The search for a missing young mom would take police into the world of hot air balloons and bees. Once her body was found, those same connections would be pivotal to the investigation.View source material and photos for this episode at: anatomyofmurder.com/hot-airCan’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc
Chapter 1: What happened to Cassandra Robinson?
Did you kill her? He obviously tells us no. He says she could come back any day. When we asked if she left, was on her own, he responded, she is either not coming back because something happened or occurred against her will. We're like, holy cow.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
There are some days you mark on the calendar that you look forward to. It might be a wedding, a birthday, or a favorite holiday. Days that bring friends and loved ones together and promise to put a smile on everyone's face.
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.
For others, sometimes these milestones and celebrations can put into focus what's missing in their lives. A happy marriage, a child of their own, or a painful loss.
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.
My name is Chad Wilhite. I'm with the Pensacola Police Department. And I was assigned to the Criminal Investigations Division as a detective.
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Chapter 2: Who reported Cassandra Robinson missing?
It was a missing person case at that time. And the missing person was a lady by the name of Cassandra Robinson. She had been reported missing by her sister, Carlisa. Carlisa had told the reporting officer that she had not seen her sister for approximately four months. And the last time she had seen or heard from her would have been on February the 1st of 2018.
Which means Cassandra may have been missing for over four months. So you can imagine why her family was overwhelmed with fear and worry that something terrible had happened to her. and why her case would have been forwarded to detectives in major crimes. Another reason for concern? Cassandra was a new mother who had left behind a one-year-old baby daughter.
Cassandra Robinson was a typical girl her age. She was active on social media. She had worked as a dancer in one of our local clubs. So she was just a normal, stay-at-home person, raising her child, involved with her baby's dad.
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.
The area they were living in, heck, it was, I want to say, like two blocks from the fire department. So it was a nice little area, nice house.
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?
Detective Galloway spoke to Henry on the phone. I believe it was June 11th. Henry told Detective Galloway that on February the 1st, which would have been the one year year birthday of their daughter, Evelyn. After the birthday party, Cassandra left in their BMW and she left with some bags. Henry said, I went to bed. She didn't come back.
And when he woke up, somehow the vehicle and the keys were back at the house and Cassandra was gone. And he hadn't seen from her, seen or heard from her since February the 1st.
Now, according to her sister, Cassandra had faced some challenges in her short life. She was just 25 years old, but had struggled at times with her mental health. And that had played a part in the delay in raising the alarm because it wasn't the first time that Cassandra had gone off the radar for a bit. But this time it felt different.
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances of Cassandra's disappearance?
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.
Henry told Detective Galloway that she had made statements in the past that when Evelyn turned one years old, she would be leaving.
So had Cassandra made good on her promise? Had she really made a plan to celebrate her daughter's first birthday and then leave both Henry and their daughter behind? It was a possibility that detectives had to consider.
Is she just tired and want to go away? Or she was just fed up with life and needed a break? She suffered from some mental health issues in the past. Maybe she went and got herself checked in and didn't tell no one.
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.
According to her, it was a somewhat volatile relationship at one point. According to Carlisa, Henry had beaten Cassandra up pretty good in the past, but she would never report it to law enforcement. or to anyone that could help her get out of the situation she was in.
A friend of Cassandra's had a similar story to tell of Cassandra making plans to move on and away from Henry.
Detective Galloway had interviewed one of Cassandra's friends. Henry had been messing around in their relationship, so she was going to pack her and Evelyn's stuff and they were going to go live in her grandma's house.
It's a decision that sadly many women, mothers, and people are forced to make every day, uprooting their lives to escape an unhealthy relationship, putting their mental and physical safety above all else. But in this situation, one thing really didn't make sense, and that was why would Cassandra have left her daughter behind in the custody of the man she was leaving?
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Chapter 4: Did Cassandra have plans to leave her relationship?
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.
I think for sure it is. But again, depending on how savvy the person who is now missing is, like they might know to just get cash, right? And if we look at Cassandra, of course, like sudden changes are often suspicious, but the specifics of every person's life can be very telling.
