Episode 4: Boogeyman

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Thank you. Sarah Zuber and Fashal Christian met at a church-a-youth group in St. Helens. Both were home-schooled, and at least for Sarah, youth group was how she met other kids in Columbia County. When the two met, Pashal was 14 and Sarah was 15. They had the same birthday, February 1st.

The two started dating a year or so later. There's a video of Pashal made of Sarah, one gloomy Oregon day. They were walking around an old dock at a sandy spot on the river. Sarah was wearing a dark hoodie, boots, her hair tied back in a braid.

When she saw Vishal filming, she covered her face with her hand.

Oh. Oh. Stop. What? This is a mushroom.

“There's a mushroom over there and look at that, not me.”

She picked up a rusty nail off the ground and lobbed it his way. You throw a nail at me? What do you think I could have died? I could have gotten Tetris. You know I haven't had my Tetris shots.

That offended him personally, just now you nailed it. Get back to work. Vishal chased Sarah down the dock. She jumped off. He did too, but bifped the landing and fell in the sand.

They went on giggling and horsing around like this. All Vishal had to do to make Sarah crumple, was point the camera at her. All right, hey, you've stabbed me. Stop it. Is this your weakness?

Am I defeating you? Yeah. I've watched this video a dozen times or more and every time it makes me smile. A snapshot, a two awkward kids flirting and wasting time. Sarah's sisters told us how in love she was with Vishal.

The young couple talked about getting married in the future, about having kids. But when she died, they were just kids. She had just turned 18 and he was 17. Their lives were like a lot of teenagers' lives. They did schoolwork, drove around, did dumb stuff.

In another video, Sarah and some friends walked around in neighborhood on Halloween, wearing oversized yellow foam minion heads. The characters from that animated movie, Despicable Me. One of them was strumming a guitar. Someone else was playing in accordion.

Sarah was shooting the video and Vishal ran up to her with a little skeleton in his arms. The night Sarah's Uber died, the last text she sent went to Vishal and she sent another to a Facebook group they were both in. And so, of course, the police quickly went to interview him.

In fact, in those first hours and days after her death, the police turned a keen eye toward

the two men in her life who were closest to her, her boyfriend, Vishal Christian and her father, Randy Zuber. It's a classic true crime trip that if a young woman dies, it's the husband, or the boyfriend, or the father, who's at fault. One idea is all over pop culture, too, that a monster could be hiding inside a man,

and that man can be living among us.

“In this episode, that's what we're looking at.”

The two men and Sarah's Uber's life, in the ways police, but into that familiar narrative. From Oregon Public Broadcasting, "This is Hush," I'm Leah Sittilly. This is episode four, "Buggy Man." The details of the day Sarah Zuber's body was found are still fresh to her family, all these years later.

They remember the police guiding Rebecca, Sarah's mother, into a neighbor's house. Randy remembers getting a call at work, telling him to rush home, something terrible had happened. Rebecca, Randy, and their daughters, Katie, and Abby waited for hours before they could

So by the time they finally released us, and they said, "Okay, you can go back home now,"

and they said they're getting ready to take her body away, and so they brought us out. They said, "You want to say a buyer, something like that, but they have recovered up." So I didn't see her anything, and on that gurney, you know, and put her hand on her. Yeah, this is, I don't even know.

“It's like a crazy thing, you know what I believe in, you're standing there, you're all,”

"Buck, what can I wake up, this can't be real." Yeah, so this is what you got. Yeah, so basically, when the Uber's finally got back in their house, they saw the police had sifted through their belongings, open drawers, right through their children's rooms.

That's when the family began to realize the police were looking for clues that weren't

on the side of the road. The officers said they needed to interview the Zubers. And he was asking, "Is there anybody who would harm your daughter, or do you have any idea what could have happened?" And I couldn't think of anything, and the police asked a lot of questions you might expect,

who were Sarah's friends, what were her routine? But some questions put Rebecca and Randy on edge. On Thursday, we went to the Sheriff's Office, and we were interviewed in separate rooms. Yeah, they said, "Now we're going to divide in conquer."

“You come with us, and you come with me, that's what they said.”

The detectives asked Randy about his work schedule. What his typical day was like. "My typical day, I get up right about five o'clock or five o'clock, I get up, I'm on 10 o'clock, I make a drossy, I put some water on it, it's oatmeal." They followed normal rhythm in the days leading up to Sarah's death.

