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Missing Kansas City Woman’s Remains Found in Box · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to picture something for a second. Imagine
• 0:03
  you're looking at your smartphone screen late at.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Night, Okay, setting the scene.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you have one of those family tracking apps open,
• 0:11
  and you're just, you know, staring at a little digital
• 0:14
  dot on a glowing map, right, and that dot represents
• 0:18
  someone you love, like a daughter or a sister. The
• 0:21
  app tells you she is at a specific house across town.
• 0:26
  The dot is glowing perfectly still. It is supposed to
• 0:29
  be this ultimate symbol of modern safety. Right, you know
• 0:32
  exactly where.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: She is, exactly you feel in control.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: But what you don't know. What the app is fundamentally
• 0:38
  incapable of telling you, is that while that little digital
• 0:41
  dot is frozen in place on your screen, inside that
• 0:44
  actual physical house, a horrifying calculated cover up is just beginning. Wow. Yeah,
• 0:50
  your loved one is already gone, and the people inside
• 0:53
  are actively figuring out how to make sure she just
• 0:55
  well vanishes from the face of the earth.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: It is a profoundly unsettling image, and I mean it
• 1:00
  strikes right at the heart of the illusion of control
• 1:03
  that modern technology gives us. You know, we operate under
• 1:06
  this assumption that because we have GPS coordinates or because
• 1:09
  we have cellular pings and read receipts that the people
• 1:12
  we care about are safe.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Right because we can see them.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Sort of exactly. But the data doesn't intervene. The data
• 1:20
  has no agency. It just watches.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: And today we are doing a deep dive into a
• 1:27
  case where the data watched absolutely everything, yet it still
• 1:31
  took nearly a year to uncover the horrific truth.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: Ten months.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we are looking at the tragic disappearance and death
• 1:38
  of twenty two year old Abby Schaeffer in Kansas City.
• 1:41
  We've spent weeks going through the comprehensive case files, the
• 1:44
  court records, the forensic data, and the investigative reports provided
• 1:49
  for this deep dive to piece together a story that
• 1:52
  is as heartbreaking as it is maddening.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: It really is maddening.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: But before we get into the timeline, I want to
• 1:57
  promise you what you're actually going to get out of
• 1:59
  this deep dive, because this isn't just you know, recounting
• 2:01
  a true crime timeline.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: No, definitely not.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: By the time we are done today, you are going
• 2:06
  to understand the fatal flaw in our modern digital safety nets.
• 2:11
  You are going to learn about the bizarre almost unbelievable
• 2:15
  forensic science of brain subpotification.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Which is fascinating.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: And you are going to understand the incredibly frustrating legal
• 2:22
  philosophy that allows a justice system to effectively hand out
• 2:27
  a free crime when multiple jurisdictions collide.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: That is the crucial mission here. We are unpacking the
• 2:32
  collision of three massive, complex forces. Okay, we have the
• 2:37
  reality of modern digital surveillance. We have the devastating synthetic
• 2:41
  reality of the fentanyl supply chain that is fundamentally altering
• 2:44
  our communities right, and we have the deeply complicated legal
• 2:49
  loopholes that open up when a fatal overdose is treated
• 2:52
  not as a medical emergency but as a crime scene
• 2:55
  to be a methodically scrubbed clean.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because to understand how at we
• 3:00
  ended up in a roadside ditch, we have to look
• 3:02
  at the incredibly detailed digital breadcrumb trail she left behind
• 3:06
  and how it collided with a deadly secret.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Let's do it.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: So we have this loving family relying on a safety app.
• 3:12
  But the problem with passive surveillance is it only tells
• 3:15
  you the where, never the intent right exactly, and that
• 3:18
  fundamental flaw in the technology is exactly what we see
• 3:21
  on May twenty twenty two. But let's look at Abbey
• 3:25
  herself before we look at that day. She was twenty
• 3:28
  two years old, growing up in the Kansas City metropolitan area,
• 3:31
  specifically in Clay County, Missouri. By all accounts from her family,
• 3:37
  her parents, Belinda and Jason, her siblings Michael, Joel, Livia, Savannah. Yeah,
• 3:43
  she was vibrant, she was deeply caring. Yeah, But like
• 3:48
  so many people caught up in the current public health crisis,
• 3:51
  she was grappling with a severe substance addiction.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: And establishing that duality is vital for understanding everything that follows.
• 3:57
  I mean, addiction does not erase a person's humanity. No,
• 4:01
  it doesn't erase their family ties or their inherent value.
• 4:03
  Even though the people she encountered on the night she
• 4:06
  disappeared treated her exactly as if it did.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: It's so sad, it really is.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: She had a massive support network. She lived with her family.
• 4:13
  This was not someone who lived off the grid or
• 4:15
  had severed ties with society. She was embedded in a
• 4:18
  loving family structure that was actively trying to keep her safe,
• 4:21
  which is precisely why they were utilizing location sharing tools
• 4:25
  like the Life three sixty app on her phone, which.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: Brings us to the actual departure on May twenty three,
• 4:32
  and it starts off remarkably Monday, Very Monday, Abby leaves
• 4:37
  her family home in Clay County. The home's ring camera
• 4:40
  captures her walking out, and she's carrying her cat.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the cat.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: She gets into a gray BMW and I mean, taking
• 4:49
  your cat with you doesn't exactly scream like I'm running
• 4:51
  away to start a new life, nor does it suggest
• 4:54
  you know I'm walking to a highly dangerous situation. It
• 4:57
  speaks to an expectation of continuity, fully expected to come back.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: It implies a casualness to the trip, like a routine
• 5:04
  errand or a brief visit. But let's pause and look
• 5:07
  at the sheer density of the digital infrastructure operating in
• 5:10
  the background of that seemingly casual departure.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's look at it.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: You have the ring camera capturing the visual time stacked
• 5:17
  evidence of her leaving. It captures the specific make and
• 5:20
  color of the vehicle she enters, and her physical state.
