Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 1 week ago

Category

📺
TV
Transcript
00:00Sheriff Barber's office.
00:02Hi, this is Valerie. Hey, someone.
00:04Yeah.
00:04I'm in her house. It is covered in blood.
00:07Hold on, thank you.
00:08We need somebody out here.
00:09We have two children missing,
00:13the woman that lives at a house,
00:16and now a neighbor friend, all missing.
00:20Excuse me, four people?
00:21In a remote part of Ohio?
00:24That just doesn't happen.
00:26Everywhere we go, dead end.
00:30Dead end.
00:31Dead end.
00:33We have zero suspects, zero evidence.
00:37All we know is that we have four missing people.
00:40There's a lot of blood.
00:42It's pretty much a race against time to find anybody alive.
00:47Are they alive?
00:49Are they dead?
00:52The first thing that I am struck by is
00:56there are tons of leaves everywhere.
01:01This is an unbelievable set of circumstances.
01:06It's like a house of horror.
01:10I'm sorry.
01:25Sheriff Barber's office.
01:27Hi, my name is Valerie Zaythorn.
01:29Uh-huh.
01:30And I work at a Dairy Queen.
01:32I'm the general manager out there.
01:33Uh-huh.
01:34One of my employees did not show up for work this afternoon at 4 o'clock.
01:38Okay.
01:38Which is totally uncharacteristic of her.
01:41She's not answering her phone, which is totally uncharacteristic.
01:43She's not answering her text.
01:57Tina is a single mom.
01:59She has two children from a previous relationship, Sarah and Cody.
02:05She's a wonderful employee, always on time, makes sure that she does a good job.
02:13On Wednesday, November 10th, she doesn't show up.
02:23The manager, who's worked with Tina for a long time, said this is so unusual for her not to be
02:30here.
02:31She would always call or text if she wasn't coming.
02:36Knox County only has about 65,000 people.
02:39Knox County is the type of place where you grow up, you know everybody.
02:43People go to school together, people work together.
02:47So her manager called the police and said, something's wrong here.
02:59The sheriff's office sends a deputy out to Tina's house.
03:06He sees the blue Ford F-150 in the driveway, assumes that maybe she's there.
03:12Goes up and knocks on the door.
03:15There's no answer.
03:17Doesn't see her, doesn't see anything unusual.
03:21So he decides that he's going to check on it at the end of the shift.
03:31He goes back at 11 p.m.
03:34And he notices that the blue Ford F-150 is gone.
03:39Bangs on the door really loud, looks in the windows.
03:43Can't see anything.
03:44So he assumes that she had come home, got into her pickup truck, and took off.
03:59The next day, Tina fails to show up for work again.
04:04The manager goes to her house, thinking, hey, I just need to make sure that everything's okay.
04:10She knows the welfare is back.
04:12And that's when she realizes, wait a minute, something's out right here.
04:21She's so worried that maybe something happened.
04:24She walks around to the back of the house, and she notices that she can get into the house through
04:29one of the back windows.
04:32She has no idea what she's about to find.
04:40Sheriff Barber's office.
04:42Hi, this is Valerie Haythorn.
04:44Yeah.
04:45I'm in her house.
04:45It is covered in blood.
04:48Okay.
04:49Hold on.
04:49I need somebody out here.
04:51Okay.
04:51Let me transfer you.
04:52Hold on.
04:54She continues into the house, and as she turns to go down the hallway towards the bathroom and the bedrooms,
05:02she stops.
05:06And she looks and she sees what appears to be blood on the carpet, oil stain, and this makes her
05:16believe something awful happened.
05:19Hey, I've got Valerie Haythorn on the phone.
05:21Okay.
05:22She's down at Kingsby's Drive.
05:24That's where that female's missing from.
05:26She got into the house and said the whole place is covered in blood.
05:39Word is spreading very quickly that there is a lot of blood at Tina Herman's home.
05:47The manager from the Dairy Queen, who had permission to enter her house, came out, did enter the house, saw
05:55blood in a couple areas of the house.
05:57It was not something that I would want anybody else to have walked into.
06:06Here's a picture that was taken during crime scene processing of some of the blood and that on the floor.
06:14You know, we see the blood, we know that something violent happened at the house, but not sure exactly what
06:21we have.
06:23This is a picture of the blood-stained bathtub.
06:30This is a picture of the blood-stained bathtub.