Randy would get up early, listen to the radio, and make his lunch. On days when the twins had college classes to attend, Randy said he'd wake them up too. But he'd let Sarah sleep. She was a night owl, who stayed up late, studying most nights, and often worked late at the grocery store.

"I had a large economy, and I was trying to get out of my seat, and I was so important to try to get out of my seat." Randy told police in this interview that he was constantly worried about his children. He said, "Sometimes they'd go jogging or walking on their windy back road." "I found a phone, you're going to be hit by a car, you read about it for a whole

the time. You know, it can happen to you." "Yeah, she constantly goes for long walk, and on my way, told her that she goes at night, which I was not aware of, because I would have told her, I mean, I would have to take you with her not to go for walks and night."

Even though Randy was telling police officers about all the ways he'd do to it on his children, there's also the sense in these recordings that he didn't know everything that was happening. "I think downstairs they've mostly just come up to get some food, or they come up once long or to a little TV with me around when I talk a little bit, and don't do that.

Police asked Rebecca about this." "Yeah, I'm sure do you do that, Randy?" "Yeah, there are those folks who are to me, then she is to Randy?" "Yes." "Yeah, they are."

It's at this point in the interviews that the detectives started to ask more probing questions about discipline in the Zuber house. "Okay, how are conflicts involved in your household?"

"Well, I guess I really don't know about fur bullying, and by the first of all, I'm trying

to be able to monitor and objective, and now that goes, and okay.

“How often are conflicts involved or deteriorated to trivial issues or yelling or that's what”

they say? They also had questions about Rebecca and Randy's relationship. Rebecca was often away from the house, staying overnight in another town where she worked as a caregiver for an elderly man. She was gone the night, Sarah died.

"I can't you run up through the household on hammock, and how it is today, between? It's now that you talk about it being stressful, between you living in one place, Randy, in the other place, and think like that, can you just come and run up? "Well, the girls pretty much take care of themselves, they're like adults.

the morning. They do.

“We did put a lot of pressure on them, because they're working, they're going to school,”

not only into regular school, but we're talking college in high school. Anyway, they're very mature and pretty much acting adult for right now, and that's probably not a good thing, that's probably not a good parenting on my part, but that's the truth right now." In many ways, it made sense to ask about trouble at home.

Police were trying to learn any reason Sarah might have died so close to her house. "Do you think there's any physical abuse between Randy and the girls or anything like that?" "No, but this is a mental ear, no, I do not believe that it's a cold but beautiful, okay."

Rebecca said Randy had never hurt the girls, but in the past, he had been physical with her

son, Ben.

“Ben was older and had moved out by this time, but he, like, he never hit me.”

He's not, he does, he is not physically able to, yes, he was physically able to defend. Ben is my son, and he never, the whole, he never, it's physical, yeah, the whole, yeah, so it's just for some right when he didn't like Ben, he doesn't like boy, whatever it is." But in the next room over, Randy downplayed anything physical, had ever happened. Had there ever been any fight in the family?

"No, okay, you push any, any, any one shall, any one, any one, anything like that, anything physical?" "No, we're pretty, we're that because we know how to say that if you, if you, if you call you, if you don't say that, I mean, you can only do this for you, so far, okay." "What is a punishment like for the food of girls?"

"If you get their phone taken away, they have to bring their phone on to theirs, and they have a clock, they put their cars taken away." "But that is the primary punishment, it's cars took away."

"I've never been there in their lives as punishment looked like, or faking, or anything like that."

"Um, maybe once or twice, when they were younger, but at one point, it looked what it was at, and I wonder, where had I come here?" Randy became quieter. The police were investigating him now, too. "Have there ever been any allegations, whether it was pointed to the police or the police

of the physical violence, for me to go, okay?" The police come across in these interviews as being in a bit of an awkward position. After all, they were asking questions that implied the zubers might have had something to do with it.

"He is yellow, and he's very verbal that way, but physically I'm trying to think of the

“example of the worst thing he's done, I don't know, he's got anything he can do, he's”

a yellow, he's a yellow, he's a yellow, he's a yellow, he does not hit them." Eventually, Rebecca saw where the detectives might be taking all these questions. "I don't, if that were your thinking almost, maybe Randy has something to do with Sarah, that's totally not a hot tip, 100%, I really don't think, if you're trying to get out, you think that maybe Randy got mad at her, something, no, only wrong."