• 5:24
  But the real heavy lifter here is the Life three
• 5:27
  sixty app on her.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Phone, right, the app I want to break down how
• 5:31
  that actually works because we treat these apps like magic,
• 5:34
  we really do, but they are doing some incredibly heavy
• 5:37
  computational lifting. So let me test an analogy on you
• 5:41
  to see if I have the mechanics right now.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: All right, let's hear it.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: When Life three sixty tracks you, it's not just one
• 5:47
  satellite looking down, it's more like three different people in
• 5:50
  a crowded room pointing at you to confirm your location.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: Okay, like where this is going?
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: So GPS is the guy on the roof with a telescope,
• 5:58
  highly accurate but needs a clear line of sight to
• 6:00
  the sky. Yes, the cellular network is the guy across
• 6:02
  the street measuring how loud your voice is to figure
• 6:05
  out how far away you are from the cell towers exactly.
• 6:07
  And the Wi Fi positioning is the guy standing right
• 6:10
  next to you looking at the names of the local
• 6:12
  routers around you. Is that essentially how it pinpoints that
• 6:15
  little glowing dot.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Well, that is an excellent mechanistic way to understand it.
• 6:19
  Oh good, Yeah, the app is constantly cycling through those
• 6:22
  three positioning systems, constantly, constantly. The Global positioning system relies
• 6:27
  on a constellation of satellites measuring the microscopic time delay
• 6:31
  of signals to triangulate a position. But as you noted,
• 6:35
  GPS struggles indoors or in dense urban.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Canyons, right, the roof guy loses sight of your.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: Exactly that is when the phone falls back on cellular triangulation,
• 6:45
  it measures the signal strength and timing from multiple nearby
• 6:49
  cell towers. I take that, and finally, the most granular
• 6:52
  tracking comes from Wi Fi positioning. Your phone is constantly
• 6:56
  listening for the unique MAAC addresses of nearby Wi Fi,
• 7:00
  even if you aren't logged into them, even if you
• 7:02
  weren't logged in and just has to hear them. Companies
• 7:04
  have mapped millions of these routers globally, So if your
• 7:08
  phone here's the router named, say Smith Family WiFi, the
• 7:12
  database knows exactly what latitude and longitude that router sits at.
• 7:17
  Through the constant interplay of those three systems, Life three
• 7:21
  sixty continuously broadcasted Abbey's highly accurate location to her.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Family, so they were watching it in real time.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: Yes, they literally watched that digital dot move from Clay County,
• 7:32
  cross the jurisdictional line into Jackson County, and finally come
• 7:35
  to a complete stop at a specific residence.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: And this is where the surveillance shifts from passive tracking
• 7:42
  to something incredibly chilling. It really is, because Kansas City
• 7:45
  Police Department investigators later pull the physical surveillance footage from
• 7:49
  that specific Jackson County.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: Residence right, the destination house.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and the timestamp burned into the corner of the
• 7:55
  video is eleven point zero nine PM on May twenty three.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: Eleven or nine.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: The footage shows Abby, along with a twenty eight year
• 8:04
  old man named Jacob Block, walking into that house together.
• 8:07
  Mm hm, and that is it. She has never seen
• 8:09
  walking out never. The door closes at eleven zero nine PM,
• 8:12
  and twenty two year old Abby Schaefer effectively ceases to
• 8:16
  exist in the eyes of the digital world.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: If we zoom out and connect this to the broader
• 8:20
  landscape of modern policing, we are witnessing a monumental historical
• 8:25
  shift in how investigations operate. That's so well, if this
• 8:29
  disappearance had occurred in say, nineteen eighty five, right, the
• 8:32
  investigation would be agonizingly dependent on human memory.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Oh, like knocking on doors.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly, Detectives will be knocking on doors asking neighbors if
• 8:40
  they happened to look out the window. They'd be asking
• 8:42
  gas station attendants if they remembered a specific face from
• 8:46
  three days.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Ago, and people forget constantly.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: Human memory is notoriously flawed, it's malleable, and it degrades
• 8:53
  rapidly with every passing hour. Right, But today policing is
• 8:58
  overwhelmingly reliant on passes of digital evidence. Our devices are
• 9:02
  smart doorbells are cars. They are constantly talking.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: To each other, creating a digital footprint.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: An inescapable digital footprint. Investigators in Abby's case did not
• 9:12
  need to canvas one hundred miles of highway because the
• 9:14
  app told them the data explicitly handed them the exact address,
• 9:18
  the specific individuals involved, and the exact minute she crossed
• 9:21
  the threshold.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: But you know that creates a really dark paradox. What
• 9:25
  do you mean, Well, we treat apps like Life three
• 9:27
  sixty as a digital safety net, almost like a modern
• 9:31
  day Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs. Okay, I see that,
• 9:33
  But the terrifying reality here is that the bread crumbs
• 9:36
  led right to the witch's house, and the app couldn't
• 9:39
  do anything to stop what happened next.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: That is the core tragedy. Of the technological age, Right.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: It's like setting up a high definition four K security
• 9:47
  camera inside a bankfold but forgetting to put a physical
• 9:51
  lock on the vault door.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: You will know exactly who robbed you, down to the
• 9:56
  color of their shoelaces, but the camera does absolutely nothing
• 9:59
  to do stop the robbery from happening.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: The technology provides location, not salvation.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Not salvation.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: Well, it gives you the wherewith pinpoint accuracy, but it
• 10:08
  is completely blind to the what and the how. And
• 10:11
  in this case, in this specific case, the what was
• 10:14
  a fatal overdose, and the how was a deliberate, multi day,
• 10:19
  calculated effort to ensure that those digital breadcrumbs ended at
• 10:23
  a closed door with nobody inside exactly with absolutely no
• 10:27
  physical body to be found inside when the police eventually
• 10:30
  showed up.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: I am still stuck on a detail from the initial
• 10:33
  source files that bridges this gap between the digital world
• 10:37
  and the physical.
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  Speaker 2: World with detail.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: The cat.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: Ah.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: Yes, Abby's cat was just this innocent living bystander to
• 10:44
  whatever horror unfolded inside that Jackson County house, Right, But
• 10:48
  that cat actually became a critical piece of undeniable physical evidence.
