:34
Speaker 1: It pointed them directly to a specific house right.
8:36
Speaker 2: To it in Jackson County. But, as this case tragically illustrates,
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surveillance and tracking are just passive observers. Yeah, they can
8:45
record a timeline, they can point to the geographical aftermath
8:49
of a crime, but they cannot intervene.
8:52
Speaker 1: So the life three sixty pin gives the police an
8:54
X on the map. They go directly to this house
8:56
in Jackson County, but when they arrive, the physical reality
9:00
of the house completely contradicts the digital data on the phone.
9:04
Speaker 2: It's totally empty exactly.
9:05
Speaker 1: The house is completely empty. No Abbi, no phone, and
9:09
this kicks off an agonizing eleven month nightmare for the
9:12
Schaeffer family.
9:13
Speaker 2: But when police arrived, they didn't find Abbi, but they
9:15
did find the next best thing in an.
9:17
Speaker 1: Investigation, an observant neighbor.
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Speaker 2: Exactly. Neighbors are often the unsung critical assets of these
9:23
initial canvases, because they noticed disruptions in the micro patterns.
9:26
Speaker 1: Of a street, and this neighbor was paying attention very much, so.
9:30
Speaker 2: They were able to describe the homeowner as a white
9:33
male who drove a dark colored BMW.
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Speaker 1: Which matches the ring camera footage right.
9:39
Speaker 2: They also noted as something highly suspicious a U haul
9:42
truck had been parked at the house over the weekend.
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Speaker 1: Okay, that's a massive red flag.
9:45
Speaker 2: And crucially, the neighbors spotted a black and white cat
9:49
wandering around the property that perfectly matched the description of Izzy.
9:52
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so all the pieces are converging right there.
9:55
You have the BMW matching the ring camera footage from
9:59
Abbey's drive. You have a U haul which screams I'm
10:03
moving something large or leaving in a hurry. Yeah, and
10:05
you have the cat. This immediately leads investigators to a
10:09
man named Jacob Block. Right. They identify him as the
10:12
owner of the BMW, and on June Ted, twenty twenty two,
10:15
just about ten days after Abbi vanished, they track him down.
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Speaker 2: And this interaction is a textbook display of the shifting narrative,
10:22
which is one of the classic behavioral hallmarks of a
10:25
cover up.
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Speaker 1: What did he say?
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Speaker 2: When law enforcement first confronted Block He flatly denied knowing
10:30
Abby Schaeffer. Total denial. Not a great start, right, But
10:34
as police began presenting him with the connective tissue of
10:37
the case, his story morphed. He admitted knowing someone with
10:40
the same first name, but vehemently denied that she had
10:44
left with him in his car on the night of
10:46
May twenty third.
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Speaker 1: But his lies are instantly dismantled by his own technology.
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Speaker 2: They really are.
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Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting because the most damning
10:55
evidence against Jacob Block didn't come from a secret wiretap
10:59
or a confidential informant. Nope, it came from his own
11:02
house surveillance footage from his own home security system.
11:06
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate digital trap of their own making.
11:09
Speaker 1: At eleven door, nine PM on May twenty three, his
11:13
own cameras capture Jacob, Blog and Abbi walking into the
11:16
Jackson County residents together.
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Speaker 2: And Abba is never seen walking out.
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Speaker 1: People install these expansive smart home security systems to protect
11:23
themselves from external threats. Right. They completely forget that these
11:27
systems are impartial data loggers. They just record exactly. They
11:31
don't turn off just because the homeowner is the one
11:33
committing the crime. Yeah, and the footage recovered gets progressively
11:36
darker over the next few days. The timeline of this
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footage is chilling. Let's break down exactly what the camera's caught.
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Speaker 2: On May twenty five and twenty six, the cameras capture
11:45
Block and his then partner, a woman named Unouse Carlo Martinez,
11:49
entering and exiting the home, repeatedly engaging in highly suspicious activity.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. On May twenty five, Carlo Martinez is seen moving
11:57
mop buckets out of a sliding glass door.
