Scott Weinberger
speaker
1,691 appearances
28 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Scott Weinberger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
As we probably all know, sometimes those occasions can bring challenges too. There's all of the anticipation, the buildup, the preparation. And before you know it, the event is over and it's back to the day-to-day, the routine.
Today's story starts with a birthday and ends in tragedy. And what should have been a day marking new beginnings would come to leave a family broken and lives shattered, including that of a one-year-old baby girl.
Chad had enjoyed a diverse career within the Pensacola Police Department. He had risen through the ranks, spent a few years investigating white-collar financial crime, and now was a part of a team of detectives assigned to major crimes. But the case that landed on his desk in June of 2018, it wasn't yet a crime at all.
Cassandra and her daughter Evelyn had been living with the child's father, a man by the name of Henry Steiger, in a middle-class neighborhood in Pensacola called The Avenues. It certainly wasn't an area that Chad and his colleagues would regularly be called out to.
It was one of Chad's colleagues who first spoke to the father of that child, Henry Steiger, a man that was 28 years Cassandra's senior. Top of his list of questions, when did you last see the mother of your child?
Now, according to his statement to detectives, Henry was less surprised. The couple had never been married, and in fact, Henry was not even listed as the father of the baby on the birth certificate. And this had been the source of some friction in their relationship in the past.
But there was also the possibility that Cassandra's sudden departure was not a case of abandonment, but one of escape. That's because, according to her sister, Cassandra's relationship had been more than just rocky. It had, at times, become violent.
And so armed with what they had learned from both Henry, the child's father, and Cassandra's sister and friends, they began their search for the missing woman, a search that started, like so many do these days, online.
Search warrants focused on Cassandra's preferred social media platforms, and that's where police noticed the first glaring red flags, because despite Cassandra being an active poster in the past, her socials showed no activity since February 1st, the day she went missing. In fact, her last post at 6.22 p.m. was a video of Cassandra holding her young child and singing, a video filmed by Henry.
Now, to everyone on the outside world, it looked like just a family enjoying a special day.
For a young girl, usually prolific on social media, this sudden change in behavior or what we might call a change in her digital footprint was highly significant. So Anastasia, as you know, as an investigator, while you always have to take into consideration that if you're a missing person is intentionally trying to be off the grid, so to speak, it could also involve their social media.
So to try to answer that question, you turn to something detectives refer to as proof of life. Start searching for things like credit card usage, which is obviously near the top of that list. Just think about it. On a daily basis, how many establishments you walk into, getting gas in your car, going to the dry cleaners, you're leaving those digital breadcrumbs.
So it's much easier to trace that in this day and age. So I think, Anasigar, a lack of that is a red flag.
Those detectives weren't just looking to rule out the presence of Cassandra's body. They were seeing if there was any indication of violence, any signs that the scene had been cleaned up or covered up. But they drew a blank.
Stepping into a case that's already started, Chad needed to go over all of the basic facts and to see things for himself. I've seen this multiple times in my career. No matter how good the handover may be, how good the paperwork was filled out, nothing beats going through the facts from the very beginning.
The two detectives planned to go in cold, ask a couple of questions, shake the tree a little bit, and just see what falls out. Either Henry would be consistent with his story that Cassandra had simply deserted him and her daughter, disappearing without a trace just hours after their daughter's first birthday party, or he'd slip up and give them something to explore. And they had one big advantage.
And I'm sure as everyone realizes, having some strange habits isn't a crime. But there are the kind of details that a detective tends to log, just in case it becomes relevant later on in an investigation.
Chad's investigator instincts were telling him that something wasn't right. Cassandra taking herself away to Bermuda without her child, without telling her sister and never returning. It just didn't add up. But more than that was that Henry had never tried to reach out to ask her about her return. Never wondered if anything could have happened to her that would have prevented her from coming home.
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