• 10:53
  It did because during the initial police canvas on June
• 10:56
  first and second, officers spoke to a neighbor m HM,
• 11:01
  and the neighbor mentioned seeing a white male driving a
• 11:03
  dark BMW a U haul in the driveway and crucially,
• 11:08
  they mentioned seeing a stray cat wandering around that matched
• 11:11
  the description of Abby's.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: Pet right there in the neighborhood.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that cat was later found abandoned nearby, scooped
• 11:17
  up and taken to a facility where its microchip was scanned. Yep,
• 11:21
  and the microchip definitively confirmed it was Abby's cat.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: It is a fascinating intersection of analog carelessness and digital verification.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Analog carelessness, I like that, We'll think about it.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: The perpetrators went to extreme calculated lengths to erase all
• 11:36
  physical evidence of Abbi from that property, but they carelessly
• 11:40
  discarded the cat, likely assuming an animal is untraceable and insignificant.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: This is a stray cat exactly.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: However, veterinary microchips are just another form of a persistent
• 11:51
  digital footprint.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: How do they actually work?
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: They use RFID radio frequency identification technology. It's a passive chip,
• 12:00
  meaning it doesn't have a battery.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: Wait, no battery, how does it transmit.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: It only transmits its unique identification number when an external
• 12:07
  scanner powers it via an electromagnetic field.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's clever it is.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: And that simple scan definitively placed Abby's physical property and
• 12:16
  biological extension Abby herself at that specific location.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: It completely destroyed Jacob Block's initial statements to the police
• 12:23
  because he lied. He flatly lied. He claimed you didn't
• 12:26
  really know her and definitely did not give her a
• 12:28
  ride that night.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: So he lies to the cops. But the cat's microchip
• 12:32
  and the Life three sixty data prove he's lying. Abs
• 12:35
  The digital evidence told investigators exactly where Abby went, but
• 12:39
  the physical surveillance of the home over the next few
• 12:41
  days revealed a frantic, calculated effort to erase her existence.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: Yes, the cleanup.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: Let's look at the days immediately following May twenty three,
• 12:50
  between May twenty four and May twenty six. Okay, the
• 12:53
  exterior cameras on that Jackson County home, the very same
• 12:56
  cameras that recorded Abby walking in document some highly suspicious
• 13:01
  activity by Jacob Block and.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: The homeowner, a woman named Eunice Carlo Martinez.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Right, Unice Carlo Martinez. What are they doing? On camera.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: We are looking at the classic logistical hallmarks of a
• 13:12
  post mortem concealment.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: Timeline, post mortem concealment.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: Yes, instead of dialing nine one one. When Abbey suffered
• 13:17
  a medical emergency block and Carla Martinez spent three days
• 13:21
  treating a human tragedy as a sanitation problem.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: A sanitation problem, God, that's grim. It is.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: The surveillance footage shows them entering and exiting the house repeatedly.
• 13:31
  You see Carla Martinez physically moving mock buckets and heavy
• 13:34
  cleaning supplies in and out of the residents.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Right out in the open.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: Yes. In forensic terms, these are the overt indicators of
• 13:42
  attempting to destroy trace biological evidence like what such as
• 13:46
  bodily fluids that often result from the physiological processes of death.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Right, okay. And then there's the camera itself, Yes, the
• 13:54
  blind spot, because according to the case files, at one
• 13:57
  point during this three day window, the valance camera is
• 14:01
  physically deactivated.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: It goes completely dark.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: Recording nothing, and then highly suspiciously it reactivates about forty
• 14:10
  five minutes later. I'm trying to wrap my head around
• 14:13
  the logistics of that, Like, what exactly can you accomplish
• 14:16
  in forty five untracked minutes when you were in the
• 14:18
  middle of trying to hide a human body.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: In the context of forensic concealment, forty five unobstructed minutes
• 14:24
  is an absolute eternity, really an eternity.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Oh absolutely. The physical act of moving a body is
• 14:30
  strenuous and difficult, especially dealing with dead weight. Right, of course,
• 14:34
  forty five minutes provides ample time to move a body
• 14:36
  from an interior room to an exterior staging area like
• 14:39
  a garage.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: It allows time to alter or removed clothing, to tightly
• 14:43
  package the remains in a container, or to thoroughly sanitize
• 14:46
  a specific primary location without the digital I recording the methodology.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: So they needed the camera off to do the heavy lifting.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: Essentially precisely, and the very act of turning the camera
• 14:56
  off and on again is highly legally significant. Why it
• 15:01
  powerfully demonstrates a consciousness of guilt.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Consciousness of guilt.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: Yes, they knew they were being recorded, they understood the
• 15:08
  immense evidentiary value of the footage they were creating, and
• 15:11
  they actively manipulated the digital record to create a specific,
• 15:15
  intentional blind spot.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: I have to say, though, the sheer audacity of what
• 15:19
  they did next is just baffling. It is shocking because
• 15:23
  the morning of May twenty sixth, the footage shows them
• 15:26
  using a hand dolly, A hand DOLLI yeah, They are
• 15:29
  wheeling this large black box like object out of the
• 15:33
  house and loading it into the back of a U
• 15:36
  haul truck that Eunice Carlo Martinez had rented. It's like
• 15:39
  they thought treating a human being like a piece of
• 15:42
  broken furniture in a U haul would solve their problem,
• 15:45
  but they didn't realize they were essentially filming their own
• 15:48
  documentary of a cover up on their home surveillance system.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: It highlights a profound lack of foresight, to put it mildly,
• 15:56
  which honestly is incredibly common when criminal actions are driven
• 16:00