06:32It was pretty messy.
06:44They called BCI, the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, to have their agents come out and process the crime
06:52scene.
06:55And when they arrive at Tina's house, just as they're getting there, Tina's boyfriend shows up.
07:03He advises them that he lives with Tina and that she has two children, Cody and Sarah.
07:12At this point, we're all missing, so we make contact with telling us that they were in school on Thursday.
07:20Now we have two children missing, and Tina, so all of them are missing at this point.
07:31The crime scene guys move into the garage and they see their Jeep parked in the garage.
07:37We run the license plate number and comes back to her neighbor, Stephanie.
07:46Now we've got, you know, the woman that lives at a house, her true children, and now a neighbor friend
07:52that may be involved in this as well and all missing and no indication of where they are.
07:59Excuse me, four people? In a remote part of Ohio? That just doesn't happen.
08:11Over a dozen friends and neighbors gathered together this morning, scouring a wooded area in Knox County, looking for any
08:19sign of a missing family.
08:21Here at a local gas station, they've posted a poster, pictures of the four people missing.
08:26And they're asked to call the Knox County Sheriff's Department if anybody has information.
08:39Tina, by everything that I know about her, is really a good person, a very dedicated worker, dedicated to her
08:48children.
08:49Just your regular mom, you know, good person.
08:55Sarah's a typical 13-year-old girl, you know, she does well in school.
09:00Sarah loves to play different sports and things.
09:05Her younger brother, Cody, is 11 years old, good kid, you know, just a typical boy, rambunctious and, you know,
09:14full of energy.
09:16I worked at Dairy Queen, and that's where I first met Tina.
09:23Tina brings her kids, Sarah and Cody, to Dairy Queen with her to work sometimes, and they'll help us.
09:31And we just have fun talking to them, joking around with them, goofing off with them.
09:38You would like Tina, she is such a bubbly person.
09:45Tina and Stephanie were very good friends.
09:48Not only were they neighbors living close to each other, but they were friends.
09:55So, Stephanie is around 41, and Tina is about 32 years old.
10:01So, Stephanie was a little bit older, but they did things together.
10:05They went to the gym together.
10:07As a matter of fact, that was the last place that they had, both Tina and Stephanie had been seeing,
10:13was at the gym together that morning.
10:19This was an initial shock because this doesn't happen in Knox County.
10:24This is a quiet community.
10:25There were people who know Stephanie, Tina, Sarah, Cody, and they are concerned about their whereabouts.
10:37We don't know what the result of the violence in the home.
10:42Whoever the violence was against is still alive or if they're dead.
10:46What happened to them?
10:47We have no idea.
10:50We have no idea where they are.
10:52It appears as though at least one of the victims is injured, most likely severely.
10:58And they would most likely need medical attention as soon as possible.
11:03But at this point, we weren't sure exactly what we had.
11:11We need to use the media to get the word out about our missing people.
11:17Get that out as quickly as we can.
11:18So, instead of having just a limited number of eyes looking for Tina and the two children, we have the
11:25whole community.
11:30I had just started at 10TV like three weeks prior to this.
11:35And our assignment manager brings up the fact that we're getting word about several people missing.
11:41And we're just going to send somebody to go check it out.
11:45And then I got sent up.
11:51I can recall riding out here and just thinking in my head, what are we going to find out today?
12:03I get to the Knox County Sheriff's Office and I could immediately tell there's something going on here.
12:11I think we've all experienced that point in life where you can sense something is wrong because it's too quiet.
12:20Usually when you arrive to police departments, usually there's a couple of people in the front and it's a very
12:26active place.
12:28There was only one person at the desk.
12:32What I learned later on was that everybody was sent out.
12:36Because this case involved so many people, it was all hands on deck.
12:47The first press release or the second press release that came out said that there was a large amount of
12:52blood at Tina's home.
12:55And when you hear that as a journalist, you think, no, this is not a runaway case.
13:03There is a large police presence there, but no one really knows exactly the background of what happened.
13:12I look at my photographer and I say to him, is this really happening?
13:16Just because this is just not normal for four people to go missing.
13:21And he said to me, no, this is not normal at all.
13:28My goal in going there is to get as much information about who Tina Herman is, who Sarah Maynard is,
13:36who Cody is, who Stephanie is.
13:39Where are these people? And why aren't they responsive?