The zubers told us in our interviews that they understood why the police asked those questions. And yet, it was also traumatizing to feel accused. "Oh yeah, he goes, oh yeah, what does discipline look like? I don't, I'm kind of the good cop, my wife's the bad cop, he goes, oh, do you spank your kids?

I go, no, I go, I go, I might have swatted him on the bottom when they were little, maybe, you know, once or twice, but no." Police asked the zubers to bring Katie and Abby to the Amani Center, a place in St. Helens that does forensic interviews with kids. Later, Rebecca saw that the Amani Center also works with abused children.

This all started to make the zubers feel like the police were implying Randy had something

Like, maybe they weren't on their side.

“And the police questioning of Randy didn't really go anywhere.”

They didn't turn up evidence he was involved, and he wasn't interviewed again. But in so much true crime, there is a man involved. If it's not the father, it can be a romantic partner, and Randy thought that was worth looking into. See, Sarah had this boyfriend name to show and there's a whole other story.

Years after Sarah died, the zubers brought up her boyfriend to us, the shawl Christian. Randy had also brought him up to the police. And unlike with Randy, the shawl would face more than one interview with the police. Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community funded, and your support is more important than ever.

Go to KMHD.org and join us over the section member with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. Sarah's sister's Katie and Abby, remember when Sarah started calling the shawl, a boy she met at church, her boyfriend.

They both had a offbeat, dark sense of humor sometimes, that I remember when I first met

Michelle, he would say stuff, and I thought he was serious, and then getting to know him more, I'm like, "Oh, that was a joke." So my sister, Sarah, she had that same weird sarcasm that some people might not get. Yeah, I really like the shawl.

“I think that they were pretty pretty for each other, because they were both kind of edgy,”

but not in a way that other people are like, they were just made for each other. Sandy wasn't charmed by the shawl. He didn't see the same kind of weird as Sarah. He just saw a weird. And my friend, he said to me, he goes, "Randy, I know this was shalted."

He said, "You're not letting your daughter go out with this guy." Some of the ways the zubers think about the shawl come back to a YouTube channel, he used to publish. For a long time, the shawl and a sister made YouTube videos that were very much in the style of an edgy online teenager, like a kid who might go to art school one day.

What do you want to have to any meal to make it a lot better? Shaving cream. In one video, his sister knocks on a port of potty door. Who is it? Vina.

Oh, oh yeah, yeah, come here. Yeah, what's up? Are you even here? It's Saturday. We need a post of it.

Inside, the shawl set fully closed. We're all out like sitting on a couch.

“And that's kind of the nature of these videos.”

They team with ideas only teenagers would think her funny. He smashes up food with his hands, he breaks a guitar, he walks down the street putting sticks in mailboxes. The shawl made these videos long enough, you watch him grow up. At first, he's a chubby faced kid and toward the end, he has long curly hair and a deeper

voice. But some of those later videos, it wasn't his sister filming, but Sarah Zuber. Yeah, so me and Sarah are risking his daughter cooking together. I knew it was nice at first, but. In this one, Vichol is driving.

Classical music blares from the radio. Sarah is filming and feeding him lines from the passenger seat. Because she was like way better at cooking than I was.

But he's like, you know, it makes sense because biologically, men should never have

their own kitchen facility. And so when I'm in this kitchen with her, and she's cooking, and she's, she's, she's she's up her hand on me. My fragile masculinity cannot handle that, and I'm not insecure, but it really hurts me.

And I don't know what it's supposed to do, like, I mean, I still make her feel good about myself that she's higher than me in the kitchen. They drive around riffing off each other, creating this character together, laughing at their own ideas. I'm sick of it, I'm sick of it, I'm kind of like, I'm going to be honest, I'm kind of a

violent person. I'm a guy who, and when I get angry and punch, when my mom tells my calf, when I can't play video games for the day, I punch a wall, and you go to my room once. There's walls, there's walls lying the whole thing. I put up walls, I put up drywall, just went through it, and put walls on my inside.