  by sheer panic and the instinct for self preservation.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Which is worth thinking long term.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: Exactly, they successfully removed the physical body from the immediate premises,
• 16:10
  achieving their primary goal, but in doing so, they immutably
• 16:15
  documented the specific container, the transport method, the rental vehicle,
• 16:19
  and their own direct physical involvement in the loading process.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: So they gave the cops everything they needed.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: They did that black box becomes the central anchor of
• 16:27
  the entire timeline.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: However, the tragedy of the justice system is that while
• 16:32
  the digital evidence was immediate, it would take nearly a
• 16:35
  year for the physical world to catch up.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: Ten excruciating months. Yes, for ten months Belinda and Jason
• 16:41
  Schaeffer and Abbey siblings are living in this torturous, unresolved.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: Limbo, agonizing for them.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: And then we jumped forward to April one, twenty twenty.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: Three, almost a year later.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we were miles away now near East ninety fifth
• 16:55
  Street and Blue River Road in South Kansas City. It
• 16:58
  is a roadside day, exposed to the elements, and someone
• 17:03
  makes a gruesome discovery, very grim scene. It's a broken
• 17:06
  box and inside are skeletal remains, right, and.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: The elements in the passage of time had severely degraded
• 17:13
  those remains. Naturally, when investigators arrive at the ditch, they
• 17:16
  find a box that perfectly matches the size, the color,
• 17:19
  and the structural description of the one seen on the
• 17:21
  surveillance footage ten months prior.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: It's the same box.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and to solidify this connection beyond any doubt, forensic
• 17:28
  analysts later pull photos and videos from the cell phones
• 17:31
  of both Block and Carlo Martinez.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: What do they find on the phones.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: Media that explicitly links that specific box to the interior
• 17:39
  of the Jackson County residents.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: So there's zero doubt it's the box from the hand dollings,
• 17:43
  zero doubt. Three days later, on April fourth, twenty twenty three,
• 17:48
  forensic dental records officially confirmed the absolute nightmare. Yes, the
• 17:52
  remains are Abby Schaeffer.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: It's heartbreaking.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: But because she had been left in a ditch for
• 17:57
  nearly a year, exposed to the harsh, fluctuating Missouri.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: Weather right the freezing wet winter, the humidity, the insect activity.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Exactly, the state of decomposition was extreme. The soft tissue
• 18:09
  was entirely.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: Gone, completely skeletonized.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: And this is where the forensic science in the case
• 18:14
  files gets incredibly complicated and honestly a bit difficult to comprehend.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: It is very complex.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Because they couldn't just look at her and say definitively
• 18:22
  this is how she died.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: No, they couldn't.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: But the source files mentioned they tested brain tissue.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: They did.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: I am struggling to understand how, like, how is it
• 18:31
  biologically possible to have testable brain tissue after a body
• 18:35
  has been sitting in a roadside ditch for ten months.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: It is a remarkable and somewhat macabre aspect of forensic pathology.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: To understand how they extracted that data, we have to
• 18:47
  look at the specific biology of decomposition.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: Let's it doing.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: Normally, external soft tissues decay very rapidly due to a
• 18:54
  combination of bacterial putrefaction, insect activity, and environmental exposure.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: Right. Nat takes its course exactly.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: However, the human brain is housed within the.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: Cranium inside the skull.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: Yes, the skull acts as an armored, relatively sealed vault okay,
• 19:11
  and under certain environmental conditions, particularly in damp, anaerobic or
• 19:15
  oxygen deprived environments like a wet ditch during a cold
• 19:18
  Missouri winter, the fatty tissues in the body undergo a
• 19:22
  chemical process called subpoonification subpontification.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for me. What is actually happening
• 19:28
  at a chemical level.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: Sopoonification is the hydrolysis and hydrogenation of body fats. Hydrolysis
• 19:34
  meaning in Layman's terms, the anaerobic bacteria in the body
• 19:37
  begin breaking down the lipids or fats. The brain is
• 19:41
  an incredibly fat rich organ It is roughly sixty.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: Percent fat wow, sixty percent yes.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: So as these lipids break down in a moist environment
• 19:50
  without much oxygen, they convert into fatty acids, which then
• 19:54
  bind with sodium or potassium to form a crumbly soap
• 19:57
  like substance known as adiposier.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Or grave way brave wax. That is cool, it is grim,
• 20:02
  but this adipose here essentially halts the normal decay process.
• 20:07
  It mummifies the organ, so it preserves it.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: Yes, so when the medical examiner opened the cranial vault
• 20:13
  ten months later, they didn't find normal brain tissue, but
• 20:17
  they found this preserved waxy atiposse here. That is unbelievable,
• 20:21
  and forensic toxicologists were able to extract that preserved substance,
• 20:26
  liquefy it in a lab setting, and test it for
• 20:28
  trace chemical compounds.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: The environment essentially turned the brain into a waxy time capsule.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: That's a perfect way to describe it, a time capsule.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: And the files say they tested it for metabolites. They did. Now,
• 20:40
  metabolite is not the drug itself, right, it's what the
• 20:43
  liver turns the drug.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: Into, precisely, and that distinction is legally and scientifically crucial.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Why is that when you.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: Ingest a substance, your body recognizes it as a foreign chemical.
