Transcript of Box of Money

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A few months before Sarah Stern disappeared, she took a trip to a neighboring Jersey Shore beach town called Avon-by-the-Sea. Her parents had bought a home there and planned to move in one day. But that never happened. On the outside, the house looked like a charming Victorian. It was white with a wraparound porch and lots of big windows. But inside, it was clear why the family didn't move in.

The Avon home was uninhabitable.

Detective Nick Catalona visited the house as he was investigating Sarah's disappearance.

The house didn't have any power to it. It didn't look like anybody had been in there for quite a while. The cobwebs were all intact in the areas of entry.

The Sterns had owned a bookstore called Books Unlimited for decades. And Michael Stern told investigators the house was used to store what was left of the business. Like the Sterns' Neptune City house, it was cluttered.

It was pretty much packed to capacity with odds and ends items and— just storage. There was a detached garage in the back, and that was literally packed from floor to ceiling, wall to wall.

But based on what investigators say Sarah's aunt told police, when Sarah stopped by the house, she found something of value among all that storage. Her aunt told police Sarah was looking through a box of photos of her mother, who had passed away when Sarah was just 15. And she discovered something else in the box. Cash. A lot of cash. According to what her aunt told police, Sarah counted $10,000, but believed there might have been twice as much. There's a lot we're never going to know about this money, like where it all came from. Or why it was left in a random box in a house used for storage.

My grandmother used to keep money in the freezer. Anytime she needed any money, she wouldn't go to the bank. She would go in her freezer and get money out of there. So people do things differently. Why she had a little stash of money, who knows?

But answering what Sarah did with this hidden treasure and whether it had anything to do with her disappearance. That is where investigators, hungry for a breakthrough in the case, turned their attention. From ABC Audio and 20/20, I'm Juju Chang, and this is Bridge of Lies, episode 3, Box of money. In the days after Sarah's disappearance, investigators were working with two main theories: that Sarah had died by suicide, or that she had run away to Canada. Police were still exploring both theories, but investigators, including Detective Brian Weissbrodt, were becoming more and more skeptical that Sarah had jumped off that bridge.

Sarah's family and her close friends, they described her as being her happy-go-lucky self, that she was in good spirits, that she had goals and she had plans, and that she had things that she wanted to accomplish in life.

Alex Napoliello covered the case for nj.com and said he got a lot of tips from the community, saying that Sarah, who was known for her quirky sense of humor and her artistic talent, just wouldn't end her life.

I've covered, you know, cases where people jump off bridges in New Jersey. However, I had never experienced people coming forward to me saying, this is not the Sarah that we know, someone who would do this. People emailing me, calling me, telling me this is impossible, there's no way she jumped from a bridge.

None of the searches for Sarah along the Shark River turned up anything. Not a scarf, not a wallet, not a purse or backpack. Investigators didn't pick up any fingerprints from her car, and they didn't find anything inside the car besides some artwork, that Disney memorabilia, and a small key. Detective Nick Catalona also searched the Sterns' main house in Neptune City a few days after police first went through it in the middle of the night. Looking for Sarah. Catalona needed to be certain Sarah was not somewhere on the property.

There was a lot of areas where somebody could have either fallen and got injured and incapacitated or could have been hidden. Um, people tend to kill themselves in the strangest of places. So I searched all the cars on the property, all the buildings, sheds, things like that, uh, the pool area. All the bushes, and there was nothing. The garbage— went through the garbage. There was nothing of any interest whatsoever.

Detective Catalona noticed that all of Sarah's belongings seemed to still be in the house.

All of her clothing, her— you know, like, she was very into her art. All that stuff was still there. I just found it odd. Then Belmar Police Department ultimately had her passport. If she's moving to Canada, you would think that she would need that, her Social Security card, things of that nature. So that didn't make sense to me that she was running away.

Why would she run off to Canada without her car, her clothes, her art, and most importantly, her passport and ID? To authorities, the theory that she ran away to Canada seemed to make less and less sense. Investigators decided to look into Sarah's bank records. Maybe there was something in her financial history that could explain her disappearance. Detective Catalona said Sarah's records at JPMorgan Chase didn't reveal anything odd. No big purchases or withdrawals in the days leading up to her disappearance. No erratic behavior at all.

Up until the day she went missing, there was regular activity on her debit card, but then pretty much stopped the day— the day that she went missing and hasn't been any activity since.

But Sarah also had an account at a local branch, Carney Bank in Bradley Beach. Reporter Jessica Easthope said Sarah had good relationships at the bank.

