‘Hush’ Episode 1: The last to see her alive

In March 2019, in the wooded hills above the rural river town of Rainier, Oregon, 18-year-old Sarah Zuber was found dead 400 feet from her front door. Six years later, her family still has no clue what happened to their daughter.

Without any answers, the wider community of Columbia County has filled in the gaps of the case with conjecture and conspiracy.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Leah Sottile: The story I’m about to tell you starts with an argument between teenage sisters ‒ the Zuber girls. Sarah, age 18, and her younger sister Kati, 16.

On March 12, 2019, Sarah worked at the only grocery store in rural Rainier, Oregon, until 9:30 p.m. During her shift, she’d been texting Kati, and Kati had a request.

Kati Zuber: So, I got home from school late. I asked her to get me a diet cream soda on her way home from work.

Sottile: Kati and Sarah had plans to watch “Animal House” that night. When Sarah got home from work, she handed Kati her soda.

K. Zuber: So she brought me the soda, whatever, and I made a joke that I’m not going to repeat. And she got mad about it and she kind of went off on me. She just said some things to me about how she was worried about me and just some different stuff about the direction I was going in life.

Kati’s twin sister Abbi was in her room. The three Zuber girls all had bedrooms on the bottom floor of the family’s home. Abbi tried to tune out her sisters.

Abbi Zuber: I hear Kati and Sarah arguing right outside my door, because all of our bedrooms were downstairs, and I stuck my head out the door and I said, “Can you shut up? I’m trying to sleep.”

K. Zuber: I made a dumb joke. She got mad and told me the things, and I just sat there like this. And I was like,” Are you done?”

Sottile:The Zuber sisters fought like this all the time. They were teenagers, and emotions were always high. They were also devout Christians. Lately, Sarah had been vocal to Kati about how she thought she should act.

K. Zuber: And so I got mad at her and I was like, “OK, I’m going to go take a shower now.” And she was like, “All right, I’m going to go on a walk.”

Sottile: Sarah marched upstairs. She told Kati to keep the door unlocked. She was going for a walk, and she’d be right back.

K. Zuber: I was like, “OK, I’m not going to lock the front door.” And we were both mad at each other because we got into a little tiff, and she goes, “I love you,” and I didn’t say it back.

And that’s the last time I saw her.

Sottile: After her shower, Kati waited up for Sarah, but eventually she fell asleep on the couch. The next morning, her sister Abbi woke up feeling awful.

A. Zuber: I won’t go into the nightmare, but I had a really, really bad dream that night. And it was a kind of dream where you wake up and you have to adjust yourself, and be like, “I’m not going to let this ruin my day.”

Sottile: Kati woke up on the couch. She was late for work.

K. Zuber: And so I freaked out. I called my boss. I was like, “Hey, I’m late to work. I’ll be there soon.” I threw my work clothes on. I got in my car and I started driving down the street.

Sottile: Kati took a right out of the driveway. Something caught her eye next to the forest-lined road.

K. Zuber: You never think it is what it is when you see something like that. So I slowed down. I was like, that’s definitely Sarah’s legs.

Sottile: She pulled over, got out.

K. Zuber: I thought she might’ve laid down or something. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Sottile: Inside the house, Abbi was starting her homework.

A. Zuber: A little bit after Kati left for work, I just hear this horrible screaming, like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It sounded like a grown woman screaming. So I paused my music and I’m listening for it again, and it comes again. And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And so I called the police.

Sottile: Abbi reported that someone was outside her house screaming. Eventually she heard a knock on the door. It was her sister Kati and a neighbor who’d heard her screaming, too.

A. Zuber: And Kati was like, “Sarah’s dead. Sarah’s dead.”

Sottile: It’s been six years since 18-year-old Sarah Zuber’s body was found on the side of that rural road, less than 400 feet from her front door.

Today in rural Columbia County, Oregon, it’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t heard the name Sarah Zuber. At one point, her photo hung from the window of many businesses, like a reminder. And in the years since her death, the community has pushed and prodded local officials to get to the bottom of this case - to get justice for her family.

But they haven’t. Law enforcement are stumped, no clue what happened. It’s a case where every question they ask seems only to produce more questions.

As those questions have piled up, so has the community’s need to figure out what happened to Sarah.

People have pointed fingers, and lobbed accusations, and grabbed at power in their quest for answers. Sarah Zuber’s death has been at the center of political campaigns, and would eventually put a target on some of the most powerful people who live here.