And I think you said it just at the beginning of what you were talking about there, Scott, like here she is in a problematic relationship. Maybe she needs an escape. She's a young mother plus the hilly relationship. These are things that sometimes people just need to go, you know, whether it was because she was overwhelmed Something having to do with any past mental health issues?
We just don't know. But regardless, like while there were plausible reasons why Cassandra had left home and maybe stopped using her phone, there was also enough reasons to believe that her sudden disappearance was not of her own volition. And detectives in Pensacola weren't comfortable with the idea that Cassandra had simply left.
And while it was still a leap to suspect foul play, and again, remember what Scott said about that proof of life digital footprint. Here, when they looked at it all, they decided to search the property where Cassandra and Henry had been living to see if there were any clues where she might be.
They searched the inside of the house, outside of the house. They used ground penetrating radar to make sure that to see if there was anything buried in the backyard that maybe would help solve this mystery. All that was done with negative results.
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.
There was no signs of a struggle or blood or anything found inside the residence that would lead us to believe that she was harmed inside the residence. At least physically attacked maybe inside the residence where she would receive some type of injury.
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Chapter 5: What evidence did detectives find during their investigation?
Apple Jacks are an orangish color and a greenish color cereal. And I can't remember which one it was, but he refused to give her either the green or the orangish red one. He'd only give them the same as that color. And it was immediately like, this guy, there's something wrong with this guy.
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.
He seemed to be willing to want to help, seemed to be somewhat concerned. Obviously, the last place he had seen or heard from her was on February the 1st. He had said that during their conversation that evening, Cassandra said she wanted to go on a well-deserved vacation, but he did not know where she had went.
an extended vacation. And the more the two detectives pushed and probed, the more Henry was able to remember about this impromptu holiday. According to Henry, Cassandra had talked about going to Bermuda and had even borrowed some money from a friend to fund the trip.
So we started asking about, well, if she's going on vacation, does she have a passport? How is she going to get in and out of the United States? I'm assuming you got to have a passport. And he didn't believe she had a passport.
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.
I asked, have you attempted to contact Cassandra? Whether it be through email, text message, phone calls. He said he had not attempted to contact her because he did not want to bother her while she was on her well-deserved vacation. I thought that was very odd. We kind of just put that in the back of our mind and we keep on talking to him.
The two detectives asked to take a tour of the house with Henry leading the way.
So he walks us around the house and shows us where their bathroom's at, walks us to a closet. While we're in the closet, Henry points to several suitcases. There's a silver one and a purple one. And he tells us that when Cassandra left, she took the matching suitcases with her to those other two. So we know now we're probably looking for a silver suitcase and a purple suitcase.
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Chapter 6: What did Henry Steiger say about Cassandra's disappearance?
There was also internet searches made on Cassandra's phone that indicated she was looking into ways that she could add Henry's name to her daughter's birth certificate to make him financially responsible to care for their child. She was even searching for local hotels and had sent messages asking a friend to send her $300 via PayPal.
In short, she was making plans, maybe plans that she was stopped from carrying out.
But his story about a planned vacation, one from which she never returned, just seemed too implausible, especially for the mother of a child that was still nursing. And so with nothing more than a hunch that he was hiding something, Chad took a much deeper look into his suspect's life story in a search of hints that everything was not as it seemed.
And what we find out is he is involved in a coffee bean roasting business. And the two people he's involved in this business with is a lady by the name of Nadina and a guy by the name of Julian Mazur. Henry refers to Julian as his right-hand man, kind of does everything for him. His driver, his business associate is basically his do-boy. There'd probably be a better way to describe Julian.
Chad hoped that these two colleagues could help piece together a part of the story, or at least help corroborate Henry's version of events. Chad started with Henry's female colleague.
We explained to her why we're there and what we're working. She states during that interview... So it was on around the February 1st or 2nd. She receives a text message from Henry saying, hey, I have a surprise for you. He's like, OK. So she goes over and picks him up. And lo and behold, Henry's holding this child.