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Speaker 2: That's a massive red flag right there.
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Speaker 1: Huge. Then she actively deactivates a security camera by physically
12:06
pulling its power cord. The camera goes dead.
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Speaker 2: And then exactly forty five minutes later it is plugged
12:11
back in and reactivates.
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Speaker 1: Then the next day, May twenty six, the two of
12:15
them use a dolly to load a large black box
12:19
like object into a U haul truck before driving away.
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Speaker 2: And in the middle of all this frantic, calculated concealment,
12:25
in the middle of loading this box into a U
12:27
haul and scrubbing the floors with MAPA buckets, they simply
12:30
abandon Izzy.
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Speaker 1: It's so cool.
12:32
Speaker 2: The cat is just left behind at the residence. Izzy
12:35
was found wandering near the house on June sixth, and
12:37
was eventually taken to an animal control center, where.
12:39
Speaker 1: She was positively identified by a microchip. I have to
12:42
push back on the logic of these suspects though, because
12:45
it absolutely boggles the mind.
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Speaker 3: Oh, their logic is totally flawed, right, you have the
12:50
sheer audacity and the presence of mind to commit a
12:54
massive cover up, moving a body, bleaching a crime scene,
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all while navigating the blind spots of your own security cameras.
13:01
Speaker 2: You're calculating enough to say, hey, we are about to
13:04
do something incredibly incriminating in this specific room. We need
13:07
to unplug this camera.
13:09
Speaker 1: Yes, so they orchestrate a deliberate forty five minute digital blackout.
13:14
But in all that cold blooded, hypervigilant planning, they completely
13:19
forget that a modern rescue cat has a micro check.
13:21
Speaker 2: They miss the most obvious thing.
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Speaker 1: They leave the literal, living, breathing GPS tracker tied directly
13:27
to their victim, just wandering the neighborhood.
13:29
Speaker 2: I mean, it sounds absurd from the outside, but it
13:31
actually perfectly highlights the chaotic, fractured cognitive state of individuals
13:35
operating in a panic. Oh soo well, the cold calculus
13:39
of self preservation kicks in, but it's a severely flawed
13:43
calculus because they're prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain
13:47
responsible for logical long term planning, is completely hijacked by adrenaline.
13:52
Speaker 1: In fear, they're just reacting.
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Speaker 2: Exactly, they prioritize the massive immediate threats the physical body,
13:59
the care recording their faces, the biological fluids that require
14:03
mop buckets. In that state of tunnel vision, a cat
14:07
is completely invisible to them as a threat. They just
14:09
don't connect the cat to a microchip database.
14:11
Speaker 1: It's a fatal flaw on their cover up, it really is.
14:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, in forensic terms, pets abandoned at crime scenes add
14:17
this profoundly heartbreaking layer to investigations. But they also serve
14:21
as silent biological witnesses.
14:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, Izzy's microchip wasn't just a sad detail.
14:26
Speaker 2: No, it was undeniable physical proof tying Abby to that
14:29
exact geographical location, reinforcing the digital life three sixty ping
14:34
and the neighbor's eyewitness account.
14:35
Speaker 1: So the camera footage proves that a large black box
14:38
was moved out of that house on May twenty six.
14:40
The police know something terrible happened, but you know, knowing
14:43
it and proving it are two totally different things.
14:46
Speaker 2: Oh, completely different in a court of law.
14:48
Speaker 1: Because it took nearly a year for the horrifying contents
14:52
of that box to be found. For eleven excruciating months,
14:56
Abby's family is trapped in an investigative limbo. Then the
15:01
calendar turns to April first, twenty twenty three.
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Speaker 2: Right, an investigator specifically tasked with monitoring illegal dumping is outworking.
15:09
Speaker 1: Just doing their regular job.
15:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, they are looking for ordinary municipal trash violations, people
15:14
dumping tires or construction debris. And they spot a broken
15:18
cardboard and wooden box in a ditch off Blue River
15:21
Road near ninety fifth Street in South Kansas City.
15:24
Speaker 1: And inside that box, exposed to the Missouri elements for
15:28
nearly a year, our skeletal remains.
15:30
Speaker 2: Just a horrific discovery.
15:32
Speaker 1: Just days later, on April four, dental records officially confirm
15:35
the worst.
15:36
Speaker 2: It is Abby Shaeffer, and the box found in the
15:38
ditch perfectly matches the dimensions, color, and structural description of
15:41
the one Jacob Block and Unice Carla Martinez were filmed
15:44
loading onto the Dolly and into the U haul.
15:46
Speaker 1: Not only that, but investigators managed to recover photos and
15:49
videos from the suspect cell phones. This showed that exact
15:53
same wooden and cardboard box sitting inside their residence before
15:57
the disappearance. Wow. This discovery is the fulcrum of the
16:01
entire case. It is the moment the investigation officially transitions
16:05
from a missing person search to a body recovery and
16:08
homicide investigation.
16:09
Speaker 2: But almost immediately the prosecution hits a massive structural forensic
16:15
wall what happened. Because the body had been discarded in
16:18
a ditch and exposed to the harsh seasonal elements of
16:22
the Midwest for eleven months, the remains were entirely skeletal.
16:26
Speaker 1: Oh right.
16:27
Speaker 2: The Jackson County Medical Examiner's Office conducted a thorough autopsy,
16:31
but due to the advanced stage of decomposition, they were
16:34
legally and medically prohibited from determining a definitive cause of death.
16:38
Speaker 1: The official medical report had to state other manners of
16:41
death could not be excluded exactly. Hold on, I need
16:44
to stop you there, because the science here seems completely
16:47
contradictoryim The report says her remains were completely skeletal after
16:52
a year in a ditch, but the toxicology results state
16:55
her brain tissue tested positive for fentanyl metabolites THC and
17:00
a cocaine metabolite called benzoilagonine. Right, if she is a skeleton,
17:04
if the weather and animals has stripped away all the
17:07
soft tissue, where on earth is this brain tissue coming from.
17:10
Speaker 2: It's a brilliant question, and it really dives into the brutal,
17:14
fascinating reality of forensic pathology.
17:16
Speaker 1: Okay, walk us through it.
17:17
Speaker 2: So the human body decomposes at wildly different rates depending
17:21
on the micro environment it's in. When a body is
17:24
left in the open, insect activity, scavengers, and weather rapidly
17:28
destroy external soft tissues like skin and muscle, which makes sense,
17:32
But the skull acts essentially like a biological vault. The
17:34
brain inside doesn't just evaporate really yeah, under certain environmental conditions.
17:39
Instead of entirely degrading, the brain can undergo a process
17:43
where it essentially liquefies into a sludge or forms a
17:46
soap like substance called atipisera ATS yeah, often referred to
17:50
as grave wax, and it settles right at the base
17:53
of the cranial cavity.
17:54
Speaker 1: So the toxicologists are extracting this liquefied remnant from inside
17:58
the skull. Yes, but wouldn't any drugs she ingested have
18:02
completely broken down by then? I mean it's been almost
18:04
a year.
18:04
Speaker 2: The active drug itself, yes, that would likely be gone.
18:08
But forensic toxicologists aren't usually looking for the raw drug.
18:12
They are hunting for metabolites.
18:14
Speaker 1: Right, the chemical footprints.
18:16
Speaker 2: Exactly. When your liver processes a chemical compound like fentanyl
18:20
or cocaine, it attempts to break it down to excrete it.
18:24
In doing so, it converts the drug into new distinct
18:27
chemical signatures metabolites. Okay, I fell for fetanyl, it might
18:31
be nor fentyl for cocaine. As you mentioned, it's benzoelecanine.
