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Chapter 1: What happened to Brittany Wallace Shank on November 30, 2018?
Hi, Crime Junkies. It's Brit. If you're like me and you're ready to dive into even more cases, there's another podcast I think you're going to love. Park Predators. In Park Predators, host Delia D'Ambra dives into the haunting crimes that happen in some of the most beautiful and unexpected places across the globe.
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San Joe County 911, where is the emergency? Okay, you're on Fawn River Road near what cross street? What cross street or what address are you at on Fawn River? I guess it's on Fawn River. Okay, do you have an address on Fawn River? Okay.
That 911 call you just heard came into St. Joseph County Dispatch just before 9 at night on November 30, 2018, from a house off a rural road right outside Sturgis, Michigan.
Okay, can you tell me what's going on there tonight? I don't know. The girl just came to the back door and she had no shoes on, no coat. She's bleeding on her feet, her arms.
If you didn't catch all that, the man, his name is John, said that the young woman that came to his back door was stranded after her boyfriend wrecked their car and then took off on foot without her. It was bitter cold with snow on the ground. So the fact that she showed up barefoot with no coat and a bit scratched up and bleeding was cause for concern.
Okay, so she said that her boyfriend, like, took off from the area. Do you know, was he abusing her or what happened? I don't know. I couldn't tell you that. Okay. All right. Would you say that she's, I mean, does she need medical attention or you said it's not serious or what's going on? No.
Under the static and radio chatter, you can hear the young woman John is speaking to in the background of the call. She doesn't sound panicked. Her tone is measured, and she tells them that she does want medical attention.
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Chapter 2: What led to Brittany showing up at a stranger's door?
What or who or why has never been fully determined. Because since Brittany slipped into the darkness that November night back in 2018, she has never been seen again.
And trying to understand what happened to her, what even brought Brittany out to that rural road to begin with, and who she was with, opens a Pandora's box of conflicting stories, troubling allegations, and a mystery that has taken on a life of its own. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And welcome back, crime junkies.
The entire scenario that kicked off this case, a woman comes to a stranger's door, a little worse for the wear, shoeless, coatless, in the cold, saying she was in a car wreck and her boyfriend took off and left her. Then she takes off just before deputies are about to come. that would be more than enough for a red flag to be thrown up for crime junkies, right?
Like, we would be, like, spiraling and, like, jumping into action. Actually, we've literally seen this play out before. This feels like a slightly different version of the start to our episode on Lisk when Shannon Gilbert was, like, running to a house looking for help. Maybe that's why, to me, this should have been so alarming from the jump.
But sadly, that's apparently not what's on the minds of first responders. We were able to get what seems to be most of the case file. And when they look over the car that's been abandoned, they realize this was far from a serious crash. One of the few things almost everyone in this case can actually agree on is just how thick the fog was that night.
And it looked like the car had basically just kind of like veered off the road into, they call it a ditch, but like we're talking a very shallow ditch and then maybe got stuck. The car was still drivable, though. And even the injuries that John saw, he described them as small cuts on her feet and her arms. But I don't know where those would have come from.
Some suggest that maybe from the brush in the field going from the car to John's if she got cut through that way and didn't use the road. But like... This is, like, right where we grew up, these, like, Michigan, Indiana, northern Indiana, like, fields.
And this is in November?
Late November. Everything is, like, cut down by this point.
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Chapter 3: Who was Brittany with before her disappearance?
And if she was seeing another guy, then the question becomes, did Sheldon know about it? When investigators circle back to Sheldon, the short answer, according to him, is no. He admits the two weren't exactly in the best place the day that she vanished, mostly due to Britt's meth use. He insists this wasn't some like blow up fight they had or anything, more just like bickering.
But he does say that before leaving the house that night, Brittany told him something along the lines of you're not going to like me much later, which he took to mean at the time that she was going to go out and get high. He says he actually didn't want to lend his car to her that night. People we spoke to told us that that car was his baby.
But that night, Brittany asked to borrow it so she could go to her grandma's. And according to Sheldon, he actually even offered to drive her himself. Like, it was only like a 15-minute cruise away. But he says that Brittany got irritated about this and was adamant about taking the car alone. Which makes sense if she's meeting up with another guy. Which is what I think happens.
Because Sheldon helps fill in more of the timeline for November 30th. He says that she left his place likely sometime between 5 and 6 p.m. And not long after, Brittany called him up like half joking, half complaining. I think that there wasn't enough gas in the car and she was going to have to stop and fill up.
And after, that's when we have a gap where we think she picks someone up before going to grandma's. Now, once hours pass by, Sheldon tries contacting Brittany to see where she's at, like she's supposed to be back with his car, but she won't answer, which probably frustrates him.
Not because he is thinking she's with some other guy, he is thinking that she's out using, and like I said, not back with his car after he already seemed like on the fence about her taking it. And look, after talking to people close to this case, Sheldon doesn't really seem like the jealous type. He is more so the guy that Britt felt she could always fall back on if she needed something.
So at 9.42 p.m., he actually called a friend and his cousin and asked them to pick him up so they could go out and look for Brittany. And deputies end up confirming this with those two people. The first place they said they checked are the Village Manor apartments in Sturgis.
Why not grandma's if that's where she said she was going?
Well, because according to Sheldon, Brittany would go to these apartments to visit friends and to do drugs or get drugs. And remember, that is what he thought was going on here, why she isn't back. But he goes there, doesn't spot her car. So then they did go by grandma's. No car there either. They said they drove back to the Village Manor apartments one more time.
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Chapter 4: What details emerged about the 911 call related to Brittany's case?