13:43Are they alive? Are they dead? Did they just randomly run away?
13:48No one just disappears.
13:57I'm in the office in Columbus, Ohio.
14:01Harry called and said that they had a really horrendous crime scene.
14:07They hadn't determined a suspect yet.
14:10There was going to be a lot of interviews that needed to be done and asked, you know, who on
14:15the squad can come up and assist.
14:17My specialty on the task force was cellular phones.
14:20So I figured, well, I'm going to be working with cellular phones when I get here.
14:24So I'm tracing both Tina and Stephanie's phones, but they haven't been used.
14:29Where are they?
14:32But what that tells us is that they're now no longer in communication with anybody.
14:38They're not using their cell phones.
14:41They're not making purchases.
14:43We're not finding them at home.
14:45At that moment, it's almost like they disappeared off the face of the earth.
14:54The community is on the lookout.
14:57They searched the trails along the Kokosan River.
14:59It's a search that's getting more and more desperate.
15:01We need to, despite what the end result, we need to find them.
15:05I think something bad happened.
15:07Greg Borders still in shock that his live-in ex-girlfriend Tina Herman has seemingly vanished.
15:13Her two children, 13-year-old Sarah and 10-year-old Cody Maynard, along with family friend Stephanie Sprang, all
15:19gone too.
15:20It's very frustrating. I mean, I'm sick to my stomach over there.
15:25The suspects are obviously the boyfriends of both Tina and Stephanie.
15:32She is dating a guy named Greg.
15:37Tina and Greg have been struggling, and Tina was looking to move out.
15:47Any time you have a case like this, you're always going to look at all of the familial relationships.
15:52Tina's boyfriend says, hey, I left for work Wednesday morning.
15:57I had plans to go golfing with my friend.
16:02So after work, I spent the night at his house.
16:05Stephanie's boyfriend said, you know, all I know is she didn't come home.
16:10So I'm thinking, okay, well, I want to know what these boyfriends do.
16:14Do they both have phone numbers?
16:15Can I get their numbers?
16:16I need to get on top of their records and see if I can verify their statements.
16:21Well, listen, I'm glad you came here because, you know, we're going to talk to you just like we're talking
16:25to everybody.
16:26You know, it's just kind of what we do.
16:27I literally have two stacks of phone records, one from Tina's boyfriend, one from Stephanie's boyfriend.
16:35And I'm looking at all of the use of their cellular phones over the last 24 to 48 hours.
16:41Greg Borders hasn't heard from Tina since he got a text message on Wednesday.
16:45Then on Wednesday, when you're working the overtime, she texted you around 1130.
16:50Yeah.
16:51What was that on when your lunch breaks or something?
16:53I didn't see it.
16:54My next break was 1212.
16:56And I had seen that she called when I was outside.
16:59So she said she fed the dog.
17:04And that was about it.
17:07As we're looking at the boyfriend's phones, everything is checking out with what they're telling us.
17:12Their phones are using towers that would service the areas where they claim to be at.
17:17And they're not making calls that are unusual.
17:22So my associate detectives that are there running down leads on their alibis, we're all striking out.
17:30Striking out in the sense that, OK, well, these two guys are not our suspects.
17:43So now we're beginning to think, OK, who would do a crime with this level of violence?
17:53It's so personal.
17:55One by one, we're ruling out, you know, your typical suspects.
18:01Tina and Stephanie didn't have any obvious enemies.
18:05Everyone that we're interviewing, co-workers, family members, friends,
18:09are not giving us any kind of indication that there's derogatory information about them,
18:14that there's any kind of spats going on, don't get along with a neighbor.
18:19These kind of investigations, they're pretty standard.
18:22You kind of go down those paths.
18:24We're following all of the regular paths and we're not arriving with a suspect.
18:30So we've got a really horrendous crime scene, a really personal violent crime,
18:36and everywhere we go, dead end.
18:40Dead end.
18:41Dead end.
18:43We have zero suspects, zero evidence, a total dead end.
18:47But all we know is that we have four missing people.
18:52It's pretty much a race against time to find anybody alive.
19:17Sarah Maynard went missing Wednesday along with her mom, Tina Herman,
19:21her 11-year-old brother, Cody, and her mom's friend, Stephanie Sprang.
19:24Friends and neighbors are now searching for any sign of the missing four.
19:29Got up early this morning to come out and see what we could do to help.