• 20:54
  Your liver immediately begins to metabolize it, breaking it down
• 20:57
  through enzymatic reactions into different chemicals structures, so your body
• 21:01
  can safely process and excrete it through urine.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: Okay. So why does that matter for the legal side.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: Because finding the raw drug itself in a body can
• 21:10
  sometimes be argued away by defense attorneys as environmental contamination.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Oh, like if someone just spilled it on her exactly.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: For example, if raw fentyl powder was spilled on a
• 21:22
  body after death, I see. But the presence of metabolites
• 21:25
  proves definitively that the substance was inside a living, functioning human.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Body, because dead livers don't metabolize exactly.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: It proves there was an active circulatory system and a
• 21:36
  functioning liver that was actively attempting to process the chemical.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: Okay, that makes perfect sense.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: In the atipusser extracted from Abbey's cranium, the toxicologists found
• 21:45
  metabolites for THHC benzoilic gonine, which is the primary long
• 21:50
  lasting metabolite.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: Of cocaine cocaine.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: Okay, And critically they found the metabolites for fentanyl fentanyl.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: So the complex chemistry of subpontification proves without a shadow
• 22:00
  of a doubt that she had a lethal cocktail, including fentanyl,
• 22:05
  actively processing in her system at the exact time her
• 22:07
  heart stopped beating.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: It undeniably proves the presence of the chemical footprint of
• 22:12
  an overdose.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is how the science of decomposition creates
• 22:16
  a legal gray area. How So, here is the massive,
• 22:20
  incredibly frustrating legal caveat that completely shapes the rest of
• 22:25
  this case. Okay, because there was absolutely no soft tissue
• 22:28
  left on the neck or the torso the medical examiner
• 22:31
  could not definitively legally rule out other methods of homicide. Wait, really, yes,
• 22:36
  the toxicology proves she was poisoned by a fentanyl, but
• 22:40
  the missing soft tissue means they cannot say for absolute
• 22:43
  certain she wasn't also suffocated, strangled, or fatally struck. That
• 22:48
  scientific gap, the inability for a medical expert to set
• 22:51
  on a witness stand and say with one hundred percent
• 22:54
  certainty that the drug was the sole exclusive cause of
• 22:56
  death becomes a defense attorney's shield.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, let me make sure. I am grasping
• 23:00
  the absurdity of this.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: It is absurd.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: The police have video of Jacob Block and Unice Carlo
• 23:06
  Martinez moving a box the exact dimensions of a human body. Yes,
• 23:10
  they have text messages, which we'll get to in a
• 23:12
  second discussing an overdose.
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: They found her bones in that exact same box, And
• 23:18
  you are telling me that because nature took its course
• 23:21
  over ten months and erased the soft tissue, that is
• 23:24
  somehow enough for a jury to say, well, we can't
• 23:27
  be sure they killed her. Yes, How does that protect
• 23:30
  them from a murder charge.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: It comes down to the foundational principle of our justice system,
• 23:35
  the burden.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Of proof, right beyond a reasonable doubt.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: Exactly, the prosecution must prove every element of a crime
• 23:42
  beyond a reasonable doubt to secure a homicide conviction. The
• 23:46
  prosecutor must prove the exact mechanism of death, okay, and
• 23:50
  they have to prove that the defendant's specific intentional actions
• 23:54
  caused that death. I see a defense attorney will look
• 23:57
  at those bones and say to the jury, yes, my
• 23:59
  client hid the body. He admits that it was a
• 24:01
  terrible mistake made in panic. But the state cannot prove
• 24:05
  how she died. Maybe she choked on her own vomit
• 24:08
  while my client was in the other room. Maybe she
• 24:10
  took the drugs herself before she arrived.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: Wow, since the.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: Medical examiner cannot rule out other causes, you have reasonable doubt.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: That is infuriating.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: It is, and if a prosecutor takes that to a
• 24:20
  jury and loses, double jeopardy attaches, the defendants can never
• 24:25
  be tried again. So prosecutors are often forced into a
• 24:28
  corner by the science of decomposition, which.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: Brings us to the motives, the digital messages, and the
• 24:34
  absolute crisis that is the fentanyl supply chain.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: Yes, the broader context.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: Because the reckless, calculated disposal of Abby's body wasn't just
• 24:42
  a panic response from a couple of people who got
• 24:44
  scared at a party. No, it was not. It was
• 24:47
  deeply tied to exactly who Jacob Block and Eunice Carlo
• 24:50
  Martinez were and the incredibly deadly product they were moving.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: Right to truly understand their bizarre actions between May twenty
• 24:58
  three and May twenty six, we have to look at
• 25:00
  the digital communications that investigators eventually uncovered via subpoenas.
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: What did they find.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: They executed search warrants on the Facebook accounts associated with
• 25:09
  both Block and Carla Martinez Facebook Yes, and inside the
• 25:13
  direct private messages on that platform, investigators found explicit, undeniable admissions.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: You're kidding, Nope.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: The suspects essentially admitted to giving Abby fentanyl and explicitly
• 25:24
  stated in writing that she suffered an overdose on the
• 25:27
  very night she disappeared.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: The fact that people confess to major crimes in Facebook
• 25:33
  messages will never cease to baffle me.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: It is very common.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Surprisingly, you are literally typing out your involvement in a
• 25:41
  death on servers earned by a multi billion dollar tech
• 25:45
  company that absolutely routinely complies with police subpoenas.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: They leave a perfect digital trail.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: But here's where the source file provides a massive twist.
• 25:54
  It provides an explosive, contextual detail from Abby's mother, Belinda.
• 25:59
  This change is ever it really does. She told reporters
• 26:02
  that Abby possessed specific actionable information about a local fentanyl
• 26:06
  trafficking operation right and not only did she have this information,
• 26:10
  she was actively planning to speak with the FBI about
• 26:13
  it right before she vanished.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: This completely shifts the entire paradigm of the investigation. Howso,
• 26:18
  we are no longer just looking at a tragic accident
• 26:21
  on overdose among acquaintances who panicked. We are suddenly looking
• 26:24
  at a highly dangerous intersection of an addicts vulnerability and
• 26:29
  a criminal enterprises ruthless need for self preservation because she
• 26:33
  was a threat exactly if Abbi was intending to speak
• 26:36
  to federal authorities, she was potentially a massive threat to
• 26:39
  their freedom and their highly lucrative profit margin.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: And we know for a fact that Jacob Block wasn't
• 26:44
  just some low level street corner dealer selling baggies to
• 26:47
  support his own habit.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: No, he was a major player.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: The sources explicitly stated that in a separate, massive federal
• 26:54
  case he was part of a major conspiracy distributing huge
• 26:58
  quantities of fentanyls dude quantities. In fact, he pleaded guilty
• 27:02
  in January twenty twenty five to federal fedinyl trafficking charges
• 27:06
  and received.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: A twenty year sentence twenty years he was.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: Moving tens of thousands of lethal doses into the community.
• 27:13
  The federal court filings even noted his direct connection to
• 27:15
  at least one other overdose death.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: If we synthesize these two realities, blocks, undeniable convicted status
• 27:22
  as a major federal trafficker, and Abbey's stated intention to
• 27:26
  whistle blow to the FBI. It creates a terrifying dual
• 27:30
  motive that the justice system struggles to untangle.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: What are the two motives?
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: On one hand, you have the narrative supported by their
• 27:37
  own Facebook messages. It was a recreational hangout. They've supplied
• 27:41
  her with drugs, she accidentally overdosed, and they panicked.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: Because calling an ambulance brings.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: The cops right, effectively exposing their massive trafficking operation.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: Okay, what's the other motive?
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: On the other hand, you have a much darker, calculated possibility.
• 27:56
  Did they intentionally provide her with a lethal dose of
• 27:59
  fentanyl spit specifically to silence her before she could reach
• 28:02
  the FBI.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting, or rather really disturbing.
• 28:07
  Abbi wasn't just a victim of a drug. She was
• 28:11
  potentially a threat to a massive criminal enterprise. Yes, was
• 28:15
  it a tragic accident they covered up or was the
• 28:18
  overdose quite literally the murder weapon.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: It is incredibly difficult to prove because when we talk
• 28:23
  about fentanyl, we are talking about a drug where the.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: Line between a recreational high and a homicide is practically invisible.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: It is practically nonexistent.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: Let's look at the mechanics of this drug because it
• 28:35
  has completely transformed the landscape of the opioid epidemic.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: It has changed everything.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: We aren't talking about prescription oxyconton pills being diverted from
• 28:43
  pharmacies anymore. This is a purely synthetic killer.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: Purely synthetic.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: The supply chain relies on precursor chemicals shipped in bulk
• 28:52
  from China to Mexico, where the cartels synthesize the drug
• 28:56
  in massive clandestine labs.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: The economic of synthetic drugs like fentanyl explain why it
• 29:03
  has saturated the market so quickly.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: How do the economics work?
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: Traditional opioids like heroin require immense agricultural effort. You need
• 29:10
  acres of land to grow poppies. You are dependent on
• 29:13
  whether you need massive amounts of manual labor to harvest
• 29:17
  the resin right farming exactly farming, and it takes months.
• 29:21
  Fentanyl synthesis requires none of that.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: What does it require?
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: It requires a small room, cheap chemical precursors, and a
• 29:27
  few hours of synthesis. Wow, the profit margins are astronomical,
• 29:32
  and because it is so cheap to produce, the cartels
• 29:35
  and the distributors use industrial tableting machines to press the
• 29:38
  fentanyl powder into counterfeit.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: Pills counterfeit pills so they look like the real thing.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: They look visually identical to standard prescription medications like the
• 29:46
  blue M thirty oxy conton pills.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: And the lethality is just terrifying, terrifying. The sources note
• 29:53
  that a lethal dose of fentanyl for an average adult
• 29:55
  is generally considered to be just two.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: Milligrams two miligram.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to visualize that two milligrams. That is essentially
• 30:04
  a few grains of salt on the tip of a pencil.
• 30:06
  That is an accurate visual How does something so microscopic
• 30:11
  shut down a human body.
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: Fentanyl is an incredibly potent synthetic opioid agonist, meaning what
• 30:17
  it binds rapidly and tightly to the muteopioid receptors in
• 30:21
  the brain. Okay, these receptors control pain, but they also
• 30:25
  control the respiratory drive breathing.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: Because fentanyl binds so aggressively, it essentially turns off the
• 30:31
  brain's signal to the lungs to breathe.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: It just switches it off.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: A dose of just two milligrams overwhelms those receptors so
• 30:39
  completely that respiratory depression occurs within minutes, leading to hypoxia,
• 30:43
  brain damage, and death.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: My god.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: Because the cartels mix it into other drugs like cocaine,
• 30:48
  which we know Abby also had in her system, or
• 30:51
  pres it into fake pills, the users often have absolutely
• 30:55
  no idea they are ingesting fentanyl until their respiratory system fails.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: So it's Russian rooms.
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: It has shifted the crisis from a slow, agonizing decline
• 31:04
  of addiction to an epidemic of instant, unpredictable lethality.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: In Missouri and Kansas, where this tragedy unfolded, the sources
• 31:12
  note that fentonyl overdoses surged dramatically in the early twenty
• 31:15
  twenties huge searches. Kansas City alone was seen hundreds of
• 31:19
  deaths annually. Abbe wasn't just a victim of a drug.
• 31:23
  She was caught in the gears of a massive, multinational
• 31:26
  criminal enterprise that Jacob Block was a willing, active and
• 31:30
  highly profitable part of. Yes, he was, but despite the
• 31:33
  FBI connection, despite his long history of trafficking, and despite
• 31:37
  those Facebook messages where they admit giving her the drug,
• 31:40
  the actual charge is brought down in state court paint
• 31:43
  a frustratingly limited picture of accountability.
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: And this brings us right to the core of the
• 31:48
  legal loophole we promised to explore.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: Let's look at the actual charges. In January twenty twenty five,
• 31:54
  Jackson County prosecutors finally formally charged Jacob block In units
• 31:59
  called them Martinez. Right. But they were not charged with murder. No,
• 32:03
  they were not charged with manslaughter.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: No they were not.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: They were charged with accessory to abandonment of a corpse
• 32:10
  and accessory to tampering with physical evidence.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: Yes, tampering and abandonment.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: So let me make sure I am perfectly clear on this. Okay,
• 32:17
  you can supply a lethal synthetic drug to someone. You
• 32:22
  can sit there and watch them die without ever picking
• 32:24
  up a phone to call an ambulance. You can stuff
• 32:26
  their body into a box, rent a U haul truck,
• 32:29
  throw them in a roadside ditch like garbage. Right, and
• 32:33
  legally you are basically charged with aggressive littering and hiding evidence.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: That is essentially what those charges amount to.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: It feels like prosecuting the getaway driver for a broken
• 32:44
  tail light while completely ignoring the fact that they just
• 32:46
  rob the bank. It is infuriating.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: It is incredibly frustrating for the public, and it is
• 32:52
  absolute agony for the victim's family.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: Can't even imagine.