When Sarah Zuber walked out the door of her house, she fell through a crack in Columbia County that no one realized was there, and without answers, people are worried it could happen again.

From Oregon Public Broadcasting, this is Hush, Season 2: Love Thy Neighbor. I’m Leah Sottile.

This is Episode One: The Last to See Her Alive.

Sottile: Not long after that 911 call came into police, investigators phoned Sarah’s parents, Randy and Rebecca Zuber, and told them something terrible had happened.

Rebecca got home first. At a police roadblock, she parked her car, walked up the road and shouted toward the officers. An officer’s body camera was recording.

Rebecca Zuber: Where is she?

Chaplain: Hi!.

Rebecca Zuber: Where is my daughter?

Chaplain: My name is Kerry and I’m the chaplain for the sheriff’s department. What’s your name?

Rebecca Zuber: Where is she?

Chaplain: What’s your name?

Rebecca Zuber: Rebecca. Where is my daughter?

Sottile: A pair of officers steered Rebecca toward the neighbor’s house.

Rebecca Zuber: Where is Sarah?

Sottile: Inside, Kati and Abbi were talking to a detective.

Rebecca Zuber: Tell me. They’re not letting me see Sarah.

Det. Lenny Olsen: Are you the mom? Are you the mom?

Chaplain: Yes, yes, this is Rebecca. Sarah’s mom.

Olsen: We’re gonna get everybody together and let you know…

Rebecca Zuber: What I really want to do… I want to see my daughter!

Sottile: The detective stood up from the table, trying to calm her.

Olsen: So Rebecca, we’re going to work this out. We don’t know…

Chaplain: Sarah has passed.

Rebecca Zuber: I want to see her right now!

Sottile: Rebecca balled up her fists and held them tight against her head. She turned to Kati.

Rebecca Zuber: What, what happened Kati?

Officers: Rebecca! Rebecca!

Rebecca Zuber: You were leaving for work, you were driving to work.

K. Zuber: I was driving to work and then I saw her in a ditch…

Rebecca Zuber: How far down? Up here?

K. Zuber: No, it’s um. I parked and I got out. I started screaming and then she came out and called 911.

Rebecca Zuber: Is she totally dead?

K. Zuber: Yeah, yeah. [crying]

Sottile: The police officers said they needed time to piece together what happened.

Officer: So one at a time. One at a time, we’re going to work through this.

Rebecca Zuber: Okay wait, I have another question. I have to ask these questions.

Sottile: But the police were hesitant to answer Rebecca’s questions because they’d decided very quickly that this was a homicide investigation.

News of a suspicious death on a windy road in the woods spread fast. TV news reporters from 30 miles away in Portland were ready to pounce.

KOIN News Anchor Jeff Gianola: A woman’s body found along a country road, and tonight the investigation into what happened to her and how she got there is just beginning. At 11 o’clock good evening everyone…

KOIN News Reporter Cole Miller: As detectives search for clues, both confusion and fear have set into this quiet slice of Columbia County, not far from Rainier…

Sottile: Soon, everyone in Columbia County was talking. Rumors were flying. Was Sarah Zuber murdered? Was it a hit-and-run?

Kristine Brownlow and Sarah had been best friends when they were younger. They were both homeschooled. She was at a church event when she found out.

Kristine Brownlow: I actually had another home-schooler’s dad text me, and he didn’t, I guess, realize that me and Sarah were super close, and he was like, “Oh, did you hear about the Zuber girl?” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And he’s like, “Oh, Sarah Zuber was found dead in the ditch,” and I was staring at my phone. Like, what? So I ran out crying.

Sottile: Pretty quickly, the Zuber case was all anyone could talk about.

Brownlow: And then, since her body was found in the ditch, it was such a big thing that blew up in Columbia County that you have everybody, “Oh, I was her best friend.” You have, “Oh, this happened.” “Oh, well, I saw this.” “Oh, well, no, this happened.”

Sottile: But no one knew what actually happened.

Brownlow: I tried not to, tried not to think about it too hard, because like I said, there was 20,000 different people saying that they knew what happened and that it was this and that.

Sottile: It was a sunny, fall day when producer Ryan Haas and I headed up the windy road toward the Zuber’s house. Ryan and I had been working together for a long time by then, and usually he’s the one holding the microphone while we discuss our reporting. But this time Ryan was driving, and I was recording – or at least I thought I was.