19:33You know, you walk along and you see things, you might see a piece of trash,
19:35and you wonder, well, you know, that was maybe just a piece of trash, but you never know.
19:40In fact, we saw a shoe over there, but it's been buried for quite a long time.
19:44The focus on the investigation is at Herman's house in Howard,
19:47where an aircraft with infrared technology is flying overhead.
19:51We also have officers on quad runners, checking fields, checking the areas around here.
19:58We need to locate them as soon as possible, and we need the community's assistance on that.
20:04Whether the searches are organized or ad hoc, the community is on the lookout.
20:08I think everybody just wants to keep the mood uplifted.
20:13We don't know.
20:13We can't see either way.
20:14We haven't heard anything, and we just got to keep praying and keep our heads up.
20:19We're not sure exactly what happened, if there's a continued threat to other community members,
20:25so we want people to be on alert that we've had this incident in Apple Valley.
20:31As the search intensifies, so does the fear in this community.
20:35I think everyone's just kind of really scared that something like this could happen so close to home.
20:40There's a lot of nervousness around the community.
20:43People still don't know, is there an active serial killer?
20:48Was this targeted?
20:50People just don't know.
20:51So how could this happen?
20:54There was a lot of confusion all across Knox County.
20:57There was a lot of confusion even for us as journalists because this doesn't happen.
21:12We've got our heads down, and we're just looking for more leads and trying to figure out,
21:17what's our next move?
21:19What are we going to do next?
21:20If they're alive, we need to find them.
21:22The question now is how?
21:25The crime scene guys are out in the garage in Tina's house, and they see a bag from Walmart.
21:34They look at the receipt, and what do you know?
21:37The date on this receipt is November 11th at like 12.08 a.m.
21:43And the first indication that they were missing came in in the afternoon on Wednesday, November 10th.
21:53We're looking at the receipt, and it occurs to us it could be obviously connected to the violence that we
22:00saw in the house.
22:01For some reason, somebody felt it necessary to go out at 12.08 a.m. and purchase garbage bags in
22:09a tarp.
22:11This receipt is gigantic.
22:14I mean, this is the key break in the investigation, because up to this point, we really were hitting walls
22:22everywhere we turned.
22:24This picture depicts the Walmart bag and some of the garbage bags in tarp that were found during the crime
22:34scene processing when they went into the garage.
22:37And the receipt that allowed us to know that the individual had gone to Walmart at 12.08 a.m.
22:47the night or early the next morning to make the purchase.
22:54The detectives drive out to Walmart.
22:59The detectives drive out to Walmart.
23:00The Walmart security officer is able to pull up the video, and he's showing the detectives.
23:07This guy just came in.
23:08This guy just came in.
23:08He walks directly to where the garbage bags and the tarps are.
23:12He walks over towards the deli on his way back to the front of the store to pay.
23:19He purchases a turkey sandwich, and then he continues over to the cash register.
23:25There happened to be some shirts on sale right there by the cash register, and he grabs one, and he
23:33goes up to the cash register.
23:35Unfortunately, he paid in cash.
23:38So now we have a visual of a mail, and it's pretty good video.
23:42So we have something to go on.
23:46We're able to see this individual leave the Walmart and walk out to his car, which turned out to be
23:55a silver Toyota Yaris, and he drives away.
24:00We couldn't get a license plate number, but at least we had a make and a model.
24:06And immediately we decide that we're going to run this information, see how many Toyota Yaris's we have in the
24:14Knox County area.
24:15There can't be that many.
24:18Investigators are looking at registration records for that particular vehicle type in this particular county,
24:26come up with just a few, and they start sorting down through them, and lo and behold, they find an
24:31individual, Matthew Huffman.
24:36And that driver's license photo has Matthew wearing the camouflage shirt depicted in the Walmart security video.
24:45So this is like pennies from heaven.
24:49You just, it's one of those things, it's just too unbelievable.
24:52The luck is starting to go our way.
24:57We got our guy, but if our suspect isn't the perpetrator, then we're back to square one.
25:04There's four people that are missing.
25:07We're talking about two young children.
25:12How scared Cody and Sarah must be right now, if they're even still alive.
25:18You're talking now about several days they have been missing.
25:22People are anxious, people are nervous, people want answers.
25:34So now we have a suspect, Matthew Huffman.
25:37And we pull up Matthew's information.