When we watch these videos, they seem dumb and funny. Sarah is laughing along with the shawl, to dorky kids joking around.

really was a psycho, what if there was some truth in the jokes? They wondered if somehow Sarah set fish all off. She'd been pressuring him to get a job, that day she died, she sent him a voice text. Also, you'd better put in that application today otherwise I'll freaking shoot you in the foot, put in your application for the city job like now, right now, today, right now.

Later, the zubers heard that message, and wondered if maybe Sarah had pushed fish all too hard to get a job, and he snapped. He wouldn't work, he wouldn't do anything, he sleeps in all days, he stays up all night, plays video games, whatever.

He would never work, and Sarah always worked, and so she went and got him an application,

and it was in her car, and I don't know if she can front him about that, because I know he's getting tired of her toner, he should try to get a job because- They told us they wished the police had looked at fish all more. But from records, it's clear the police looked at fish all more than anyone else. A little over four hours after Sarah's body was found, Oregon State Police Detective Alex

Monarch was at his house, sitting the 17-year-old down for an interview. So the shawl, and coordinator, like I said, and that is warnything else, so I'm not here all day. I know that you've got some pretty devastating news, and I apologize to be the one to bring it to you.

So, it was a last time you talked to her.

“Can you answer it, I think it's your day night?”

About what time.

I can check my phone real quick.

The shawl grabbed his phone and showed his text messages to the detective. Tuesday, at 10.57, so yesterday. 10.57 PM. Yeah, yeah. And what was that conversation like?

She's on me and message I didn't understand, and then I said what? And then this morning I said, hey, and then later today I said, what are we doing tomorrow because we had plans for her. But okay. So tell me about this message that you didn't understand.

You can just read it right there.

The detective and Vishal read the garbled text, the one that seemed to say, I'm fucking drunk.

“Is this the one which says I'm furchasing the F.E.8 in case of the one you'd understand?”

I didn't understand it, and she didn't respond after it, so I don't know what to. Vishal said, he just assumed Sarah went to sleep when she didn't respond. This interview went on for about an hour, and there wasn't a single question Vishal didn't answer. He even gave the detective his phone to take with him back to the station.

The zubers have listened to these interviews, but they were left feeling like the police could have been more aggressive with Vishal. I think the cops really didn't interview him for a long time, and I guess they went over to his house that day and said, hey, your girlfriend died, and I guess he went, oh, wow. Okay.

And then that. Vishal also sat down with Columbia County Sheriff's Detective Dave Peabody for another hour-long interview. Again, he was cooperative. In May 2019, just a couple months after Sarah died, the zubers heard about a nearby chapter

of a group called Parents of Murdered Children. It's a support group for parents who've lost their kids in tragic circumstances. That group suggested the zubers connect with a private investigator who does pro bono work for some of its members. Randy and Rebecca felt like things had just stopped in Sarah's case, and they wondered if

a PI could help turn up new information. They eventually connected with Vanessa Feraro. She's licensed as a private security guard in California, and a PI. One day Feraro called Vishal's father.

“Hello, Sam, my name is Vanessa Feraro, how are you today?”

Good. I'm the investigator working on Sarah's zubers' case. Okay. Yeah, and I actually tried to get in touch with your son, but it appears that I don't know if he has my number blocked, but I can't even leave a message with him.

Is he available for me to talk to him? Yeah. Feraro didn't make it clear. She was a private investigator working for the zubers, but even so, Vishal got on the phone. For over an hour, he answered all of her questions, just like he had for the police.

Except Feraro took a different tone than the police detectives.

chat, both he and Sarah had been in, where she sent one of her last messages. Okay.

“But you were a participant of that group chat, is that correct?”

The phone quality isn't great, but Vishal basically said, "Yeah, I was in the group chat,

but no. I didn't see her message until later. It was just a chat for jokes, and most of the people in it weren't even people who knew offline." Feraro grilled Vishal over his screen name in that chat.

He couldn't remember what his handle had been. Their nicknames and the group name changed all the time. You don't remember what your nickname was? Come on, Vishal. You're smarter than that.

“You have to remember what your name was in that group chat.”

I mean, the police know, so why don't you tell me what your name was? Listening to this interview was extremely frustrating. You have Vishal, an 18-year-old kid saying, "Look, Facebook group chats aren't that deep." And then you have a much older person saying, "Oh no, they are that deep." They just talk right past each other.

It was the same story when they discussed video games. