Crime Junkie - MISSING: Sage Smith

Episode Date: June 11, 2018

On November 20, 2012, Sage Smith left her home at 5:30 for a date. She was seen alone at 6:30 talking to someone on the phone and then possibly sighted one more time at 7:00 at a cafe, again alone. Her father and friends were advocates and attempted to investigate her disappearance on their own, but ended up in the same place where the police ended up. At a dead end. No one has seen her since and police are still looking to speak with the man she last communicated with that day. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-sage-smith/    

Welcome back Crime Junkies, I'm Ashley Flowers and I'm Britt and as always our program is brought to you by Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana and I have some exciting news Crime Stoppers is participating in a big nonprofit event here in downtown Indianapolis on June 14th 2018 that's this coming Thursday so if you guys want to come out and meet me learn more about the Crime Stoppers program I have all of the information on our website crimejunkiepodcast.com I hope to see some of you out there Britt the story I have today is about the disappearance of Sage Smith this is

one that I remember coming across my Facebook feed a lot in like 2015-16-ish and I'm sure you saw it too because we get a lot of the same stuff and after this quick flurry of information I never really heard anything else about it until there was a TV special that came out recently and I thought I have to talk about this on Crime Junkie. Yeah I remember reading a pretty extensive article on it a while back and it was a lot to take in. Yeah it's a ton of information it's it's a really kind of confusing case and there's all these different players but again nothing really happens so Sage's story takes

place in November of 2012 she is a trans woman who lives in Charlottesville Virginia and at the time she was 19 years old and really learning like to become independent she had just graduated high school recently and she's now in school for cosmetology and gotten her own apartment with two other trans girls one named Shakira and one named Aubrey. On Monday November 19th all of the girls decide to throw a party for Shakira's 19th birthday. Oh it's her golden birthday I just realized. They had a party at their apartment and at some point in the night this random girl comes charging in all pissed about

something over some guy and she tries to start a fight with one of Sage's friends. The fight gets taken outside and of course a bunch of people follow because that's just what happened you have to see what goes down. Sage is one of the people who go outside to follow this fight. Well while they're fighting outside the street that they're fighting on is lined with cars and you assume usually that they're empty but what they didn't realize is one of the cars is packed full of people who came with that girl who started the fight so they all hop out of the car and an actual physical altercation breaks out between

multiple people and at some point Sage ends up getting her hands dirty and fighting with somebody named Jamel. Someone ended up calling the cops and about 11 20 that night police arrive and are filing a report that Sage is a part of. Sage's friend Shakira said that the whole thing was just so bizarre like like yes fights were not totally uncommon in their friend group but she said that she didn't really even know this girl who came in she really didn't really understand what she was pissed about whatever she was mad about this guy had nothing to do with Sage so how Sage ended up in the middle of all this

didn't make any sense and Shakira actually never even jumped in on the fight and this pissed Sage off because she's like pretty hurt like you you're my best friend you need to have my back if I get into a fight yeah and let it be known I would totally have your back in a fight and I'm totally gonna hold you to that because eventually you know of the two of us I'm definitely gonna be the one who's going to get us into trouble and I'm gonna need you to back me up never change yeah well they end up getting in a fight about this and Shakira calls some of her relatives to come pick her up because she didn't even want to

stay in her place at night she doesn't want to deal she's like listen you got in a fight I'm not obligated to jump in and punch somebody in the face just because like you're riled up about something that didn't even involve you just before Shakira left Sage told her that she hated her and that was the last time the two friends ever spoke and they never got a chance to make it right again we also learned that later that same night Jamel tweeted quote been disrespected to the point of no return that seems kind of ominous I know and I'm not sure if that is a threat or like a sign of