Sottile: [Laughs] Well, good.

Ryan Haas: Now you know the pain of not turning on the recorder.

Sottile: We wouldn’t have used it anyway.

Haas: We had a great… oh my gosh, it was so amazing…

Sottile: Riveting…

Haas: You missed everything…

Sottile: Riveting convo.

Sottile: Sarah’s parents, Randy and Rebecca, came out to greet us.

Randy Zuber: Your name’s Ryan?

Haas: Ryan.

Randy Zuber: Ryan, nice to meet you.

Haas: Nice to meet you.

Rebecca Zuber: Hi, I’m Rebecca.

Sottile: Thanks for having us out.

Randy Zuber: Our pleasure. Pleasure. Is all ours.

Sottile: Shoes off?

Rebecca Zuber: You don’t have to…

Sottile: It was peak tomato season, and Rebecca Zuber had laid out a tray of her tomatoes for us to try, with cheese and crackers. She had long wavy hair, glasses and a warm smile. Randy had a firm handshake, and wore a fluorescent green hat advertising a logging supply company.

It seemed like they were eager to speak to us because they felt so many people had failed them – especially the police.

Randy Zuber: I’ve always said we only would like to get to the bronze level of investigations, and I don’t even know if we really got that. They haven’t really changed at all. They do a little lip service here and there in between totally disrespecting us and disregarding us, which is OK, we’re used to. But this is going to happen again. The whole thing comes down to accountability. And there’s no accountability…

Sottile: The pair used to live in Portland, but moved out to Columbia County when their kids ‒ the three girls, and one older son ‒ were young. They moved into an old, red schoolhouse on a windy, rural road.

Rebecca Zuber: We had Sarah, and then 14 months later we had twins. So we found this place and we fell in love with it. And so we raised our kids here.

Sottile: In Rainier, Randy got work as a garbage man, and Rebecca decided to homeschool the kids herself. They all thrived, but Sarah especially. By the time she was a teenager, Sarah was a night owl. She preferred to stay up late studying, when the house was quiet and their rural internet was running faster.

Rebecca Zuber: Sarah, when she was 16, started Liberty University online. It was a dual program where she would get her high school diploma and two year-degree.

Randy Zuber: Kind of like the Running Start program, I believe, that they have in Washington and Oregon.

Rebecca Zuber. So she had finished that up. She was just finished with that. Her graduation was the following month.

Randy Zuber: We were already planning. We had everything paid for. We had paid for the flights.

Rebecca Zuber: Yeah, we had the plane tickets.

Randy Zuber: We were going back there for…

Rebecca Zuber: We were going back there for graduation. We had everything. That was the big plan. She had gotten scholarships for…

Randy Zuber: Full presidential scholarship, the University of Portland, she had earned herself.

Rebecca Zuber: Several different colleges, including Liberty, but she wanted to go to University of Portland.

Randy Zuber: She was gonna be a neuroscientist.

Sottile: Sarah was the kind of kid who could do math equations in her head. At a certain point, she excelled far beyond what Rebecca could teach, and was basically teaching herself.

Randy Zuber: We can’t say enough about her, honestly, and it’s not just because she’s our daughter. She was just a really good, nice girl and yeah, and I miss her to death. The problem is we just miss her so much. And I mean, it’s kind of sad, but I got to drive down the road and I pretend my daughter’s sitting next to me, and I just wait for her to walk in the door. But I know she probably isn’t going to, but it’s hard. I’m sorry I got to cry a lot, but I knew I’d probably be crying a lot.

Sottile: What happened is still a fresh wound in a lot of ways. They still have so many questions.

An autopsy was conducted the day after Sarah died. Afterward a Columbia County sheriff’s detective sat down with Randy and Rebecca.

Rebecca Zuber: And he said, “But she died of other-than-natural causes.” And at that moment he said that her neck was broken, and there was two places where her neck was broken. So again, they’re like, “Do you have any idea who would want to hurt her?”

Sottile: Randy and Rebecca couldn’t think of anyone who’d hurt Sarah.

Weeks passed, and no one was arrested. But that idea, that their daughter died from “something other than natural causes” nagged at Rebecca. One day, she called Detective Dave Peabody, who was heading up the case for the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office.

