On Wednesday, November 28, Charlottesville police officers searched the streets and wooded areas along West Main street, where Sage was last seen, and then they expanded their search to include the area around where McFadden had been living.
The next day, Esther Ayeni told police that McFadden was taking a bus to Charlottesville arriving the next evening and that he expected to be picked up by police. The police affidavit reads, “Brake reasonably assumed, based on the email communication, that McFadden would be speaking with him at that time to explain his absence from Charlottesville and his relationship with Smith.”
But that’s not how it turned out. On Friday, November 30, while coming back from a visit to a trash expert that helped them determine that the dumpsters behind McFadden’s apartment went to a landfill some 60 miles away in Henrico County, near Richmond, detectives heard again from Esther Ayeni. McFadden was going to run.
“[I]m heading out,” McFadden wrote to Ayeni in an email on November 30. “This is what happened i never did anything sexual with that guy and he was blackmailing me, he wanted me to give him money not to lie from saying we did and i did and he agreed to stop and then the next time he hit me up for money i said no . . . we did meet up but he had alot of enemies me and him were walking and some people sowed up and i kept walking not looking back.”
In other words, McFadden did in fact meet up with Sage. Police obtained warrants for McFadden’s computer, email accounts, cell phone apps, Twitter, and bank records. Another email to Ayeni in May of 2013 from an untraceable email address is the last anyone has heard from Erik McFadden.
That December, police made two more efforts to find Sage. On the first, Charlottesville police, in conjunction with officers from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and cadaver-sniffing dogs from the Virginia Search and Rescue Dog Association, again searched the areas around Main Street and McFadden’s house as well as nearby railroad tracks and near a deep sediment pond. A dog made a “slight indication” that they picked up Sage’s scent.
A dive team was called in to search the pond, but nothing turned up. The final attempt was a large-scale search of that Henrico landfill that involved Charlottesville police officers as well as officers from Henrico County, forensic and hazmat personnel, and a retired special agent specializing in landfill searches. But they found nothing.
Over the past four years, Sage’s case has stayed “under active investigation.” In January of 2013, detectives met with agents from the FBI and US Marshals Service to see if they might be able to consult or provide assistance. In May of 2013, they got in touch with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Later that month, dental records for Sage were obtained and placed into a national registry. A few tips came in that Sage might be living in the Tidewater area or in the Carolinas. They went nowhere.
ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2014, A WHITE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA sophomore named Hannah Graham went missing from Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. Within 24 hours, the Virginia State Police had taken over the case.
By September 15, nearly every law enforcement office in central Virginia knew Graham’s name and dozens of officers were searching. Then the FBI came on board, as well as the Albemarle County Sheriff’s Office, the Blue Ridge Mountain Search Group, and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. More than 5,000 tips flooded in, necessitating a separate Hannah Graham tip line. Police announced a $50,000 reward for information, $10,000 of which came from the city of Charlottesville itself (the reward pool would later total $100,000). A massive volunteer search drew more than 1,000 participants from all over the state.
In the early hours and days of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, Charlottesville police chief Tim Longo gave several press conferences during which he shook his fist, banged the lectern, and wiped away tears.
Communications Officer Captain Gary Pleasants was sending 146 members of the international press updates more than once per day.
Detective Mooney was also the lead detective on Graham’s abduction case. Law enforcement officers from all over the country were calling offering help—did Mooney need trucks? Helicopters? A drone? The CPD declined to disclose the total amount spent on the search, but it has been called the most extensive and intensive in Virginia state history. “Ungodly amounts of overtime dollars,” Mooney said.
The suspect in Hannah Graham’s case fled as well, triggering a national manhunt that located the fugitive in Texas in three days. Hannah’s remains were found after 36 days, and the suspect pleaded guilty in spring of 2016. He will spend the rest of his life in jail.
“HOW DO YOU THINK I FEEL?” DEAN SMITH WANTS TO know. “I watched the helicopters come right up and over the field there behind my house. They didn’t do that for my child.”
Hundreds of thousands of people are reported missing each year, but most of them are found. Key factors distinguish these ordinary missing from the truly gone, and it falls to law enforcement, who have finite time and resources, to tell the difference, and quickly. Every expert says that the choices law enforcement makes in the first 72 hours determine the outcome. In Hannah’s case, every choice was made correctly. In Sage’s, many of them were not.
The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services has clear protocol as of 2015 for high-risk missing persons cases (though no such document existed in 2012; when called for comment, the CPD declined to do so). The protocol includes making requests for search and rescue and other external support “in the early hours of the investigation.”
Yet the detectives did not make requests for substantive external support in this case until December 1, 2012, 11 days after Sage went missing. Detective Mooney said the Virginia State Police and the US Marshals were consulted, and that the FBI offered technical assistance to find McFadden. When contacted this February, the first two agencies said they never had any agents working on Sage’s case nor are they actively assisting on it now.
Protocol also advises police officers to contact local government and trash companies to request a delay in trash collection near where the subject was last seen or might have been abducted. CPD did not request any such delays. Finally, protocol advises detectives to get consent or obtain search warrants for emails, chats, and “other online communications” for clues relevant to the disappearance and to communicate frequently and openly with the victim’s family.
Police did file for a warrant to search the email files associated with Sage’s phone as well as the laptop they seized from McFadden’s apartment—but not until March 11, 2013, nearly four months after Sage’s disappearance. Miss Cookie states that she had to call and leave messages for several days, even during the first week of the investigation, in order to receive a return phone call from lead CPD detective Marc Brake.
Aubrey Carson, who called about Sage’s disappearance, was not contacted until “three or four days, maybe longer” after Sage went missing. Aubrey was staying with his grandmother 20 minutes north of town. Detectives asked Aubrey to come down to the police station. Aubrey agreed, but because he didn’t have a car, he asked to be picked up at his grandmother’s home. The detective agreed. But no officers ever showed. Aubrey was not interviewed for nearly two more weeks.
When interviewed in January of 2016 in her home on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, Shakira said detectives had never talked to her beyond a short factual phone call. Mooney said he and Stayments had been meaning to go up to see her but that his desk duty, which he had for most of 2015 due to a knee injury, had prevented it.