defeat but I don't think you tweet any other way than as a threat like you're gonna this is like someone crossed a line and this is just way too far so the next day which is November 20th and keep in mind the 20th is Thanksgiving Eve and Sage had plans to be with her family that whole weekend Sage is getting ready for a date on the 20th Shakira still isn't there but their other roommate Aubrey is she's sleeping on the couch and at about 5 30 Sage wakes up Aubrey and says she's leaving for a date but she's gonna be back that evening sage walks out of the front door and this is the last time her other roommate

would see or speak to her it's not until the next morning that Aubrey realizes something isn't right she notices that sage never came home last night she tries calling her and the calls are going straight to voicemail and people said this is so unlike sage she was glued to her phone even carried a charger with her so she would never have to have a dead phone so something was absolutely wrong so Aubrey is calling her family the family is trying to call sage but the same thing right to voicemail every single time the family does get in touch with sage's stepsister though and she says she actually saw

sage that night before her stepsister said yeah I was on my way to this bus stop and I ran into her and she was on the phone with somebody and it sounded like that person was asking where she was and sage said something like I'll be there in five minutes and the stepsister and sage end up parting ways with sage still on the phone and that's all she knew when did this meeting happen like right after sage left her house no this was about an hour after at 6 30 p.m. so we don't know exactly where sage was between 5 30 when she last saw Aubrey and 6 30 because where they were supposed to meet wasn't that far away a

lot of people think because this person obviously wasn't showing up and they're still trying to connect maybe sage was just waiting for this person at their meeting place the whole family knows something is wrong at this point and even with that brief citing it doesn't change anything like okay she was last seen an hour later but we still don't know where she is we still can't get a hold of her we don't know where she was all night she never came home so they have Aubrey called the police to file a report the police respond fairly quickly and they do a grid search of the area where sage's

stepsister last saw her they canvass nearby businesses looking for anyone with surveillance video but even in 2012 there just wasn't a ton which was kind of shocking to me and the few that they were able to get in their hands absolutely nothing was captured with sage on it nothing that can help them figure out what path she took that night or where she might be now the police start building a timeline and the first thing they want to see are her cell phone records to find out who was she on the phone with that night when her stepsister saw her who was the last person she talked to before her phone

was turned off well they put in a request but I told you all this before it takes days precious days to get these results back another great example of why everyone needs an if I go missing folder a hundred percent the police have to wait but if she would have had an if I go missing folder it could have saved her family some valuable time because they were not gonna wait for some paperwork to stand in their way they start actively trying to log into her cell phone provider by just guessing her password and they end up guessing it right and they're able to see that sage's last communication was to a phone

number with an out-of-state area code that no one in her family recognized so sage's dad Dean tried calling this number over and over and over with no response back and there's no voicemail saying who this person is so Dean does the next best thing he puts out a call out on Facebook saying basically hey everybody do you recognize this number we think whoever owns this number was the last person talking to sage before she went missing so please help us if you recognize this number please reach out within just a few hours Dean gets a message from someone named Yanni and Yanni is like yeah I know that number

and I know exactly why that person would have been talking to sage Yanni says that that number belonged to a guy named Eric McFadden and Eric had been secretly dating sage secretly dating why the secret well because Eric had a girlfriend who had no idea that a he was cheating on her and b he was cheating on her with a trans woman okay then that makes sense right well once Dean finds out who this guy is he wants to talk to him and obviously he can't reach him by phone he's been trying that over and over so again he does what works for him he goes to Facebook and Yanni gives him a picture of Eric that he posts and says

listen has anyone seen this guy he was last seen with my son before my son went missing wait did Dean say son yeah actually sage had just started identifying as a trans woman within the last couple of years before she went missing so her family accepted her loved her was okay with her decisions but it would still take them some time they'd spent years calling sage a he and sometimes they would slip up on their pronouns calling her he him son and sage this didn't bother her she was used to it and this is just one of those instances where Dean slipped up and said son did Dean share any of this with the

