by Kit Frick
But I don’t buy it, and that’s why I’m here. I’m angry, and that’s why I’m here.
So, let’s go back to late December of last year. For those of you who have been following Zoe’s case, none of this will come as new information. Everything I’m about to recap was widely reported on the news during the days and weeks that followed Zoe’s disappearance. But it’s important to start with the facts we can agree upon, the things that are known. And to examine critically the way in which law enforcement approached the case once Zoe was reported missing.
Before she disappeared, Zoe had been home from Brown for about two weeks, spending time with her family. Several Herron Mills residents saw Zoe around town.
JUDITH HODGSON: She spent a few afternoons at the library. Nothing unusual about that. Zoe always was very serious about her studies.
MARTINA GREEN: That was Judith Hodgson, reference librarian at the Herron Mills Public Library. I personally saw Zoe twice, once at the grocery store, where she was helping her mom with the shopping, and again on the day after Christmas, when Aster and I spent the afternoon together at the Spanos house. Zoe was baking cookies in the kitchen. We talked for a few minutes about the marine bio internship she’d done in California over the summer and the advanced research course she’d be taking in the spring.
PROFESSOR DAVID BRECHER: I was looking forward to working with Miss Spanos this spring. She made quite a case to get into my class. I have a firm policy about restricting admission to upperclassmen. But Miss Spanos had completed the prerequisites early, and she showed a great deal of promise.
MARTINA GREEN: Professor David Brecher spoke with me on the phone from his office at Brown. Why would Zoe campaign to get into that course if she wasn’t planning to return to school? There was nothing in Zoe’s behavior that pointed to a girl making plans to sever ties, to vanish into the night.
Fast forward to New Year’s Eve, a Tuesday: Zoe left the house around nine o’clock. She told her parents that she was meeting friends at a nearby house party thrown by Jacob Trainer, a Jefferson alum from Zoe’s class. Multiple sources, including Zoe’s friend Lydia Sommer, confirm she never made it to that party.
LYDIA SOMMER: I texted her a few times that night—no response. Which wasn’t like Zoe at all.
MARTINA GREEN: Is it possible that she went to Jacob’s with someone else? That you might have missed her?
LYDIA SOMMER: No way. If Zoe was there, I would have known. Someone would have seen her. It was almost all Jefferson alum at that party. We all knew each other. Zoe never showed up that night.
MARTINA GREEN: The next morning, Mr. and Mrs. Spanos woke to the realization that Zoe had not returned home. If you read the comments on the news articles that ran in the following days or dive into the Reddit thread about Zoe’s case, you’ll see that many people were immediately critical of their parenting, but let’s remember: Zoe is nineteen and a sophomore in college. Her parents were used to her living away from home, where she’d been an A student at an Ivy League college. And as the police have been so quick to emphasize, Zoe is an adult. Her parents knew where she was going, to a party within walking distance from their home. She hadn’t had a curfew since high school. Let’s stop blaming the Spanos family. They didn’t do anything wrong.
In fact, they did exactly what they should have done. The morning of Wednesday, January first, when Zoe wasn’t responding to phone calls or texts, Mr. Spanos called nine-one-one.
911 DISPATCHER [RECORDING]: Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?
MARTINA GREEN: It was New Year’s Day, and local police had been dealing with their share of calls throughout the night and into the morning: two separate car accidents on Grove and Ocean Avenue, noise complaints, vandalism, a stolen boat—we’re going to get back to that in a minute—littering, trespassing, you name it. If you’re going to go missing, New Year’s Eve is probably just about the worst time to do it.
Or the best time to disappear, if you believe the police.
GEORGE SPANOS [RECORDING]: My name is George Spanos, and my daughter Zoe is missing. We’re at Forty-Five Crescent Circle, Herron Mills, New York. She didn’t come home last night.