18:36
These metabolites are highly lepophilic, meaning they love to bind
18:39
to fat.
18:40
Speaker 1: Cells, and the brain is full of fat.
18:42
Speaker 2: The brain is incredibly rich in lipids fats, so these
18:46
chemical signatures embed themselves deep within the fatty tissue of
18:49
the brain. They act like chemical fossils.
18:52
Speaker 1: That is genuinely incredible.
18:54
Speaker 2: They are astonishingly resilient and can survive for months or
18:57
even years, long after the physical structure of the brain
19:00
has broken down.
19:01
Speaker 1: So they extract these chemical fossils from the cranial vault
19:04
to prove exactly what was in her system at the
19:07
exact moment her heart stopped.
19:08
Speaker 2: Yes, so they have what a lethal cocktail of fentanyl, cocaine,
19:12
and THHC.
19:13
Speaker 1: And they also have the who right because while the
19:16
medical examiner is working on the physical evidence, digital forensics
19:20
is executing search warrants on the Facebook accounts of Jacob
19:23
Block and Unice Carlo Martinez.
19:25
Speaker 2: And they struck gold big time.
19:27
Speaker 1: They found direct private messages between the two suspects explicitly
19:32
proving that they were the ones who gave Abby the
19:34
fentanyl and acknowledging in writing that she overdosed.
19:37
Speaker 2: It sounds like a completely sealed slam dunk murder case.
19:41
Speaker 1: Right to a lay person, it absolutely sounds like a
19:44
closed case. But this scenario represents the ultimate agonizing frustration
19:49
for homicide investigators and prosecutors. Well, they have the what
19:52
the lethal drugs in her system, they have the who
19:55
the digital confessions proving the suspects supplied those drugs, But
19:59
because of the severe decomposition of the body, they lack
20:02
the intact physical physiology to definitively rule out every other
20:07
possible mechanical cause of death.
20:09
Speaker 2: Wait, if you know she had a massive amount of
20:11
fentanyl in her system, why does it matter if you
20:13
can't see the rest of her organs?
20:15
Speaker 1: Because in a murder trial, the defense will exploit any
20:18
scientific ambiguity. Oh, of course, the medical examiner has to
20:21
be able to testify under oath that nothing else killed her.
20:25
But without a heart, lungs, or a throat to examine,
20:28
how can the medical examiner definitively say she didn't suffer
20:31
a catastrophic spontaneous aneurysm right before the drugs took effect.
20:36
They can't exactly. How can they prove she wasn't asphyxiated
20:40
or smothered in a way that left no physical marks
20:42
on the bone. They can't without the soft tissue. The
20:45
medical examiners legally obligated to say other manners of death
20:49
could not be excluded.
20:50
Speaker 2: And if the state's own medical expert cannot exclude other causes,
20:55
a defense attorney will drive a truck through that ambiguity
20:59
to introduce reasonable doubt to a jury.
21:02
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for the legal strategy?
21:05
Because the physical evidence is fundamentally degraded by time, the prosecutors,
21:10
led by Jackson County Prosecutor Melissa Johnson, have to make
21:13
an incredibly difficult choice.
21:15
Speaker 2: They finally announced charges on January ninth, twenty twenty five.
21:19
Speaker 1: But they aren't charging Jacob Block with murder or manslaughter.
21:22
Speaker 2: No, they charge him with two felonies, accessory to abandonment
21:26
of a corpse and accessory to tampering with physical evidence.
21:29
Speaker 1: The inability to prove direct causation of death beyond a
21:32
reasonable doubt forced the prosecutor's hand.
21:34
Speaker 2: They had to pivot entirely away from the cause of
21:37
death and focus exclusively on the cover up.
21:39
Speaker 1: Right, the actions caught on the ring camera, the U
21:41
haul footage, and the physical movement of the cardboard box.
21:44
Speaker 2: It's like trying to build a house, but you realize
21:46
your foundation is made of sand.