police no he didn't want the police to shut down his little operation I mean he knew that technically he got the information illegally and police are all about going through the red tape so he felt like he was really getting somewhere and he didn't want to be slowed down by the police now while Dean had his investigation going on police are just a couple of days behind him because just two days later they also end up at Eric McFadden but in a totally different way a student named Esther at the University of Virginia calls police on November 24th she has left the university to go home for Thanksgiving

holiday but she's really worried because she can't get a hold of her boyfriend so she wants police to go do a welfare check at the apartment that they share together police go there but nobody is home they probably would have totally closed the book on this except for the same day Yanni the person who reached out to Dean on Facebook comes into the station and tells them the whole story that she had told Dean about Eric dating sage Dean's Facebook post this call out for Eric and him having say just sell records like all of it so now they know without them having the records that this Eric guy is missing

sage is missing Eric is the last person to talk to them and now we know sage's dad Dean is looking for him so because police know that he's missing it's one of two things either they're both missing together or Eric is missing because he did something to sage so right away they go public with this information there's posters press releases the police want to talk to Eric but he's nowhere to be found did Eric have a job or anything that he wasn't showing up to I mean he could have just been out of touch for normal reasons right unlikely because he did have a job that he wasn't showing up to either so police know something is

super fishy here in an attempt to get more leads they get Esther's approval to search the apartment that she shared with Eric and the only real thing of note that they find in the apartment is a CVS receipt from November 22nd what was the receipt for it's not what the receipt was for that stood out to police I think it was pretty innocuous but rather when the receipt was generated on the 22nd this was two days after sage was last seen so we know for sure that Eric didn't go missing with sage and it's not even like he dropped off the grid right after something happened to sage it would almost seem like he was still going

about his day-to-day activities on the 22nd like nothing was amiss then what made him go MIA well some people's best guess is that it was the Facebook post from sage's dad Dean didn't call out Eric specifically for having a relationship with sage but a lot of people said the fact that Eric would have even been linked to sage publicly would have been enough to freak him out oh and especially because Dean used the word son if Eric was paranoid about being outed that probably would have freaked him out even more yeah and that's a total possibility so at this point police aren't sure on any angle did he

run away because he had something to do with sage's disappearance and people are linking him to the disappearance or did he run away because he thought everyone in his life including his girlfriend would find out about his secret affair now a couple of days later police finally get the actual phone records and they confirm what Yanni and Dean had already pieced together Eric was in fact the last person to talk to sage on the phone at 6 36 p.m. and so that was the person who was on the phone with him when sage's stepsister saw her but what the police have that Dean couldn't get was actual transcripts of the text messages that

were sent and received from her phone and in the minutes before that last call between Eric and sage it looks like some messages had been sent back and forth where sage was basically saying listen I've been waiting for you I think I got stood up and I'm only giving you five more minutes so maybe they never even met up that night that's the thought at first but we know they spoke on the phone after this and sage was saying that she'd be somewhere in five minutes oh yeah right so police are more confused than ever they have to talk to Eric to clear up this mess and wouldn't you know it who voluntarily calls them but

Eric himself mind you this is now the 27th seven days after sage had gone missing he gives him this whole story he says that he left Virginia and went to New York City just because he always wanted to go there like that's it nothing more I just up and left my girlfriend at my job and stopped talking to everybody because I wanted to visit this town I've never been to it doesn't quite feel right but he does admit to having a sexual relationship with sage and that night he said they had plans to meet up but sage never showed up Eric offers to come back to Virginia to get this story straight and he's a

glisten I'm gonna come by a bus I'll be there in a couple of days but of course Eric never shows up but he does keep talking and not to police but to other people specifically his girlfriend Esther and he tells her a totally different story man if you're gonna lie you gotta keep your story straight I feel like this is 90% of the way liars get tripped up and I feel like you just made up that statistic 100% but for real I'm shocked at how many people will tell wildly different stories to different people thinking like no one is ever gonna talk to each other it's so strange but in any case Eric tells Esther that he did meet