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: But this is the harsh reality of prosecutorial strategy when
• 32:59
  faced with degraded forensic evidence.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: Right because of this spotification.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: Exactly as we discussed, the ten months of decomposition erased
• 33:07
  the medical examiner's ability to definitively rule out other causes
• 33:12
  of death.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, proving exactly who physically handed her the fatal dose
• 33:17
  and whether she took it willingly or under duress is
• 33:20
  incredibly difficult when the only surviving witnesses in the room
• 33:24
  are the suspects.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: Themselves, because they're the only ones left to tell the
• 33:27
  story exactly.
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: Prosecutors are ethically bound to only bring charges they believe
• 33:31
  they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt to adjourn.
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, I understand that.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: Thanks to the ring cameras and the U haul rental receipts,
• 33:38
  the tampering and abandonment charges were a slam dunk. Right
• 33:41
  the homicide charges were a massive legal gamble.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: But the sentencing is where this legal reality gets even
• 33:48
  more complex and frankly enraging.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: Yes, the sentencing is controversial.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: In April twenty twenty six, Jacob Block, who is now
• 33:55
  twenty eight years old, pleads guilty in Jackson County Circuit Court.
• 33:59
  He gets a six sentence for what he did to Abbi,
• 34:03
  but the judge rules that this six year state sentence
• 34:06
  will run concurrently with his prior twenty year federal sentence
• 34:10
  for federal trafficking. Right concurrently, he's currently serving his time
• 34:14
  in a federal prison down in Georgia.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: This raises an important question about how our justice system
• 34:20
  handles overlapping jurisdictions and the philosophy of punishment.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: Please explain, because I am lost.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: Okay. There are two ways to structure a sentence, consecutive
• 34:30
  and concurrent.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: When sentences run consecutively, they are stacked end to end.
• 34:36
  You serve your twenty years for the federal drug trafficking,
• 34:39
  and then on day one of year twenty one you
• 34:41
  start your six years for abandoning the corpse.
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: That makes sense.
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: But when they run concurrently, you serve them at the
• 34:47
  exact same time.
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: Wait, if he is serving them at the exact same time,
• 34:51
  and the federal sentence is twenty years, well, the state
• 34:54
  sentence is only six years. Yes, that means the state
• 34:57
  sentence is entirely swallowed up. It adds zero additional time
• 35:00
  to his life behind bars. It's essentially a free crime.
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: That is correct.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: He pays no extra price of freedom for throwing her
• 35:07
  in a ditch. Why on earth would a judge agree
• 35:10
  to that?
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: It often comes down to the mechanics of plea bargaining
• 35:13
  and the doctrine of dual sovereignty.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: Dual sovereignty, Yes.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: The state of Missouri and the federal government are separate
• 35:19
  sovereigns prosecuting separate crimes. Okay, However, court systems are massively overburdened.
• 35:26
  By offering a concurrent sentence, the state prosecutor guarantees a
• 35:30
  guilty plea without the massive expense and risk of a trial.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: While ensuring he's still locked up for a long time
• 35:36
  under the federal charge.
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly, from a purely administrative standpoint, the system views the
• 35:42
  twenty year federal sentence as sufficient incapacitation of a dangerous individual.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: But from a moral standpoint.
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: From a moral standpoint, the specific grotesque punishment for what
• 35:52
  he did to Abby. Shaffer's body is effectively absorbed into
• 35:55
  a spreadsheet that is so dark, and his defense attorney
• 35:58
  actually leaned into the bizarre, minimized narrative during the proceedings.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: What do they say?
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: The sources say? The defense noted Block's own struggles with addiction,
• 36:08
  claimed he viewed Abbe as a friend, and emphasized that
• 36:12
  he accepted responsibility for the concealment, while adamantly denying he.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: Caused her death a friend.
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: That was a term us.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Treating the concealment of a corpse as just a poor
• 36:22
  choice made by a friend in a tough spot is
• 36:25
  a staggering minimization of stuffing a twenty two year old
• 36:28
  woman into a U haul.
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: It is a deliberate defense strategy designed to humanize a
• 36:33
  client who committed an incredibly dehumanizing act. By citing his
• 36:37
  own addiction, The defense attempts to frame the event not
• 36:40
  as a calculated, ruthless crime by a major fentanyl kingpin,
• 36:44
  but as a chaotic, sad tragedy among equals but true friendship.
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: Basic human decency involves calling nine one one when a
• 36:51
  life is in danger exactly, not buying cleaning supplies in
• 36:55
  a hand Dolly.
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: No, certainly not. And we also must remember the unresolved
• 36:59
  thread here. While Block is sitting in a federal prison,
• 37:02
  Unice Carlo Martinez, the homeowner, the one seen moving the
• 37:06
  mop buckets, the one whose name is on the U
• 37:08
  haul rental agreement, remains at large with an active warrant.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: She is a fugitive, which means the family is still
• 37:14
  waiting for the other shoot to drop. They are, and
• 37:16
  that leads us to the human toll and the systemic
• 37:19
  failures that Abby's story represents. The Schaefer family endured prolonged
• 37:25
  psychological torture. Yes, for nearly a year. They were organizing vigils,
• 37:30
  printing and distributing posters, physically searching wooded areas, begging the
• 37:35
  media for coverage ten months of that. Can you imagine
• 37:38
  the sheer psychological agony of waking up every single day
• 37:42
  for three hundred days knowing your daughter's digital breadcrumbs stopped
• 37:46
  at a known drug house right knowing who is inside,
• 37:50
  and the police just don't have a body yet to
• 37:51
  make an arrest.
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: The term psychologists use for that specific type of trauma
• 37:56
  is ambiguous loss.
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: Ambiguous loss.
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: It is a uniquely deva stating form of grief because
• 38:01
  it freezes the morning.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: Process because there's no closure.
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: Exactly, you cannot mourn properly because there is no finality,
• 38:08
  no grave to visit, and no absolute confirmation of death.
• 38:12
  But you also cannot hope properly because all the logical
• 38:15
  evidence points to a terrible tragedy.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: Finding her remains ten months later brought a form of
• 38:20
  physical closure. They finally knew where she was, but it
• 38:24
  simultaneously introduced a new horrific layer of profound.