21:48
Speaker 1: Yes, you desperately want to build the roof, which is
21:52
the murder charge. That's the ultimate goal for the family's justice.
21:56
But the foundation of any murder charge is establishing a
21:58
definitive cause of death.
22:00
Speaker 2: If that foundation is completely compromised by eleven months of
22:03
weather and decomposition, you simply can't put the roof on.
22:06
Speaker 1: The entire case will collapse in a court room. So
22:09
you build what you safely can, a rock solid, structurally
22:13
sound case for tampering and abandonment based on video evidence.
22:18
Speaker 2: That analogy perfectly captures the strategic reality of criminal prosecution.
22:22
The burden of proof in the American justice system is
22:25
purposefully high, very high, but it creates this painful friction
22:28
where the legal truth, what can be proven in court,
22:31
falls tragically short of the factual truth what everyone intuitively
22:36
knows happened, and.
22:37
Speaker 1: The defense attorney, Angela Hasty, leveraged this exact gap brilliantly.
22:41
Speaker 2: What was her argument?
22:43
Speaker 1: She argued that Block considered Abby a close friend and
22:46
that both of them were struggling deeply with the disease
22:49
of addiction. She stated that Block accepted full legal responsibility
22:53
to the concealment of the body because the video evidence
22:56
of the box and the U haul was insurmountable, vehemently
23:00
denied causing her death.
23:02
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the sentencing that just occurred. On
23:05
April twentieth, twenty twenty six. Jacob Block pleads guilty to
23:09
the tampering and abandonment charges.
23:11
Speaker 1: And the judge hands down a sentence of six years
23:14
in state prison, three years for each count, running concurrently.
23:18
Speaker 2: But here is the massive gut wrenching catch for the family.
23:21
That six year state sentence runs concurrently with a twenty
23:24
year federal prison term. He is already serving for an
23:27
entirely different crime.
23:29
Speaker 1: So practically speaking, he doesn't actually spend a single extra
23:32
day in prison for what he did to Abbey. That
23:35
is just awful. And on top of that, the co
23:37
defendant who unplugged the cameras Unice Carlo Martinez remains entirely
23:41
at large with an active warrant still out there, still
23:43
out there. How does a judge justify concurrent sentences in
23:46
a case like this? Why not make them consecutive?
23:49
Speaker 2: Well, Concurrent sentencing is one of the most controversial mechanics
23:52
in the justice system, especially for victims' families. It has
23:55
to be mechanically. When sentences run concurrently, the defendant serves
24:00
multiple sentences at the same time. If you have a
24:03
twenty year sentence and a six year sentence running concurrently,
24:07
you serve twenty years total, not twenty six. Judges often
24:11
use concurrent sentences when crimes are part of the same
24:14
behavioral event, or when dealing with plea deals to guarantee
24:18
a conviction without a costly trial.
24:20
Speaker 1: So it's about efficiency exactly.
24:22
Speaker 2: There's also the reality of jurisdictional overlap. Block was already
24:25
absorbed into the federal prison system. Adding state time to
24:29
the end of a long federal sentence is administratively complex
24:32
and often viewed by judges as punitive rather than rehabilitative,
24:36
even in a case like this, yes, especially when the
24:39
state charges are technically nonviolent, property or tampering crimes, which
24:44
legally speaking, abandoning a corpse is, but.
24:46
Speaker 1: For the family that has to feel like the ultimate
24:49
hollow victory. Oh, undoubtedly, he stood in a courtroom, admitted
24:52
he stuffed their daughter into a box, and essentially received
24:56
zero additional punishment for it.
24:58
Speaker 2: It raises an immense ethical dilemma regarding accountability versus closure.
25:02
The family gets a piece of paper that says he
25:04
is guilty, It goes on his permanent record, but it
25:07
feels entirely insufficient.
25:09
Speaker 1: It really does.
25:10
Speaker 2: Furthermore, it highlights the immense difficulty of prosecuting drug induced homicides.
25:16
When an overdose occurs within a closed social circle. When
25:20
the person handing over the fentanyl is a friend, as
25:22
the defense claimed, how does the law separate the dealer
25:26
from the fellow addict.
25:27
Speaker 1: That's a huge gray area.
25:28
Speaker 2: Proving intent to kill in a shared drug use scenario
25:31
is notoriously difficult, making these secondary tampering charges often the
25:35
only viable path to any form of conviction, And.
25:38
Speaker 1: That brings us to what might be the most chilling
25:41
revelation in the entire case. What's that was? Abby? Truly
25:44
just a tragic victim of an accidental social circle overdose
25:47
or is there something much darker, much more systemic at play.
25:51
Speaker 2: Ah the vigilante theory.
25:53
Speaker 1: Yes, let's dive into the vigil ante theory and the
25:56
broader fentanyl epidemic because Abby's mother, Belinda Schaeffer, revealed something
26:02
absolutely staggering to the press.
26:04
Speaker 2: What did she say?
26:05
Speaker 1: She stated that Abby had actively gathered information on a
26:08
specific Kansas City feentanyl trafficking operation and she was allegedly
26:13
planning to take that information directly to the FBI right
26:16
before she disappeared.
26:17
Speaker 2: Oh wow, that single detail entirely reframes the dynamic of
26:22
that night in the Jackson County House completely. Two months
26:25
prior to Abby vanishing, her former boyfriend, a man named
26:28
Joseph Burgess was among four men arrested in an alleged
26:32
drug trafficking suite. Right, and Abby was described by everyone
26:36
as having a fierce, passionate sense of justice. It is
26:39
highly plausible that she was trying to independently dismantle the
26:43
local networks that were actively destroying the people she cared about.
26:46
Speaker 1: If she was acting as a vigilante informant, did that
26:49
passion for justice make her a target? Was she deliberately
26:52
lured to that house under the guise of friendship.
26:55
Speaker 2: It really makes you wonder to.
26:56
Speaker 1: Answer that, we have to look closely at Jacob Block's
26:59
actual criminal reality. The defense painted him in court as
27:03
just a friend struggling with his own addiction demons.
27:06
Speaker 2: But federal indictments tell completely different story.
27:09
Speaker 1: They really do. He was a major operational player in
27:12
a massive, thirteen person federal drug trafficking ring.
27:16
Speaker 2: Precisely that twenty year federal sentence he is currently serving
27:19
is not for low level street possession.
27:21
Speaker 1: No, not at all.
27:22
Speaker 2: In February twenty twenty four, Block pleaded guilty to a
27:25
federal conspiracy charge that involved the distribution of at least
27:28
sixty three thousand potentially lethal doses of federol.
27:32
Speaker 1: Sixty three thousand that is insane.
27:35
Speaker 2: Furthermore, his specific distribution ring was directly linked by federal
27:39
investigators to an entirely unrelated fatal overdose back in twenty twenty.
27:43
Speaker 1: So we are not talking about a tragic accident between
27:46
two naive friends sharing a pill, not even close.
27:48
Speaker 2: We're talking about a man deuckly embedded in a highly organized,
27:52
highly lucrative, and demonstrably lethal distribution network.
27:56
Speaker 1: Sixty three thousand lethal doses. That number is almost possible
28:00
to visualize, and it forces us to zoom out and
28:03
look at the macro crisis happening in Missouri and across
28:06
the entire United States.
28:07
Speaker 2: The numbers are just staggering.
28:09
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty two, the exact year Abbi died, there
28:13
were two one hundred and seventy eight drug overdose deaths
28:16
in Missouri.
28:17
Speaker 2: Alone, and fentanyl was involved in a staggering sixty seven percent.
28:22
Speaker 1: Of those cases. The Kansas City metro area in particular
28:24
saw a massive, sharp rise. What happened to the drug market?