25:42So we're finding out who he is.
25:45We're able to see he had a criminal record.
25:50He's got priors in Colorado, burglary, arson.
25:56He's been in prison.
25:57And comes out after six years.
26:00And now he's back in Knox County.
26:03And he hooks up with a tree trimming company and starts cutting trees.
26:10Well, when they discovered that he had a criminal record, they fired him.
26:18Now Huffman's unemployed and hanging out in Mount Vernon.
26:23His mom lives in Apple Valley, not too far from Tina's house.
26:27He's got a girlfriend at the time.
26:30They get into a fight and he grabs the girl and pushes her up against a wall and tries to
26:37strangle her.
26:38She contacts the Knox County Sheriff's Office and makes a report.
26:42But she doesn't want to press charges against him.
26:45So they've got this report on file that he had assaulted her, his girlfriend.
27:00There's information on the reports that provide us with his cell phone number.
27:03So then we are calling the cell phone company that provides service to his phone,
27:08verifying that he's the subscriber.
27:11And we, of course, have to get a legal process search warrant in order to gain this information.
27:18So now it's a race against time to find Matthew.
27:21It's pins and needles.
27:23You're rush, rush, rush.
27:24We've got to get the search warrant written.
27:26You're looking for that judge.
27:27You're going to wake him up.
27:28It's probably 3.30 in the morning right now.
27:33Once we get the judge's signature and the warrants get served on the service provider,
27:39they give us the information on the phone that we're looking at.
27:41We put that information into our equipment and we go out and actively begin to search for the phone.
27:48We put all of the information in the stingray.
27:50It's called a stingray.
27:51So every time it sees a new cell tower signal, it registers with that cell tower.
27:57It's, hi, I'm a Sprint phone.
27:58You're a Sprint tower.
27:59And I see you and they communicate a little bit.
28:03But our equipment is looking for one particular registration, one particular device ID.
28:10We've locked the phone up and it's in the area of Matthew Huffman's known address.
28:22We kind of back off where we can see the house.
28:25We can still capture the signal.
28:28We notify SWAT.
28:30So Knox County has a multi-agency SWAT team.
28:34This is considered a high risk entry that they're about to do.
28:38You know, we're investigating a possibly quadruple homicide because we really don't know yet.
28:45At the same time, we have a second team that's out at the lake out in Howard, Ohio.
28:52Matthew's mother still has a house out here.
28:54And we didn't know for sure whether Matthew was at his home in Mount Vernon or whether he was out
29:00here in Howard.
29:01And the thing is, is that at this point, we know that Matthew's mother's home is less than a half
29:07a mile from the crime scene.
29:18You can see from the area here, the Maynard home, it sits off by itself.
29:23It's a quiet location, lots of woods around it.
29:30Go up a small hill here, less than half a mile away from the crime scene,
29:37is the house that Matthew Hoffman's mother and stepfather lived in.
29:43So he is very familiar with the area.
29:48We don't want to hit one place that might tip off Hoffman that we're looking for him.
29:54So we want to hit both locations at the same time.
29:56We're going to wait until eight o'clock. It's going to be late by that time.
30:01We'll hit both locations simultaneously and see if we, if we capture him.
30:12There's no guarantee that he'll be there, but those are the best two options that we have.
30:18And time is of the essence, looking at the amount of blood and everything that was found at the home.
30:23You know, we didn't, we didn't know what we had, but we just knew that we had to move fast.
30:33Well, we left the sheriff's office and went to our two locations.
30:37We made contact with each other and, hey, are you guys all set up?
30:41You ready to move? And we were all set to go. We had the warrants.
30:50Eight o'clock comes.
30:52We don't have any idea what we're going to find when the doors come open.
30:55We don't know whether there's anybody else involved.
31:03I'm excited. You know, as, as I always am, there, there's an element of danger when you're about to potentially
31:10take somebody's freedom from them.
31:12You don't know how they're going to react, what you're going to find.
31:15We didn't know where the family members were.
31:18We didn't know how Hoffman was going to react. Was he armed? Was he going to start shooting at us?
31:23You know, we had no, no idea.
31:26We were staging, uh, just down the road from Hoffman's mother's house.
31:32I'm leading the way.
31:33We got our guns out, you know, because we don't know what we're going to find.
31:37It's huge. They're sitting in the truck, hunkered down, eyes on the house, running the gear.