The manager, Raymond Blojis, was a family friend. The bank staff knew her, and she had known Raymond since she was born. And so the bank was somewhere she was often found. She would even stop by when she wasn't interacting with her account at all, just to say hi.

As investigators searched for information that could break open this mystery, they received a tip. On the day of Sarah's disappearance, she went to the bank. Investigators learned that in September 2016, just months before she disappeared, Sarah opened a new account at Kearney Bank, a safety deposit box account. According to investigators, a review of her bank records showed she accessed the box 3 times. Once in September, once in November, and once in December, on the last day she was seen. They got search warrants for her safety deposit box and for surveillance footage from the last time she went to the bank. And that's when they went to the bank to search Sarah's box. The bank kept the safety deposit boxes in a big shiny metal cabinet. Detective Catalano was there to execute the search warrant.

The bank has— it's like a two-keyed system, so the bank maintains the key and the customer has a key, and the, the box can only be opened with both keys.

That small gold key that had been found in Sarah's car had the number 35 on it, and it was the matching key for the safety deposit box.

They inserted their key. I inserted the key that we recovered from Sarah's car, and it unlocked the box.

The long beige metal box was pulled from the cabinet and set down on a table. Detective Catalona opened it.

My first thought was, wow, this is a lot of money.

This money wasn't in organized stacks of crisp, clean bills. Like you see in the movies when someone pulls out a lot of cash.

This is old, old currency, and it was in a very bad condition. It was, you know, brittle. Some of it was falling apart. Most of them were stuck together. They had a lot of holes in them. These are the old-style smaller portraits. Current currency has the larger portraits on them. It's like when you go to the store and they hand you an old bill, you're like, wow, that's You know, I haven't seen this in a while. So it's just— it was old. It had not widely circulated at all.

Police believe this was the money Sarah found in the Avon-by-the-Sea house, tucked away in a box of photos. And there was far more than $10,000 of it. Double that, actually.

$25,250 in 20s, 50s, and 100s.

Catalona noticed that the money was split into a few rough piles.

There was a yellow mesh bag that had some money in it. And the money seems to have been separated by amounts with index cards. Some of the index cards had the amount of money that was in it. Some of them didn't.

They sent the money away to their evidence vault. They didn't know whether Sarah had taken money out on her last trip to the bank or put money in. All they knew was that she made this trip just before 3 PM on the day of her disappearance. In the surveillance footage from the bank, you can see Sarah is wearing a puffer jacket and glasses. Her hair's in a messy bun. She's dressed for a casual day with a friend, getting lunch, running some errands. As she leaves the bank, she waves and says goodbye to the bank manager, who's a close family friend. She's smiling, and you can see her dimples even in the grainy footage. She doesn't look stressed or tense. She looks like someone who's seen some friendly faces and made another ordinary stop at a bank she's been coming to for years. But this trip was not ordinary. This surveillance footage is the last clear recording showing Sarah's face before she vanished into the night. Sarah turns around, walks through French double doors in the lobby, and leaves. Another camera shows her exiting through glass doors into the parking lot. She was a 19-year-old walking seemingly carefree out of a bank where she had over $25,000 in cash.

Hidden away.

The first thing that went through my mind is that Sarah did not run away, because if she was going to leave, she certainly would have taken her money with her.

Based on police interviews, it seems that not many people knew about Sarah's safety deposit box. Her dad Michael says he didn't. According to investigators, he told police he didn't even know Sarah had found money in the Avon-by-the-Sea house. In the first place. Sarah's aunt, her dad's sister, did know about the money. So did some of her friends, based on what investigators say they told them. Friends like her neighbor Carly and her friend Liam. Detective Brian Weissbrodt said finding out about Sarah's trip to Kearney Bank marked a big turn in the investigation.

Especially when we took into account that Liam had failed to tell us that he had gone to the bank with Sarah.

Liam McAtasney. Liam had told police about going to Taco Bell and playing video games with Sarah. Investigators knew from the timestamped bank surveillance video that Sarah had gone to the bank right after Taco Bell, when she would have still been with Liam. Did Liam know more than he was letting on? Was Sarah's friend, going all the way back to first grade, hiding something?

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The detective from the county is going to come in and, uh, talk to you.

You know, you haven't met him yet, so, uh, At this point, Detective Brian Weissbrodt had just joined the investigation. Weissbrodt has a very calm, matter-of-fact demeanor.

I wanted to be able to introduce myself to him and also speak to him directly in an effort to find Sarah.