up with sage that night and the two of them were walking together when some other people showed up that made him feel uncomfortable so Eric just gets out of there he thought maybe these people were after sage because apparently sage has some enemies so his story now is that he and sage ran into some of sage's enemies and he just peaced out and left her there basically yeah and who were these alleged enemies well it turns out that sage had a history of getting involved with closeted men Eric said that she was even blackmailing him specifically threatening to out him if she didn't get the things that she

wanted and this history with these kinds of men had gotten her in hot water before when police started looking into the other people sage had relationships with they find out that there was one man in particular that actually got outed because of sage he had a girlfriend and his girlfriend found some emails on his computer from sage that were apparently revealing of their relationship and he flipped out he was aggressive it turned violent and he actually ended up attacking sage and charges were brought against him um suspect alert where was the skywinds sage went missing that's the thing he's

a great suspect but he was incarcerated at the time so there's no way he would have been able to do anything to sage fast forward to December 3rd though a new suspect emerges now this is two weeks after sage has been missing police are monitoring all of her bank activity her credit card activity when boom they get a hit that sage's credit card has been used at a convenience store so they pull the footage and it wasn't anyone they expected to see on the footage was sage's roommate Aubrey the person who last saw sage before she was said to have left the apartment now we know obviously she didn't do anything to her because

sage was seen after she left the apartment but she had her credit card and when she gets pulled in by police she basically says listen I took the card to buy food we leave the card on the counter we share stuff all the time sometimes she takes mine sometimes I take hers it's not a big deal but when they talk to other people Aubrey's behavior was pretty unusual she would be wearing sage's wigs like using all of her stuff so she's using her clothes her wigs clearly her credit cards her money I think it's crazy for your friend that's going missing to just be like I'm just gonna use all their stuff until they

come back or maybe because I know they're never coming back but she swears that it's totally normal and her friends even say this is probably just her way of coping with the fact that her friend is gone making her feel closer to her I don't know she has a couple of other holes in her story as well Aubrey had originally told police that yeah she had heard of this Eric guy she met him once briefly like in passing but she never actually hung out with him didn't know him super well well there was a witness that came forward that said Aubrey and Eric and sage all had hung out that Saturday slash Sunday before

sage went missing so that doesn't make sense either like you spent a whole evening with this guy according to a witness and now you're gonna pretend like you don't know the person who was last known to talk to and be with sage that doesn't make sense so all of this seems super fishy to police but there is nothing they can do to link Aubrey to sage's disappearance in any way and things from here just yet stale there's no more credit card transactions no new leads to follow and it's like this for two more months until February 2013 a new eyewitness comes forward with a new account it's a girl named Monica who

comes forward and says she's known sage for years so it's not like she would have confused her with anyone else and she said that she saw and spoke to her around 7 p.m. that night that she went missing the 20th at a restaurant and she said that sage told her she was meeting somebody and she ended up leaving her alone in the bar so the timeline we have now we know at about 6 36 she is on the phone with Eric she sees her stepsister she's telling somebody who we now we know is Eric that you know you stood me up I'll be there in five minutes so it sounds like she's going directly to meet somebody but now at

7 o'clock about a half hour later Monica sees her at this Wild Wing cafe alone now this Wild Wing cafe shares a building with the Amtrak station and the Amtrak station is where Eric and sage were supposed to meet up so was Eric later than expected did they meet and they only met for a couple of minutes we don't know police try and search for more witnesses at the cafe and they speak with management who remembers seeing a few transgender people together but nothing specific they couldn't say for sure if it was sage they couldn't say for sure if it was any sage's friends so while it seems like it's a

likely sighting of not only sage but maybe some more people they don't have anything specifically to say it was and there's no security footage to tie all of this together so even though they have this new sighting the case goes stale again this time for years until November of 2015 when police make a stunning announcement they no longer consider Eric a suspect wait what what happened in three years to make them say that they say that his digital footprint doesn't line up with any kind of criminal activity his phone and computer activity shows that he was occupied almost the whole night he was