MARTINA GREEN: Nine-one-one dispatch transferred Mr. Spanos to the local police. We don’t have access to that recording, but according to TV interviews that ran in the following week, they told Mr. Spanos to check local hospitals and call around to Zoe’s friends and their parents. They told him that Zoe had probably spent the night at a friend’s house, and perhaps her phone battery had died. They told him to do his due diligence, but to try not to worry. Zoe wasn’t a minor. She was responsible and bright. What the police suggested was a perfectly plausible scenario. The most likely scenario. It made sense. But it was wrong.
The Spanoses made those calls. Zoe had not been admitted to any hospital on Long Island. No one had seen her. She had not been to Jacob Trainer’s party. She hadn’t called anyone to say she wasn’t going to make it. She hadn’t responded when three separate friends, including Lydia Sommer, checked in via phone or text between 11:35 p.m. and 1:17 a.m.
Zoe Spanos walked out of her house in Herron Mills around nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve and vanished into thin air.
On the morning of Thursday, January second, when Zoe had still not come home or contacted anyone to say she was okay, the police finally started searching. A pair of officers went door to door in the neighborhood. Zoe was declared a missing person, her photo and description shared with local news. The police worked with the Spanos family to organize a search party for the morning of January fourth, to comb the woods behind the Spanos property. But by the fourth, they had uncovered something else.
Remember that missing boat I mentioned earlier? On the morning of January first, Mrs. Catherine Hunt of Herron Mills reported her small motorboat missing from its post at the White Sand Marina, one of two local marinas where residents can purchase docking permits.
CATHERINE HUNT: I assumed it was kids, partying in the area. It was New Year’s, after all. But then on Thursday afternoon, I heard on the news that there might be a connection between my boat and the missing girl. It was shocking.
MARTINA GREEN: When the boat had not turned up two days later—and an investigation into Zoe’s cell phone records determined that the last GPS activity on her phone could place her within a hundred-foot radius of the marina at 2:12 on the morning of January first—the police put two and two together.
But here’s where I think they got their math mixed up. The search went ahead as planned on the morning of the fourth, but with a fraction of the expected turnout. I was there. Zoe’s family was there. There were maybe thirty of us total, friends of Zoe’s home from college, neighbors, family friends. Searchers did not find anything in the woods.
At the same time, the Herron Mills PD arranged for the ocean floor to be dragged in and around the White Sand Marina. Dozens of onlookers—who should have been searching—showed up there instead.
CATHERINE HUNT: It seemed, at the time, like the divers might find something that day. The marina isn’t large. I’m sure they did a thorough job. But if she made it out of the marina, onto the open ocean …
MARTINA GREEN: The initial working theory was that Zoe had arrived to the marina early Wednesday morning, released Mrs. Hunt’s boat from its post or more likely found it already liberated by New Year’s revelers who had taken their party elsewhere, and that she tried to take the boat out and drowned.
The Spanos family was horrified, but police overturned that theory lightning-fast with a new one: Zoe didn’t drown. She took the boat, and she literally sailed away into the night.
AD MASSEY [RECORDING]: We’ve now concluded an initial investigation into Miss Spanos’s financial records and can report that the 2:12 data activity on her Verizon-registered cell phone was a PayPal transaction. The purchase from Miss Spanos’s account was for a one-way bus ticket from Asbury Park to Philadelphia for the evening of January first. Miss Spanos’s phone was turned off
after the transaction went through, and no further activity has been registered.
MARTINA GREEN: We’re hearing a clip of AD Massey from Channel Four news, which aired on the night of January seventh. That’s right, listeners. The police actually think Zoe Spanos attempted to motorboat across the Atlantic to the Jersey shore, to board a bus to Philadelphia. And that she succeeded.
Maybe it’s possible, for an experienced boater, which Zoe was not. The police have latched onto the fact that Zoe was majoring in marine biology like it’s some kind of proof she was an expert in all things nautical. News flash: College-level research knowledge of the giant squid does not equal experience with boating or aquatic navigation.
Maybe it would have been a plausible escape route for a desperate person. But here’s the thing: While the purchase is indisputable, the fine folks at Greyhound Lines cannot confirm that Zoe actually got on that bus. This clip is also from Channel Four, from the evening of January ninth.