Incredibly, Henry had never revealed to his close colleague, Nadine, that he even had a child. And apparently for a good reason.
The whole child caught her off guard because, according to Nadina, she believed that her and Henry were in a relationship since about 2013, so about five years.
So Henry had revealed to this partner of five years that he was not only having a relationship with another woman, but that he was the father of her child.
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Chapter 7: Were there signs of foul play in Cassandra's case?
During their search for Cassandra, detectives had now stumbled on evidence of a money laundering scheme. But in addition to painting a clearer picture of Henry Steiger and his criminal background, it also gave them good reason to obtain a search warrant for his property. Whether that search would also reveal clues about Cassandra's fate was still unknown.
Suana Seager, you know, as investigators always look to best ways to utilize as many tools as they can in a tool belt to get information. And here they have a situation where they likely don't have enough to even think about a search warrant for a crime like murder. But they need to get into his home to determine if they can gain any information that connects to Cassandra's disappearance.
And here was a pretty cool way to get in.
And it's all about Chad's background, which is obviously unrelated to a missing persons or any potential murder investigation. And it just shows how all these things that you may not even realize how they can really help connect dots and move investigations forward, how they can be utilized. Like it's Chad's experience in white collar crime that really now started to help move things quickly.
So the good thing with being in, when I was in fraud is I made a lot of connections at these banks. I mean, I can call our prosecutor and be like, hey man, I need a subpoena for bank records from Wells Fargo. And literally it'll be in my email in like a couple of minutes. And I'm talking to the people at Wells Fargo. I'm like, look, all I need is this right now.
I need something official from y'all showing these deposits and they do us a solid and get us what we need.
So using all of that, on June 29th, Pensacola Police Department returned to Henry's home, this time with that search warrant. And as we mentioned, while the search warrant was written for a financial crime, these are also homicide detectives with experience in working crime scenes.
So while they're in there, they're also going to keep a close eye to see if anything could be tied to Cassandra's disappearance.
During the search warrant, we find just a lot of money wrapped up in like three by five cards, a lot of that. Money just in weird places.
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Chapter 8: What were the red flags in Henry's statements?
We got there just in time that we believed we did. When we took him into custody... Searching him, we find two prepaid cell phones, a bunch of keys, and some cash.
Whether he would escape the mounting evidence that he had something to do with Cassandra's disappearance was still a looming question. Henry Steiger was now in custody on white-collar charges. His daughter was taken in by the authorities until detectives could determine if he was responsible for Cassandra's disappearance and possible homicide.
In the meantime, another detective had begun building a picture of all the other known associates of Henry Steiger that he may have contacted to help him make his escape from Pensacola. And what they found was that Henry enjoyed a hobby of beekeeping, and he had a friend in the beekeeping world named William Shelby Johnson.
Balloonist, beekeeper, and fraudster. As a suspect, Henry Steiger looked pretty unique. And in order to keep building the most complete picture they could, Chad invited this William Johnson in for an interview.
So he comes down on July the 10th and explains to us that he's actually doing construction work for Steiger at a business in downtown Pensacola that Steiger has the plans to convert into a coffee shop, which we didn't think was too strange because he's in this coffee business.
The interview didn't last long with the friend offering up a little help. But shortly after being escorted out of the building, Henry's buddy made a quick beeline back to the station.
By the time Detective Iverson and I get back up to our offices, the officer who's working the front desk calls us and says, hey, Shelby said there's something he forgot to tell y'all and wants y'all to come down. I'm like, oh, OK. So we go down there and he says, hey, I forgot to tell y'all that back in the middle of June, Henry was getting grief therapy.
from his HOA about a trailer he had parked in his driveway. And I told him he could park his trailer out on my empty land lot thing and that he could leave it there for a while.
A trailer owned by Henry Steiger parked on Shelby's land, a trailer the detectives had known existed.
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