Liam and the officers sit in plastic chairs at a long rectangular table. The camera is pointed down right at Liam. He's wearing a blue plaid shirt. And has his arms crossed on the table. He's leaning forward in his chair. He's looking down at the table rather than up at the officers or at the camera, and you can see the wavy blonde hair on the top of his head. The officers are sitting across from him.

Yeah, I'm Ryan. I work— I'm a detective with the prosecutor's office. Nice to meet you, Ryan.

Investigators are curious as to why Liam hasn't mentioned the bank. But they don't ask him about it right away. They go through a long list of other questions first, like what he's studying at the local community college.

Psychology. I want to pursue some kind of career in law enforcement.

How long he's known Sarah.

First grade.

And how close they are.

I would say we're pretty close friends. I'm a lifeguard in Bradley Beach. She was a badge checker. So I saw her pretty much every day over the summer.

Weissbrodt asks Liam to go over the day of Sarah's disappearance one more time. Liam says he slept in till noon. Then between 1 and 2, he met up with Sarah and helped her move bins to her neighbor's house. After that, he says they went to Taco Bell together and brought food back to Sarah's house. Where they played video games until Liam left for his job as a waiter at Brennan's Steakhouse. That was it. Again, no mention of visiting the bank. Weissbrodt wants to know if Sarah asked Liam to help keep any secrets.

Did you make any promises to her? No, definitely no. That you wouldn't tell anybody anything? No.

Liam pauses for a while and then, without prompting, leads investigators back to a familiar theory: that Sarah was in emotional distress and ran away to start a new life with her YouTube friends in Canada.

I had spoken about going to Canada with her over the past few weeks, but that was just kind of her emotional support. I guess I didn't think she would actually go through with it. I thought this whole Canada thing was just trying to escape the situation she was in, I guess, with her dad.

Detective Weissbrodt urges Liam to think carefully. Did Sarah say something that suggested she might be in Canada?

If she told you something, if she told you that she was going somewhere, she told you that she was going to do something, you need to tell us. Yeah. Okay.

For the whole interview, Liam is looking at the table, only raising his head once in a while to make eye contact with the officers. He's nodding a lot as he speaks and uncrossing his arms occasionally to emphasize a point with a hand gesture. He does this during what he says next. It's a question that comes out of the blue.

One thing I want to talk to you guys about was, um, if she— she did jump off the bridge, what are the odds that she's not Some are all the way out in the ocean by now.

I found the question, uh, very odd. Um, I would have expected him to ask us questions like, what are we doing to find her? Uh, what efforts have we made? Who's assisting? Who's helping? Um, Liam didn't ask any of those questions.

Detective Weissbraut pushes Liam on what he just asked. About the possibility of Sarah's body being carried away by the Shark River current a few hundred yards out to the Atlantic Ocean.

And did she tell you she was going to jump off the bridge? No. If, if she had told me that I— that she's going to jump off the bridge, there would have been no way that I could have gone to work that night.

Liam says he had a great night. A great work shift.

I made a bunch of money. All my tables were good. I had a great time. It definitely— I would not have been able to do that if I knew something. You just hang tight right here. We're just going to step out. We're going to bring him to a certain place. No problem.

The investigators step outside for 10 minutes. And Liam sits in the room alone. When they come back in, Detective Weissbrodt will get to the thing that they really want to ask. What about the bank? Okay, Nicola, Quizfrage: Homeoffice-Baustelle oder Fahrtkosten? Was bringt uns mehr? Moment, ich check das kurz. Oha! Homeoffice gewinnt! Bringt uns 150 mehr im Jahr. Ja, richtig. Aber wieso weißt du so was? Weil WISO Steuererstattung live anzeigt. Das ist einfach die Steuer-App für alle Fälle. Ja, und Fragen beantwortet sie auch.

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When Detective Weissbrodt and another investigator sit back down, Weissbrodt immediately brings up the bank.

You haven't told us about the bank.

Yeah, Liam says he told the other detective in the room about the bank, during an unrecorded interview at his house. The other detective doesn't react to this, doesn't confirm or deny that Liam ever mentioned the bank to him. But none of the detectives working on the case documented or even remembered Liam ever bringing up the bank in any of their multiple interviews with him.

Did you go to the bank? I was with her. Okay, that's the way back from Taco Bell. And what'd she do at the bank? No idea. I didn't go in.

Liam says he stayed in the car.

Why did she stop at the bank? What did she tell you she was stopping at the bank for? Something to do with her money. I don't know. She had found money in the Avalon house a few months ago. And, uh, you know, she has a lockbox full of money in there. I don't know. She was taking money out, putting money in there.