GREYHOUND SPOKESPERSON [FEMALE]: We have no record that the ticket purchased by Zoe Spanos was scanned. Our scanner was working and in use, and we’ve turned our records over to the police. It is highly unlikely that Zoe Spanos boarded the 317 line on the night of January first.
MARTINA GREEN: If Zoe’s phone was turned off following that PayPal transaction, how did she navigate Mrs. Hunt’s motorboat to New Jersey? The police theory would require a good deal of advanced planning on Zoe’s part. It would also require a good deal of stupidity and desperation, neither of which describe Zoe at all.
So, what do we know about Zoe?
Fact one: Zoe had access to her parents’ car. If she wanted to get to Asbury Park, or Philadelphia for that matter, she could have driven herself there.
Fact two: Zoe also had access to the LIRR. If she was concerned about being charged with grand theft auto, she could have easily hopped on a train.
Fact three: If Zoe was really trying to run away, leave no trace, why would she create an obvious digital trail with the PayPal transaction? She had access to plenty of cash, yet did not withdraw any from her bank account before she disappeared. Additionally, none of Zoe’s accounts have been accessed since.
Fact four: Zoe had no reason to run away from her life. This has been the sticking point for police, the motive they can’t produce. But they don’t need to produce a motive, because Zoe’s supposed choice to run away isn’t a crime.
Over the course of the past six weeks, police have proposed an unlikely string of theories: that Zoe didn’t make it all the way to Asbury Park, drowned somewhere out in the Atlantic. (Which would actually seem the most logical scenario, if you believe that Zoe would have attempted to make the boat trip in the first place, which I firmly do not.) That Zoe made it to Asbury Park but then rerouted. That she met up with friends with a car. That she purchased the bus ticket to deliberately lead us off track. What friends in New Jersey? And where is the boat?
As of last Friday, search efforts in Asbury Park, Philadelphia, and along Zoe’s supposed oceanic route have officially wound down. From what we can tell in Herron Mills, they unofficially wound down a lot sooner than that. We’ve been told there’s no way to clearly trace her path. That without communication from Zoe, who clearly does not want to be found, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack.
So, I’m here to ask the questions the police won’t. Because Zoe Spanos had no reason to run away, and certainly not in the way the police think she did. I’m here to propose that there’s no connection between Zoe and that missing boat. Yes, she—or her phone—was in the vicinity of the marina that night. She—or someone who had access to her phone—purchased that bus ticket. But that’s where the connection between Zoe and the boat ends.
Something happened to Zoe Spanos on New Year’s Eve, and someone knows what it was. Someone knows where Zoe is.
Zoe, I hope you’re alive. I hope you’re still out there. There are a lot of people at home who are missing you. And no matter what the police think, I, Martina Green, am going to try my hardest to uncover the truth and bring you home.
[CODA TO MISSING ZOE INSTRUMENTAL THEME]
7 NOW
September
Herron Mills, NY
MARTINA WAITS PATIENTLY to be connected to Anna Cicconi at the Pathways Juvenile Center. Her phone is on speaker on the kitchen table, ready to record. She picks at a plate of cold tostones, the sole remnants from last night’s dinner still waiting in the fridge when she got home. Dad must have taken the rest with him to Jenkins’. She thinks about microwaving the leftover plantains, but she’s too hungry to wait. She reaches for the salt.
She had wanted to go to Brooklyn, to visit Anna in person, but the center’s visitation policy is inflexible. Only immediate family, and further, only adults. Martina is neither, boxed out. Not that Mami would have let her go anyway. She doesn’t approve of the podcast, would certainly never approve of her daughter visiting a criminal in a detention center. But Martina would have gone anyway, if Pathways had let her. Martina is seventeen, newly a senior at Jefferson. She’ll be applying to colleges soon, moving away, hopefully to the city to double major in journalism and sociology at NYU. She’s almost an adult. What Mami doesn’t know won’t kill her.