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: Grief regarding the absolute indignity of her disposal.
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: Exactly, no parents should ever have to learn that their
• 38:34
  child was treated like refuse. No never, And the horrifying reality,
• 38:38
  as noted heavily in the sources, is that this is
• 38:41
  not an isolated incident. Sadly, it is not nationwide. Tens
• 38:44
  of thousands of people are dying annually from fentanyl poisoning.
• 38:48
  It is shattering families from Clay County, Missouri, to every
• 38:51
  corner of the country, and it is completely overwhelming both
• 38:55
  our justice systems and our public health infrastructure.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: Abby's story represents a massive macro level failure of both
• 39:02
  public health and human empathy. How so, it represents a
• 39:05
  tragic repeated pattern where users are low level dealers panic.
• 39:09
  The sheer lethality of fentanyl creates scenes of sudden, dramatic
• 39:13
  death that absolutely terrify the survivors in the room, And
• 39:16
  instead of prioritizing human life, the people in the room
• 39:19
  prioritize self preservation.
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: They protect themselves.
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: They fear prosecution for drug possession or distribution more than
• 39:26
  they value the life of the person actively dying on
• 39:29
  their floor.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us? It means
• 39:32
  we're looking at a crisis where the lethality of the
• 39:36
  drug completely strips away basic human empathy.
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: The most tragic irony of this entire deep dive is
• 39:44
  looking at that timestamp eleven point zero nine PM on
• 39:47
  May twenty.
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: Three, eleven zero nine.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: A single phone call for an ambulance at eleven to
• 39:52
  fifteen PM could have entirely changed the trajectory of this story.
• 39:56
  It could have Abby might have received NARCAN, She might
• 39:59
  have lived to see her family again. But instead the
• 40:01
  choice was made has been three days scrubbing floors and
• 40:03
  renting trucks.
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: That specific tragedy is exactly why the sources stress the
• 40:07
  critical need for multifaceted solutions.
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: What kind of solutions?
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: Well, we cannot simply arrest our way out of this epidemic,
• 40:14
  although the aggressive prosecution of high level bulk traffickers like
• 40:18
  Jacob Block is an absolutely necessary component.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: Right getting the suppliers off the street.
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: But true prevention requires massive, sustained public education on the invisible,
• 40:28
  microscopic risks of fentanyl. Yes, it requires universally expanded access
• 40:33
  to naloxone or narcan, which acts as a receptor antagonist,
• 40:38
  violently knocking the fennel off the brains receptors and restoring
• 40:42
  breathing in seconds.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: In seconds. It's a miracle drug.
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: It really is. It also requires robust, accessible addiction treatment
• 40:50
  programs so people like Abby have a lifeline before they
• 40:53
  end up crossing the threshold of a house in Jackson County.
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: And it requires better legal frameworks, right like good Samaritan
• 40:59
  loss laws that explicitly guarantee people won't be prosecuted for
• 41:03
  minor drug offenses if they pick up the phone and
• 41:05
  call nine to one one to save a life. Yes,
• 41:07
  because right now, the sheer fear of the police showing
• 41:10
  up is resulting in bodies being left.
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: In bitches, precisely the legal structure needs to incentivize saving
• 41:16
  a life over hiding the evidence makes total sense. Abby's
• 41:19
  story is a profound call to vigilance. It reminds us
• 41:22
  that we must support those battling addiction within our families
• 41:25
  and our communities with deep compassion, because the margins for
• 41:28
  error that existed decades ago are entirely gone because of feminol. Exactly,
• 41:32
  our relapse today isn't just a painful setback on the
• 41:35
  road to recovery. With fentanyl saturating the supply chain, a
• 41:38
  single relapse is frequently fatal.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: So to recap our journey today, we started with a
• 41:44
  glowing digital dot on a Life three sixty app, a
• 41:48
  piece of modern technology that told a loving family exactly
• 41:51
  where Abbi went, but was entirely powerless to save her.
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: We followed that digital trail to a Jackson County home
• 41:59
  where surveillance can cameras captured the chilling reality of a
• 42:02
  twenty two year old walking into a trap yeah and
• 42:05
  documented the subsequent days of a frantic, calculated cover up
• 42:09
  by Jacob Block and Unice Carlo Martinez. We did we
• 42:12
  explored the gruesome discovery ten months later, and the incredible
• 42:15
  complex forensic science of subpotification that used preserved brain tissue
• 42:20
  to find the undeniable chemical footprint of.
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: Fentanyl a waxy time capsule.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: And we untangled the deeply frustrating legal realities where a
• 42:28
  major federal trafficker absorbs a state charge for abandoning a
• 42:32
  corpse into a concurrent sentence, facing virtually no extra time
• 42:36
  for the horrific indignity he inflicted on Abby and her family,
• 42:39
  no extra time. Jacob Block is behind bars in Georgia,
• 42:43
  Unis Carlo Martinez is hunted, but true holistic justice for
• 42:47
  Abb Schaeffer remains fragmented.
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: It is a stark reminder to stay compassionate, to deeply
• 42:53
  understand the invisible synthetic threat that opioids post every single community,
• 42:59
  and to recognize that the staggering statistics you hear on
• 43:02
  the evening news represent vibrant, loved individuals who deserved so
• 43:06
  much better.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: We started this deep dive talking about how technology tracks
• 43:10
  are every move. Abby's phone tracked her right to the
• 43:13
  door of her final moments.
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: It did, but.
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: Here's something to think about. If we live in an
• 43:17
  era where our devices know exactly where we are, who
• 43:19
  we are with, and the exact minute our heartbeat stops.
• 43:23
  Why is our justice system still so fundamentally unequipped to
• 43:27
  hold the people in the room accountable when it.
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: Does, It's a great question.
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: What good is knowing exactly what happened if the law
• 43:33
  doesn't have the teeth to punish it. Keep questioning, stay curious,
• 43:37
  stay informed, and most importantly, look out for each other.
• 43:41
  Stay safe.