Liam tells detectives it was her mother's money. And according to him, Sarah thought it could be up to $100 grand in cash.

She wasn't sure how much money she found. Yeah. Now, does that make sense to you, that you wouldn't be sure how much money you found? Well, she told me the condition—

Even as Weissbrodt pushes Liam, Liam stays calm. And he doesn't clam up. He keeps responding to the detective's questions. It seems like he's trying to be helpful. Offering whatever information he can.

Well, she told me the condition of the money was pretty bad, like it was all stuck together. Well, it was old, old bills, so that could have been a reason for not knowing. Did you ever see it? No.

After ticking through some more questions about the day of Sarah's disappearance, Detective Weisbrodt returns to the bank. It seems to really bother the calm detective that Liam left out this crucial detail from the day his friend went missing and now says he doesn't know much about it.

Just hear me out. It just— it just doesn't make sense that you would do all these things, stop at the bank, So she can take care of her money and that you ask no questions. She doesn't— you don't inquire about anything. She doesn't share anything with you.

Liam says he isn't sure what more Sarah could have told him.

What she's doing at the bank. I mean, if I was in the car with you, I'd be like, I got to stop at the ATM to grab cash. Well, she was just like, I got to deposit this check. She's like, I have to stop by the bank. That's all it was to it. He's like, all right, I'll stay in the car. Stay in the car, watch a YouTube video or something. And then we were at her house.

About an hour and a half into the interview, the officers leave the room again. Liam sits alone for about 30 minutes before they come back in and tell him that his parents have contacted attorneys on his behalf.

We're not going to talk to you any further today. We do appreciate you coming down.

The interview ends ultimately after approximately 2 hours of us gathering information from him. Something was not right. There was nothing at that point pointing in the direction that someone had hurt Sarah. Yet at the same time, I wasn't satisfied that something didn't happen to her.

For the first few weeks of the investigation, Police had been working with two theories on this case. But by mid-December, reporter Jessica Easthope said a third theory was suddenly emerging.

Police start to believe that something violent happened to Sarah. But one of the biggest questions is why. When investigators find out about the sum of money that Sarah came into, they start to think that this could be a possible motive.

Could someone have targeted Sarah for her money? In the minds of detectives, could Sarah's case morph from missing person to murder? Liam was one of the few people who knew about Sarah's money, and investigators felt something was off about his story. But all they had was suspicion. They had no evidence that Liam had anything to do with Sarah's disappearance.

The case doesn't go cold, but it moves in that direction.

Investigators were still searching for Sarah, the promising artist whose life had only just begun. Missing posters featured photos of her and listed a $5,000 reward. Police were getting tips from all over California, Florida, and Canada. People called in to say they thought they had spotted Sarah somewhere.

There was not, not one lead that came in that they wouldn't check.

Michael Stern said one of the YouTubers his daughter liked posted a video asking for help finding Sarah. It went viral.

There was 167,000 views on that. That was within, within a day.

But none of these efforts led to any answers. For weeks, Detective Weissbrodt continued investigating, and her dad Michael stayed involved in the case too.

I tried to talk to Michael Stern every day or every other day, if not every day. Michael Stern was not sitting by without checking in with law enforcement and demanding to know what we were doing.

December passed. A new year started. And the case was still stalled.

It's horrible. It's a sense of hopelessness when you don't— you just— you have no idea. Sarah's my only child, and, you know, that's a— it's a— it's a hard feeling that we couldn't find her.

It's weeks and weeks before police come in contact with the person who is going to break this case open.

In the dead of winter, a month and a half after Sarah went missing, investigators finally got a tip that seemed like a breakthrough. It didn't come from another state or country. It came from within Sarah's community, from someone who went to school school with Sarah and Liam. Pursuing this lead would require a dangerous undercover sting operation and a high-stakes gamble between two friends.

The cops haven't questioned me.

I know you— I know you're not a rat, but we gotta— we gotta play it safe, bro. This is like a movie, bro.

Bridge of Lies is a production of ABC Audio and Twenty Twenty, hosted by me, Juju Chang. Produced by Camille Petersen and Sabrina Fang. Fact-checking and production help from Audrey Mostek and Annalisa Linder. Tracy Samuelson is our story editor. Our supervising producer is Sasha Azlanian. Music and mixing by Evan Biola. Special thanks to Katie Dendoss, Janice Johnston, Joseph Diaz, Avery Brooke, and Michelle Margulis. Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming. Eamon McNiff is our executive producer. Welcome back, Grace. You and your sister are here for a very exciting reason. Now, with Peter's hunters, you have until dawn to kill them both.

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