31:43We don't want to get discovered.
31:44We were heading up to zero hour.
31:47There's been a lot of investigation, a lot of late nights since November 10th.
31:51And it's, uh, it's the morning of the 14th. You know, this could be it.
32:15I'm at the mother's house, and at 8 a.m., we hit vocations.
32:21Pound on the door, guy.
32:24Let us in.
32:25Panged a couple more gentlemen came to the door, and the credentials said,
32:29we're FBI Matthew here.
32:33Deputies are an out.
32:36At this, we knew that Matthew had his mother's address,
32:39nor were any of the family members there, so basically struck out at that home.
32:46I thought I'd call the other team at Hoffman's house.
32:53Make contact and see if they had any luck.
32:58That's why teams do a knock and announce.
33:02Matthew coming to the door.
33:04Matthew's at the door.
33:06Here is a mess.
33:08Kind of just disoriented.
33:10Let's us in.
33:11All moments of relief.
33:13There's no struggle. There's no fight.
33:15Almost as though he knew that this was going to happen.
33:24I drive to Matthew's house in Mount Vernon.
33:31Entering the house was really a bizarre experience.
33:36The first thing that I am struck by is there are tons of leaves everywhere.
33:45You step inside the front door, and right immediately off to your right is a big room,
33:50literally filled with a pile of leaves probably four or five feet high.
33:56I looked at one of the deputies, and I said,
33:59have we checked that pile to see if there's anybody in there?
34:07And they said, yes, we've searched that.
34:09But I want to show you some.
34:12I'm looking through maybe a little sitting room into the kitchen,
34:16and there's some bizarre writing, painting on the wall.
34:22He takes me into the kitchen.
34:25He walks over to the refrigerator, and there's a freezer on the top part of the refrigerator.
34:31And he goes, look at this.
34:32So he opens up the freezer.
34:37I'm looking at a couple of dead squirrels
34:43just laying there frozen.
34:46That was pretty earth shattering.
34:52The house is a disarray. It's just disheveled.
34:55There's not a lot of furniture.
34:56It's almost like it's a vacant structure.
34:59It's filled with stuff you don't expect to see in your house.
35:05It's very cold.
35:07This is November, and it's probably 40 or 50 degrees outside, and it's rainy, and there's obviously no heat.
35:14I mean, it's really chilly. It's damp.
35:21I walked into the bathroom, and every wall of the bathroom is lined with a plastic bag filled with leaves
35:28and stapled to the wall.
35:30Neatly, uniformly stapled to the wall.
35:34I never saw anything like that.
35:39This is, like, really bizarre stuff.
35:41You just don't see this kind of thing.
35:47Huge pile of leaves stapled to the wall. This is crazy.
35:54It's like a house of horror.
35:59I'm going to guess that that house is probably 60 to 100 years old. It's an old house.
36:04It's been remodeled.
36:06Walls have been put up and taken down.
36:08So it's kind of a...
36:10It's an odd floor plan.
36:12There's hallways that have been turned to closets that don't meet anywhere.
36:16The longer it takes for the sheriff's office to find them, the less likely that that person is going to
36:22be alive.
36:24It took them a little bit of time to get through each one of the rooms.
36:28And they're coming into this last room, and there's furniture in front of it.
36:33It's like, okay, well, why do you have furniture in front of the door?
36:36That's an odd thing to block off a door.
36:40They cleared that stuff out of the way.
36:43And when you open that door, what you find is a very steep set of narrow steps leading down into
36:49this dank, dark basement.
36:53Well, it's a great hiding place, but who would want to be down there?
37:02As you go down those steps, you kind of get to like a little landing, and then you look off
37:07to your left, it's like a little root cellar.
37:14Within a few minutes, I was face-to-face with Sarah Maynard.
37:27I'm sorry.
37:29It was, I've never found anybody alive like that.
37:34And it was unbelievable.
37:39I mean, we rescued this girl, and it was unbelievable.
37:48It gets communicated back on the police radio that, you know, we've got a girl in the basement, and she's
37:54alive.
37:59When we got confirmation from the sheriff's office that Sarah is alive and well, there was not one person in
38:07this town or in this community that didn't rejoice.
38:21It was loud, loud noises, boom, boom, get down, get down.
38:26And I'm like, you know, I'm confused.
38:30I laid there, you know, still scared.