Grandma said that Brittany and the mystery man seemed to be arguing a bit, remember. And Brittany's mom, Jessica Rolfe, told us something interesting about her. Believe it or not, she said that Brittany actually had this habit of impulsively jumping out of cars when she was pissed off. Like it's something her mom had witnessed her doing before in an argument.
And to further hint at this idea that something happened in the car, when Sheldon got the car back from impound, he says the inside was trashed. Like the glove box was open. Brittany's purse had supposedly been like dumped out. Her belongings were scattered everywhere. And apparently, that was exactly how it was when first responders found it on the side of the road in the first place.
So, say something happened in that car before or after it went off the road. Was Brittany trying to get away from the person she was in the car with? If so, there is a good chance that he caught up to her. Now, John isn't around anymore for us to get this story directly from him.
But Brittany's dad, Greg, relayed to us that John had told someone that when he went out to his detached garage the next morning after Brittany had been at his house, it looked like someone had gone through his stuff. The insinuation being that this had supposedly happened when Brittany herself was inside with John talking to dispatch.
Meaning mystery man is in the garage. Right. But that doesn't mean she didn't know. What do you mean? I mean, like, I'd venture to guess people are more willing to open their door to a young woman in trouble than a woman and a man. Like, maybe she went up to use the phone, told him to wait outside.
Actually, that would make a lot of sense, especially when combined with the tidbit of info that we get, like, when deputies canvass the neighborhood. Yeah. Okay, there isn't, like, much of a neighborhood campus. Again, you know this area. Like, it's... Super spread out. Yeah, it's pretty rural. But there was another house not too far from John's on the same road. And...
Someone in that house saw Britt that night, too. According to the case file, there was this young teen who was home alone, and they reported seeing Brittany outside this house wearing a big green coat, just like the one that John had given her. So, I mean, we can almost be sure that this is her, and we can be sure that this happened after she left John's. Right.
But it's what happened next that's really unsettling. So according to the report, while he watched this woman like circle from the backyard to the front, like peering through the windows, he heard someone else knocking on his front door at the same time. Now, this teenager is obviously like super freaked out. He's not going to answer the door for whoever is knocking.
So he didn't see what that person looked like or anything. The question is, was, to, like, to your point, so, like, I was originally thinking, like, was this person, like, stalking her and looking for her, thinking maybe, you know, she was at John's, maybe she's here. Or, now thinking what you're saying. Were they together? Did they travel to that second house? Together.
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Chapter 5: How did Brittany's family and friends react to her disappearance?
But then this happens. So Eric Schenck showed up to one of the early searches for Brittany, dropped off by Ashley, by the way. Even though Britt's family told us that, like, at this point in time, like, they did not even know who she was. But it is, like, in this one of, like, early day searches that he claims to have found part of Britt's phone. Part.
So according to people close to the case, what Eric allegedly said he found was the back plate from a Samsung phone that resembled the one that Brittany had been using before she disappeared. This Samsung J337P. And we know that that's reportedly the same model tied to the selfie that Brittany took before leaving Sheldon's that night. It all seems to match up.
But some of Britt's family tell us that they're suspicious of this whole, like, finding. Because according to them, Eric was off searching by himself in a field near the crash site when he made this alleged discovery. No one else from the search party was there to witness it.
And what's even weirder, Britt's mom Jessica said that he didn't even, like, run over to the rest of the group and tell them, like, I found this clue. Jessica said that he just, like, left and she learned about it later.
Yeah.
Now, in the case file, there is mention of a ZTE cell phone missing backplate listed under the evidence. But there's like no other details. I don't know if this is the one that we're talking about. I also don't know why you would call it a missing backplate.
And they don't give any notes in the file about who ended up turning it in, when that happened, or if investigators were ever even able to confirm that it was, in fact, Brittany's. Still, the family can't help but wonder. Did Eric genuinely stumble across part of Brittany's phone while searching for her? Or did he somehow already have it? Did anyone ever just ask him? Not really.
Even though Eric is her husband. Even though he is allegedly finding evidence. Even though he is tied up in some weird way to Ashley who seems to keep finding herself at the center of this thing. St. Joseph County investigators don't seem to question Eric at all until more than six months after Brittany went missing.
And even that appears to have been this like super short interaction from what I can tell. During that little chat, Eric even admitted he hadn't spoken directly with any law enforcement about Britt's case before. And he had only passed information through, guess who? Ashley.
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Chapter 6: What role did Brittany's boyfriend and his friends play in the investigation?
The Facebook messages that disappeared. How did Britney's gas receipt actually turn up? I think somebody out there really does know exactly what happened to Britney Wallace Shank that day, November 30th, 2018. And maybe all the accusations and the chaos and the outlandish stories just served another purpose entirely.
Maybe it was creating so much noise that detectives would never find the truth buried underneath it. But I believe the answers are there. And I believe that the right person can still get to them.
So if any of our listeners know anything about the disappearance of Brittany Wallace Shank, especially if you recognize the man in the sketches, which we've also posted to our blog, you can contact the St. Joseph County Sheriff's Office at 269-467-9045. You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, CrimeJunkie.com.
And you can follow us on Instagram at Crime Junkie Podcast.
We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crime Junkie is an Audiochuck production. I think Chuck would approve.
Okay, crime junkies, you know I absolutely love a twist and a turn, especially when it comes to people who turn out to be someone they're not. That's why I have been obsessed with the podcast Chameleon. Every Thursday, host Josh Dean deep dives into a scam so bizarre, it will leave you wondering, how did they get away with that?
It is truly one of my favorite podcasts right now, and I've been listening for years. I think you'll love it too. Listen to Chameleon wherever you get your podcasts.
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