Rebecca Zuber: I think I called and I said, “I’m coming in. I want to know what’s going on.” So Detective Peabody said, “You know, sometimes these things take a long time to figure out. You might not find out what happened to her for a long time.” He said, “Look at these…”

Randy Zuber: Binders? Books, binders?

Rebecca Zuber: These three-ring binders, “See this row of binders.” And it was like, I don’t know, 10 binders or whatever. And he goes, “This is a case that I just solved and it took three years, so you never know.” And I left there and I thought, “I can’t believe it would take three years to figure out what happened to my daughter.” And that was it. That was all I got from him.

Sottile: The Zubers want someone to tell them a story of what happened to Sarah that they can believe. Because, as it stands, they’ve heard more than one explanation for how Sarah died. It was an accident. It was a hit-and-run. It was a murder. But every explanation only poses more questions.

Randy Zuber: It isn’t anything like what you’ve… You know, growing up, I’m old, I’ve seen 50,000 murders on TV. I always said, “Why is there all these murders on TV?” But it isn’t like on TV. It isn’t like that at all.

Sottile: The Zubers say all they want is justice for their daughter. But they’re still stuck on how she died in the first place.

Randy Zuber: You know, who cares? We could be disrespected. Maybe we don’t deserve any respect, but just the way that they’ve treated my wife throughout this thing, trying to get answers and blowing her off and blowing us off, and they can just send an email and then not worry about it for three weeks. We’re faceless. There’s no one getting in their face. There’s no one asking questions. There’s no one down there with a camera. They need to have a direct answer for anyone to move on in any kind of logical way.

Sottile: Sarah Zuber died just over a month after her 18th birthday.

She was quiet, practical, smart. She liked to draw and write stories.

She was tall and thin, with long strawberry blonde hair. She wore big baggy clothes, boots, little makeup — if any. She read fantasy books. She loved tromping in the mossy Oregon woods, swimming in wild rivers.

Her sister Abbi sent me a video of Sarah. In it, she’s standing in her bedroom wearing a red graduation cap and gown. She turned to Abbi to show her a purple honor cord, and noticed her sister was filming.

Sarah Zuber: Do you know what this is? Stop! Don’t take pictures of me.

Sottile: Sarah wasn’t shy so much as reserved. When she decided to talk, people really noticed.

Sarah could be moody. She was 18. She had a weird sense of humor, but what teenager doesn’t? She loved a good pun. She adored cats, and made videos of her big, gray cat, named Smokes.

S. Zuber: I love you even though you’re a horrible carnivore that just tried to eat my face.

Sottile: She was a compulsive doodler. She made videos harassing her sister while she was in the bathroom.

S. Zuber: Get out of the shower! I want in!

K. Zuber: Abbi! I mean, Sarah, be quiet!

Sottile: She grew up in this rural town. Her homeschooling kept her sheltered, a little innocent. Most of her community came from church. In this one video she sent a friend, she was showing off every detail of a hotel room her family had checked into in Portland. She opened the mini-fridge and peered inside.

S. Zuber: We got like these fancy-ass mirrors. And it’s not stocked, but still, it’s a cool-ass frickin fridge. And it comes behind a cupboard.

Sottile: She and her sisters were rushing around the room, taking photos of every little corner.

S. Zuber: That’s a cool painting. Look, the ceiling changes height. I think that’s fancy, even though it’s not supposed to be.

Sottile: Every time Sarah passed the mirror, she’d jerk the camera away, uninterested in her own reflection.

S. Zuber: A normal, plain bathroom with more Neutrogena products, and another shower with another attic. Fancy, fancy, fancy fucking place.

Sottile: Some people knew Sarah around town from jobs she had. Before she worked at the grocery store, she worked at a small movie theater.

Leah Tillotson: We’re the first job for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. She was a homeschooler. And so homeschool kids can be a little bit different than others because they think outside the box a little bit. So that was definitely Sarah.

Sottile: That’s Leah Tillotson, the owner of the theater. One afternoon, she told us about how Sarah baked batch after batch of cookies until she nailed the perfect method, and wrote it all down. The cookies would come out great every time, and customers loved them.

Tillotson: I think she just wanted to do something perfect. It’s not just get a job done to get it done. It’s get a job done right, the way that it should be done.

Sottile: Sarah stuck out from the other teenagers who worked at the theater.