38:36I don't know what's going on.
38:37Is it somebody else here to hurt me?
38:39Because, you know, I couldn't see nothing.
38:45It is an image that's burned into my mind.
38:49I've seen a man standing in front of me and said, you're about to be saved.
38:54She is surrounded by leaves.
38:56There's blankets all around her.
38:59She, uh, her hair is kind of, you know, she's got blonde hair, and it's, it's sort of, it's just
39:08bedhead, you know.
39:09It's just disheveled.
39:11And she's bewildered.
39:12She's like, you know, a big-eyed doe.
39:15You know, she's just bewildered.
39:21Not even, like, five minutes later, they all came running down the steps.
39:25And all I remember is I seen helmets and black suits.
39:29And I'm like, oh my gosh.
39:33Her hands were in socks and wrapped with duct tape.
39:36She was tied up like that was to take away her dexterity so that she was not able to untie
39:43her bindings or escape, turn a lock, turn a doorknob.
39:49I went to sit up and they said, if you're Sarah Maynard, let me see your hands. And I put
39:54my hands up, still tied.
39:58And they said, we're not here to hurt you, we're here to save you.
40:03This young, young girl has, has lived through an unbelievable experience the last three days.
40:13And she's being rescued.
40:14It had to be surreal.
40:16I just was confused.
40:18I'm like, am I just seeing something or is this real?
40:21I recall her being quiet.
40:23I don't remember her having tears.
40:25I don't remember her even saying a word.
40:27I think that she was just awestruck.
40:31I was too overwhelmed.
40:32Everybody was asking me a bunch of questions.
40:35You know, I'm still a little girl.
40:37You know, I'm a kid.
40:39And I'm so scared.
40:40I don't even know how to talk.
40:43Really, you know, they're wanting all these answers and I don't really know what to say.
40:49She has no idea what has happened to her family.
40:53She's worried about Cody.
40:57You know, I'm super cold.
41:01And all I want to do is escape.
41:03That's the only thing I kept thinking is I just want to escape.
41:07I was so mind blown by everything going on.
41:09I didn't even know what day it was.
41:10I didn't even know.
41:12I forgot the date.
41:14Didn't know what time it was.
41:18I just had laid on the bed of leaves tied up.
41:22There was no window.
41:25It was pure dark.
41:27100% dark.
41:30I feel like it was so dark that a lot of times he came down there to check on me.
41:34I hadn't even seen him because it was so dark down there.
41:39I would hear the door open.
41:40I just felt he was just going to end up killing me.
41:42That's all I kept thinking.
41:43Hopefully somebody finds me.
41:47We were so freaked out by the fact that, oh my gosh, even with this horrendous crime scene, even with
41:56everything we get seen up to that point, we have Sarah and she's alive.
42:04I was free.
42:05I know I was free.
42:08But I was still scared.
42:15They've arrested Matthew and they've located Sarah, but we still have three people missing.
42:22Now, you know, it's doubling down on the search of the house.
42:25Maybe we're going to find somebody else.
42:29I go back up the stairs and I'm walking around the house.
42:34SWAT team does room by room search.
42:37SWAT's cleared the house.
42:39Immediately, though, you go from joy to where the heck are these other people at?
42:48They take me to the hospital and then I'm sitting there and then there's a TV on and they have
42:54my story on the TV.
42:57Sheriff, are you still treating us as a missing persons or is this now a murder investigation?
43:02As of right now, we have no one that we are aware of who is deceased.
43:07So it continues as a missing persons investigation.
43:11I'm like, oh, that's my mom.
43:13That's my brother.
43:15And then Stephanie.
43:16And I'm like, what the heck?
43:18We're missing.
43:22The minutes feel like hours.
43:25The hours feel like days.
43:28And the days are feeling like weeks.
43:31We still have three people missing.
43:33We've got Tina missing.
43:35We got Stephanie missing and Cody missing.
43:38I need to find out those answers so we know what we need to do to recover them.
43:44Even after Matthew Hoffman was arrested, the story still wasn't over.
43:55The basement, a vanishing in Apple Valley concludes tomorrow night at 10.
44:01And if you or someone you know has been affected by what you've seen tonight, find advice and support at
44:07channel5.com.
44:10On 5, can tech prevent crime before it's happened?
44:14Person of interest, stream now on 5.
44:17Next, emergency call out.
Comments

Recommended