Killing of Ebby Steppach

Ebby Jane Steppach was an 18-year-old senior at Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, who had previously attended a private school before transferring for her final year. Wanting independence from her parents, she moved out of her family's home at the start of the school year and was mainly staying with her grandparents and friends. On October 21, 2015, she missed school, and on the evening of October 23, she attended a party.

The following day, October 24, 2015, Steppach went to her mother's home and told her stepfather that four individuals had gang raped her at the party and that she wanted to report the assault to authorities. She also said the assault had been recorded on a cell phone. That evening, when her mother and stepfather tried to reach her by phone, she did not respond; her stepfather thought she might have gone to retrieve the video. Two brief calls, each about a minute long, were placed that evening from Steppach's phone to the Little Rock Police Department, though the department later said it had no record of a report being filed. Phone records showed Steppach also sent text messages that evening to several of the men she had accused, threatening to report them to police.

Steppach's last known contact with anyone was a phone call with her older brother around 2 p.m. on October 25, 2015. Her brother said she sounded disoriented; she first told him she was parked outside his house, then, in a second call after he did not find her car there, said she was in her car but did not know where she had parked. The call ended after she told him, "I'm fucked up." Two days later, on October 27, a security guard found Steppach's 2003 Volkswagen Passat abandoned in a parking lot near wooded parkland in Chalamont Park, a neighborhood park in west Little Rock. Local police did not respond to the guard's initial call; when he called again the next day, officers arrived roughly an hour later and identified the car as Steppach's. The car's gas tank was empty, its battery was dead, and the key had been left in the ignition.

Police searched the wooded areas of Chalamont Park after the car's discovery but did not find further evidence. According to a 2017 report, the men Steppach had accused of rape were interviewed by police, but their cell phones were not formally searched for the video she had described. In December 2017, Steppach's mother and stepfather appeared on the television program Dr. Phil to draw attention to the case, and the family offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to her discovery. The case had also been profiled earlier that year on the podcast The Vanished.

Steppach remained classified as a missing person for nearly three years. On May 24, 2018, at around 10 a.m., police conducting another search of Chalamont Park discovered skeletal remains in a drainage pipe near where her car had been found in 2015; the remains were subsequently confirmed to be hers. A family friend who had been searching the area privately told police she had smelled decomposition and alerted authorities; she said officers initially dismissed her report, telling her the park had already been searched with recovery dogs and that the smell was probably an animal. Evidence indicated Steppach had been dead since around the time her car was found in October 2015, and her death was classified as a homicide.