on his computer from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. and they said the activity is super normal not looking up anything crazy just normal search history for him if he did something when would he have had time to clean up a body or get rid of a body or hide a body he couldn't even drive either they said he didn't have a car and the apartment that he was in he shared with other people he also didn't have a car so he wasn't able to drive anywhere where would he have taken sage and he's in an apartment that he shared with other people so police say there's just no way he could have been able to hurt transport or store sage anywhere

without either getting help from somebody else or a bunch of people witnessing all of this we last know of sages whereabouts at seven it's four hours to eleven I feel like he could have gotten a lot done in those four hours you know I kind of agree when they say that oh we know for sure because of his computer activity like do you I don't know what his cell activity was maybe there's a way they can track where he was I don't know when sages phone was turned off maybe they see that their their phones parted at some reason all they give in all the stuff I could find was this 11 to 3 window but I think it

does leave four hours where something could have happened and even though police leave it like this for two years some something makes them reconsider all this too because all of a sudden in March of 2017 two years after they were like nope Eric's not a suspect no big deal they reclassified the investigation as a homicide and they say now they think that Eric is a person of interest not necessarily a suspect again but they think that he knows something and when they're asked they say nothing new has spurred this reclassification we just decided this I'm gonna go ahead and call BS on that same I think that the

something had to make them come back to Eric whether that's new information whether that's just them reinvestigating but at this point they're saying they think Eric knows more than he's saying either he saw something like maybe he was a witness to something maybe he knows what happened but they said whatever he has he has more information that they think will help them and now they also say that they are for sure that sage had been murdered but they don't have anything to push the case forward now Eric still has not been seen since and this is what like five plus years later they can't get Eric in

front of them so he's hiding for some reason either he had something to do with it which for whatever reason police say they don't think he was responsible but he probably knows something is he afraid of someone else is he afraid just to come forward because of the big explosion he got out it I don't know but basically the case is solved they want to find Eric so we'll post a picture of Eric on our website and if you know anything if you're in the Charlottesville Virginia area or outside obviously Eric isn't in Charlottesville anymore you can call Crime Stoppers at 434-977-4000 with

any information you can remain totally anonymous and that's really where things stand they're waiting for somebody to come in with any kind of tip to push the case forward and I think it's kind of sad again not a lot of people are talking about this case you know there was that that recent TV special thank goodness and we're trying to keep it alive but when you compare this case to others like I don't know if you know not long after Sage went missing is when Hannah Graham also went missing from the same area yeah I think I remember that case oh I totally remember it was on national news there were massive search

efforts literally thousands of people showed up the police said they had resources they had never seen before and it was the most expansive and intensive search they had ever conducted and within 36 days they were able to recover Hannah Graham's body and it makes you wonder like if Sage would have had half of those resources is she somewhere where like a search of the same size that Hannah had would have found her so many people know Hannah's name and face and her family has closure and Sage hasn't gotten nearly the same attention I do have to bring something up before we close though is there any chance that

this was a hate crime you know when it initially started police said of course there's a chance they couldn't rule out anything I think the farther they get into the investigation and trying to talk to Eric and knowing Sage's history they think that less and less they think it was more likely that it was someone specifically that Sage had to do with and not somebody who just hated Sage's life more of a personal conflict right it's kind of sad though that it's literally 2018 and we still even have to wonder if that is a possibility like I don't why can't we all just like love each other I mean I know that sounds

crazy but just be nice to each other whether you're LGBTQ a dog lover a cat lover like everyone just be kind be cool and let that be your life lesson for the week no for the rest of your life and we will be back next week with another episode thanks so much for listening to this week's episode for pictures and links about the case check out our website crimejunkiepodcast.com you can also follow us on Twitter at crimejunkiepod and on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast crimejunkie is written and hosted by me all of our sound production and editing

comes from Brit Praywat and all of our music including our theme comes from Justin Daniel crime junkie is an audio Chuck production so what do you think Chuck do you approve?