28:29
Why did it suddenly become so incredibly deadly?
28:32
Speaker 2: Well, the shift from traditional plant based narcotics to synthetic
28:35
chemicals is the defining story of the modern underworld.
28:38
Speaker 1: How fast did it happen?
28:39
Speaker 2: Very fast? If we look at the data from twenty
28:41
eighteen to twenty twenty two, deaths driven by synthetic opioids,
28:45
primarily fentanyl, increased by one hundred and forty percent in Missouri.
28:49
Speaker 1: Wow.
28:50
Speaker 2: During that exact same four year window, deaths from heroin
28:53
plummeted by ninety.
28:54
Speaker 1: Four percent ninety four percent drop.
28:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, the market didn't just evolve. Heroin was completely and
29:00
utterly replaced by fentanyl.
29:01
Speaker 1: I look at this like a hostile corporate takeover of
29:04
the black market.
29:04
Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it.
29:06
Speaker 1: Think about the logistics of heroin. It requires vast poppy fields,
29:10
hundreds of farmers, specific agricultural climates, and highly complex, bulky
29:15
international smuggling routes.
29:17
Speaker 2: Right, it's a huge operation.
29:19
Speaker 1: And it's incredibly vulnerable to weather in law enforcement eradication. Fentanyl,
29:23
on the other hand, is made entirely in a lab.
29:26
Speaker 2: It's vastly cheaper to manufacture.
29:28
Speaker 1: Because it is so unimaginably potent. It is infinitely easier
29:31
to smuggle. You can hide a million doses in the
29:34
spare tire of a single sedan.
29:36
Speaker 2: And tragically, it is vastly more lethal.
29:39
Speaker 1: It drove heroin completely out of business because the profit
29:42
margins are astronomical. But how does a local community fight
29:45
an enemy that is essentially invisible. A lethal dose of
29:49
fentanyl is literally the size of a few grains of salt.
29:52
Speaker 2: It is an unprecedented public health and law enforcement challenge
29:56
because of that exact pharmacology. Fentanyl is highly meaning it
30:00
crosses the blood brain barrier almost instantaneously.
30:03
Speaker 1: Meaning it acts incredibly fast right.
30:05
Speaker 2: It shuts down the respiratory system in minutes. Nationally, this
30:09
crisis is driven largely by Mexican cartels utilizing cheap chemical
30:13
precursors shipped from China, and this.
30:15
Speaker 1: Supply chain caused the vast majority of the more than
30:18
one hundred and ten thousand overdose deaths in the US
30:21
in twenty twenty two alone.
30:22
Speaker 2: And Kansas City is at the epicenter. Why Kansas City
30:25
Because of its geographic location and its network of intersecting
30:28
interstate highways, Law enforcement considers k C a major transportation.
30:33
Speaker 1: Hub what they call fentanyl mills.
30:35
Speaker 2: Exactly places where bulkpowder is pressed into counterfeit pills and
30:39
distributed to the rest of the Midwest.
30:41
Speaker 1: And a demographic impact is terrifying. Overdose is now the
30:45
single leading cause of death for adults aged eighteen to
30:48
forty four in Missouri.
30:49
Speaker 2: Are there any defenses against a drug this potent? The
30:53
data notes that harm reduction efforts things like distributing the
30:56
lock zone the nasal spray, which can temporarily reverse an
30:59
opioid os overdose, and handing out FEENTONYL test strips so
31:02
users can chemically check their drugs before using them. These
31:05
initiatives have actually gained traction.
31:07
Speaker 1: By twenty twenty four. They actually help slow the tide
31:09
of death slightly.
31:10
Speaker 2: Harm reduction is critically important because its primary goal is
31:14
simple keep people breathing long enough to eventually get them
31:17
into addiction treatment. Right, you cannot rehabilitate a dead person,
31:21
But we have to recognize that urban pockets like Kansas
31:24
City are still fighting a grueling, uphill battle.