Tillotson: Whatever she thought, that’s what she said. That was the truth of what she said. She never pretended to be something that she wasn’t at all. She was who she was, and you got to know that without filter. I remember at the time we had a girl that worked here that a lot of people didn’t like and she was just really kind of socially awkward, and Sarah found a way to be her friend and find the best in her and honestly. Not pretend the best in her. Honestly. Like, “Oh, she’s great at these things. Did you know that?” You know what I mean? So I would say a very authentic, honest person.

Sottile: When Tillotson heard the news of what happened to Sarah, it seemed impossible.

Tillotson: I didn’t believe it was true. Obviously, knowing the family and knowing her and she was a cautious person that was careful, she wasn’t willy-nilly with her safety. Do you know what I mean? It wasn’t like, you’ve known some teens where you’re like, “Oh please God, just get them alive.” She was not that at all in any way and didn’t come from a family that, she just wasn’t that. And so it absolutely was a huge shocker of, how could that be true? How could that? And then you go kind of quickly to how can a family survive that?

Sottile: The theories about what occurred were rampant in the community. Everyone wanted to know the real story.

Tillotson: How could there not be an answer? It’s a girl’s life. How could we not know? OK, somebody broke into my car. I don’t know who did it. OK, we’re only going to give it so much effort, right? A girl’s gone.

Sottile: About a week after Sarah’s death, a memorial was held inside Tillotson’s movie theater. A local church uses the building on Sundays.

Minister: I wanna say welcome, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. Your presence says a lot. It says that you love the Zuber family and that you’re with them as they go through a very, very difficult situation…

Sottile: People who knew Sarah took to the microphone to tell stories.

Man: I would like to share a few comments about Sarah. She is a character. She was such a beautiful person. It was a privilege and an honor to teach her in Sunday school.

Woman: I’m going to miss those times when we would go to the county fair and we would look at all the animals and ride all the rides. There was this one ride, the Gravitron, and we would ride it until it felt like our innards were outtards. When I first started writing this, my first thoughts were “I’m 17. I shouldn’t be writing a eulogy for my best friend who was only 18.” None of us should be writing a eulogy for her.

Singing: God, you’re so good. God, you’re so good. God, you’re so good. You’re so good…

Sottile: A few days before, Sarah was right here in this church. She was too young to die. People talked about all the things she’d never get to do. She’d never fly in a plane. Never attend graduation. Never vote. Never experience heartbreak.

She was gone. And it seemed like no one would ever recover from her loss.

Singing: I am blessed. I am called. I am healed. I am whole. I am saved in Jesus’ name.

Sottile: Less than 24 hours after Sarah Zuber’s body was found, a deputy state medical examiner named Dr. Rebecca Millius performed an autopsy.

You might think that autopsy would answer all of the Zubers’ questions about what happened to their daughter. But, the opposite occurred. A lot of the speculation around this case starts in that autopsy room.

When Sarah was found, she had grass and plant matter all over her clothes. There was mud on her shoes. X-rays showed she had a hairline fracture in her neck. And maybe you’re hearing all this and thinking “OK, she must have been hit by a car. That’s what killed her.”

Not so fast. The doctor noted that neck fracture wasn’t a life-threatening injury. Sarah had bruises and a few scrapes on her arms and legs. And there was a small contusion on the side of her head like you might get if you banged your head on a cupboard door.

In her report, Dr. Millius wrote, ”The minor blunt force injuries found on postmortem examination are of degree sufficient to have caused death.” And yet, Dr. Millius also made a note that her findings did not support the theory that it was a hit-and-run. In other words, she was saying, yes, Sarah had blunt force injuries that could have caused her to die, but no, she wasn’t hit by a car.

OK, so now you might be thinking, “Maybe Sarah Zuber was killed.” But the autopsy makes that seem less likely. Millius did tests to find out if Sarah had been sexually assaulted, which came back negative. And she said there was no evidence of homicidal violence.

According to the medical examiner, she wasn’t hit by a car, and she wasn’t murdered. So what the hell happened to her?

That night, Sarah clocked out of work at Grocery Outlet at 9:30. The store is about a 13-minute drive to the Zuber’s house.

Rebecca Zuber: She left the parking lot at 9:35. And from the reports it said that she turned right out of the parking lot. But to go home, you turn left out of the parking lot. So then that was a few different reports they had on that. And they were trying to figure out where she went before she came home.