Martina cringes inwardly and thanks her lucky stars she didn’t say that out loud, in hearing distance of the neighbors. It has been a full month now since Anna’s arrest. The revelation that Zoe is really dead has barely settled in for Martina, for anyone. Even though her body, or what was left of it, has been found. Even though her family confirmed her identity and the dental records sealed the deal. The family can’t have a funeral yet, not if they want a body to bury. The autopsy results still haven’t come in. It’s not like on TV, postmortems moving lightning fast, cases being closed by the end of the sixty-minute episode.
It still seems impossible to believe they found her in Catherine Hunt’s missing motorboat—albeit at the bottom of nearby Parrish Lake, not submerged in the Atlantic Ocean. Martina was wrong about the boat. But not about the most important thing: Zoe wasn’t trying to run away. Someone put Zoe’s body in that boat. Someone sank it to the bottom of the lake. Someone who might be Anna.
Martina knows that she confessed, understands that things don’t look great for the girl she’d only just gotten to know this past summer. But just like with the police’s bogus theories about Zoe the Runaway, there are lots of things that don’t add up for Martina about Anna’s confession. Officially, the details won’t be made public until the case goes to trial, but everyone seems to know what Anna told police. Secrets don’t stay secret for long in Herron Mills, and Anna’s friend Kaylee spread this one like wildfire. She told anyone who would listen exactly how wrong Anna’s story is, but hearing Kaylee say it just made everyone believe: How Anna got Zoe drunk before she fell from the Windermere balcony that night. How Anna drove her body to the lake, hid it in the boat. Martina pops another piece of plantain in her mouth.
“Martina Jenkins?”
She swallows quickly. “Yes, speaking.”
“You have ten minutes with Ms. Cicconi. Understood?”
Martina hears a soft scuffling sound on the other end of the line. Then Anna’s voice breaks through.
“Martina?”
“Hey. Okay if I record this?”
There’s a momentary pause. “Sure. Everything’s recorded on this end anyway.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. I was … angry, at first. And really sad. And then there was like a three-step approval process, just to get a phone call.”
“Yeah. They love their approval processes around here.” Anna makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, but not quite.
“I wanted you to know I’m working on another episode of the podcast.”
“Oh. What for?”
Martina takes in a deep breath, gets ready to say the words she’s been rehearsing since school let out. “I think there are still a lot of unanswered questions about that night. I think … I’m not sure yo
u could have done what you said you did. Or maybe I’m just not understanding, and I want to understand. I’d like to speak with you, Anna. Again.”
“Like an interview?”
“Exactly. I’d schedule it through Pathways, just like this. Would you be open to that?”
Martina is very aware of the formality of her words. All the ease she’d begun to feel with Anna over the summer, the beginning of what felt like a real friendship, is buried beneath the weight of what happened to Zoe, the place where Anna is locked up, the circumstances surrounding this phone call.
“I think I would,” Anna says finally. “I think I’m starting to have some questions too. About that night.”
“We both want the same thing,” Martina says carefully. “Just to know what happened. To get some real answers for Aster and her parents.”
Most of all, even more than she wants to uncover something important, something that will get her into NYU in spite of her miserable track record with standardized tests—and she wants NYU a lot—Martina wants answers for her best friend. The real answers. She watched the discovery of Zoe’s body steal the last flash of hope from Aster’s eyes. She saw her best friend crumble. Martina can’t get Zoe back for Aster. No one can. But she’s going to try her hardest to bring Aster a little bit of peace. Answers—solid, definitive—let you sleep at night.
“Will you help me?” she asks.
“Yeah,” Anna says. “Yes.”
Martina exhales.
Then, Anna’s voice drops. “Can I ask you one thing?”
“Sure.”
“Has Caden … said anything? About me?”
Martina chews on the inside of her cheek. Growing up, she used to feel a tenuous kind of connection to Caden, even though he was three years ahead of her in school. When you live in a town as white as Herron Mills, you notice the one or two (in her case, two) other biracial kids at your school. Maybe you aren’t close friends, but you exchange glances. Keep tabs. But Caden has been less than cooperative over the past six months. Any connection she used to feel is gone.