31:27
Speaker 1: This crisis is not happening in a vacuum.
31:29
Speaker 2: No. It is fueled by deep seated economic stress, massive
31:33
gaps in the mental health care system, and the terrifying
31:36
ease of modern digital access.
31:39
Speaker 1: Dealers no longer have to stand on street corners.
31:42
Speaker 2: They operate in plain sight on social media platforms, using
31:45
emojis to advertise.
31:46
Speaker 1: They turn ordinary social circles into deadly traps, pushing counterfeit
31:51
pills that look exactly like legitimate prescription medication like OxyContin
31:55
or xanax, but are actually loaded with synthetic poison.
31:58
Speaker 2: It brings us right back to Apple.
32:00
Speaker 1: An artist, protective older sister, a rescuer of traumatized animals,
32:05
someone with a fierce, perhaps dangerous sense.
32:07
Speaker 2: Of justice, a vibrant life that was reduced to skeletal
32:10
remains in a broken cardboard box on the side of
32:13
Blue River Road by people she mistakenly trusted.
32:16
Speaker 1: As we synthesize this entire deep dive, the journey we've
32:19
taken through Abbey's case is a horrific tapestry of modern
32:22
American failures.
32:23
Speaker 2: It truly is.
32:25
Speaker 1: We've looked at the deceptive, almost invisible lethality of the
32:28
cartel fetanyl market. We've bumped up against the hard, incredibly
32:31
frustrating structural limits of our justice system when physical evidence
32:35
is left to decay, and.
32:36
Speaker 2: We've examined the permanent yet passive digital footprint we all leave.
32:41
Speaker 1: Behind right the tracking apps that record our demise but
32:44
cannot save our lives.
32:45
Speaker 2: It is a profound, multi layered tragedy, and as we
32:49
consider that staggering national statistic of one hundred and ten
32:52
thousand deaths a year, it is vital that we force
32:55
ourselves to remember that behind every single one of those massive,
32:58
incomprehensible numbers is a real person, the.
33:01
Speaker 1: Person with a family, with specific quoks, with unresolved dreams.
33:05
Speaker 2: You, the listener, I want you to remember Abbe rain Schaeffer,
33:08
not just as a name in a case file or
33:10
a data point in an opioid study, but as a
33:13
vibrant twenty two year old who loved making improv dinners,
33:16
rescuing cats, and pulling over to photograph street art.
33:19
Speaker 1: But before we sign off today, what is the final
33:22
lingering takeaway? Here? We've covered the legal constraints, the chemical metabolism,
33:26
the digital tracking. What is the thought we should walk
33:28
away with?
33:29
Speaker 2: I want to leave you with a chilling paradox tem
33:31
all over. We currently live in an era of unprecedented,
33:35
almost suffocating technological surveillance.
33:38
Speaker 1: We really do.
33:39
Speaker 2: We have ring cameras on our front doors, capturing and
33:42
uploading every footstep to the cloud. We have GPS trackers
33:46
constantly beaming our exact coordinates to satellites from our phones.
33:50
Speaker 1: We even have microchips injected into the necks of our pets.
33:53
Speaker 2: Our movements are recorded, analyzed, and stored minute by minute. Yet,
33:58
despite this massive, highly advanced web of technology watching over us,
34:02
a vibrant twenty two year old woman can still be
34:04
stuffed into a cardboard box and hidden in a roadside
34:07
ditch for nearly a year without anyone finding her. What
34:10
does it say about the reality of our society when
34:13
our technology is so incredibly advanced, but human cruelty, deception,
34:17
and indifference remains so terrifyingly basic.
34:20
Speaker 1: That is an incredibly sobering thought to end on. The
34:24
tools we use to navigate the world constantly evolve, but
34:27
the shadows we hide in stay exactly the same. Thank
34:30
you for joining us on this deep dive, Stay curious,
34:32
stay informed, and please check on your loved ones today.
34:35
We'll catch you next time.