Haas: But they never figured that out?

Rebecca Zuber: They never figured that out. No.

Sottile: So Sarah took a right out of the parking lot, instead of a left, and she didn’t arrive home until about an hour later, around 10:30. She handed Kati her soda, they got in an argument, then Sarah left for a walk. Kati estimated she left around 10:50 p.m.

After she walked out of the house, two text messages were sent from her phone. The first went to Sarah’s boyfriend at 10:57 p.m. It read “I’m firking f-e-8-n-k,” which police interpreted to mean, “I’m fucking drunk.” He wrote back “What?” but got no response.

The second message was a minute later, at 10:58. It went to a Facebook group chat Sarah was in that her boyfriend was also a part of. That message read: “h-e-p-l-0,” which the police took to mean: “help.”

Sarah’s phone died a half hour later. Police found it water damaged in her coat pocket.

In the autopsy report, Dr. Millius wrote that when Sarah died, she had an extremely high level of alcohol intoxication. Her blood alcohol level was at a 0.16. For comparison, the legal limit you can drive with in Oregon is about half that. We’ve asked several experts about how many drinks this would mean Sarah had, but the answer is unfortunately very unclear.

Millius wrote that that high level of intoxication combined with foggy, 42-degree March weather might have caused Sarah to succumb to hypothermia. But even then, the doctor indicated none of her findings definitively supported her own theory. She said she’d amend her report if she got “clarifying information” from the police.

Millius concluded that Sarah’s official cause of death was “undetermined.”

But this alcohol thing is hard for the Zubers to believe for a few reasons.

First, Kati Zuber – the last person to see her alive – insists her sister wasn’t drunk when they had their argument and she left for a walk.

Sottile: Did you ever see her drink or did she seem like she’d been drinking that night? Would you have known?

K. Zuber: Yeah, I would’ve known. And she wasn’t. She was completely sober. Whenever she drank, she would share it with me. And she wasn’t a partier and she wasn’t a big drinker. She had a little bottle with some vodka in it in her mini-fridge, and she had a can of wine. And sometimes when we watched our shows, we would share a little can of wine or have a little bit of vodka, but she would never get drunk, and she wasn’t going out and getting drunk with people. She wasn’t a drinker. And that night, I know she wasn’t drinking, and I don’t think she would’ve taken it with her. I’m not sure.

Sottile: Randy and Rebecca Zuber also aren’t convinced that Dr. Milius did all the tests she could have to prove Sarah was drunk. And drinking to that extent would have been so out of character for Sarah.

Randy Zuber: Now, to this day still, they can’t prove that. That’s the one thing. And I don’t care if Sarah did drink and if she did get drunk, but like this alcohol thing. How did you come up with that? “Well, we didn’t find it anywhere, but somehow in her blood she had some.” Well, did she have it in her urine? No. Well, any other things? Nothing. No alcohol anywhere? No. I could even tell when my kids have a Rockstar, and I’d never seen Sarah drink, but I know that she did have some saké with her sister and she might’ve had whatever with Vishal. I don’t know what they did.

Sottile: That night or just in general?

Rebecca Zuber: No, just in general.

Sottile: Sarah had consumed alcohol in her life. But investigators didn’t find any bottles in her bedroom or her car.

If the only definitive conclusion of the autopsy is that Sarah Zuber had a lot of alcohol in her body, when did that alcohol go into her body? If she drank it with someone in that hour after work, who was that person? And why didn’t she seem drunk when she got home?

Sarah had a few things on her when she died. Her phone, which was waterlogged. Some headphones, which were laying at her feet in a puddle. A pocket knife, and an empty plastic water bottle.

At the bottom of that bottle, there was a tiny amount of brown liquid. And so at the scene, Detective Dave Peabody poked his breathalyzer into the bottle.

Randy Zuber: Peabody who comes up there, and he’s all, “Hey, there’s some water in her pocket.” And he takes his PBT and sticks it there and goes, “Well, there’s alcohol in there.”

Sottile: Is that like a breathalyzer?

Randy Zuber: Yeah, that’s where you watch “Cops.” They go, “Blow, blow, blow. Keep blowing, keep blowing. Blow, blow, blow.” They go, “Alcohol. I knew it.” And then from then on, it’s all “alcohol, alcohol, alcohol.” Baloney.

Sottile: What’s weird is that in files we got from the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office, we didn’t find a report of Peabody doing this test. However, there were records of a couple of other lab tests: One found that the brown liquid in the bottle was just dirty water. And a DNA test on the mouth of the bottle didn’t come up with a match for Sarah.

So, just to recap: Sarah had this sky-high blood alcohol content, but there were no traces of alcohol in her bedroom or her car. We don’t know what she did after work, but her sister insists she wasn’t drunk. She left the house, sent those two seemingly drunk texts just minutes later. But that’s it.

Here’s why this all matters. Ten months after the autopsy deduced that Sarah’s cause of death was undetermined, Dr. Millius changed the conclusion of her report. She wrote that Sarah’s new cause of death was “combined deleterious effects of acute ethanol intoxication and hypothermia due to exposure.”

In other words, Millius believed Sarah got drunk and somehow ended up freezing to death on the ground a few hundred feet from her front door.

When we sat down with the Zubers, Rebecca told us about how hard she pushed for answers. The sheriff’s office, the medical examiner, the district attorney. She begged all of them for information about what happened to Sarah, and how this went from a suspicious death to something that seemed to put Sarah at fault.

Rebecca Zuber: I know that there’s so many deaths out there that never are resolved. They have no idea what happened. You know, I could have accepted that this is another one of those except that I think that I pushed so hard because I wanted to know what was wrong. And I think that the district attorney Auxier just went ahead and sent me those records and wrote that memorandum and supposedly that meant that the case was closed.

Sottile: In February 2021 – almost two years after Sarah died – the Columbia County district attorney officially closed the case. He said the alcohol story explained what happened, and there was nothing more to look into. It was a huge blow to the Zubers, but it also allowed Rebecca to see the police files she had been asking for.

In some ways, Rebecca blames herself now. She kept asking to see the police records, and the DA closed the case.

Rebecca Zuber: I didn’t know how to act. I didn’t understand the whole, I got to stay out of it and let them do their job. I couldn’t take “We don’t know” or “we’re not going to say anything to you. Oh, I couldn’t leave it at that. So I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing. So then this was the result.

Sottile: But it’s hard to believe a garbage man and a homeschool mom could dictate whether a district attorney says a case should be put away. Later, the district attorney would tell them the case was open and they couldn’t look at the investigative records. It wasn’t clear to the Zubers what was happening.

Randy Zuber: Half the time the case is open, half the time it’s closed, depending who you talk to, what time of year it is, blah, blah, blah. I don’t even know. They say it’s open. We haven’t heard from anybody in a year and a half.

Sottile: The Zubers have reminders on all sides of their home of what happened, and how none of it made sense. There’s the place where Sarah died just a few hundred feet from their door. And just down the road is a small cemetery where she’s buried. When I work on stories involving people who have died, I often visit a person’s grave to see how they’re remembered.

So one afternoon last fall, Ryan and I visited Sarah’s grave.

Haas: Sorry. I’m just trying to block the wind here.

Sottile: It’s got a picture. Oh, man.

Sottile: On her headstone, there’s a photo of Sarah in that red cap and gown.

Sottile: Sarah Elizabeth Zuber, precious daughter, sister, friend. Heaven sent February 1st, 2001. Returned March 13th, 2019.

[Long pause.]

This whole thing is just so weird.

Haas: Yeah.

Sottile: Yes. Okay, it’s a mystery. That was why I was initially interested.

Haas: It’s definitely a mystery.

Sottile: But is it a mystery? Is something that is a human-created error a mystery? Or is it that just somebody never said what happened?

Haas: Nobody figured it out. Right.

Sottile: I just think you do anything in an area like this and everyone knows. I just have a hard time believing that there is such a thing as a secret in a small town.

Haas: There’s no secrets, but it’s also, every rumor gets shared, so it’s like the information is extremely diluted.

Sottile: There’s so much rumor and conjecture about what happened to Sarah. As we reported, it felt at times like every path we went down only led to more questions, more speculation.

We decided if we were going to get any kind of clarity on this case, we needed to talk to Detective Dave Peabody. If for nothng else, maybe he could say for sure if the Sarah Zuber case was open or closed.

Sottile: Do you think that Sarah laid down in a ditch and just died?

Det. Dave Peabody: No.

Sottile: Did you ever think that?

Peabody: No.

Sottile: Do you have any ideas of how she died?

Peabody: Yes.

Sottile: That’s next time.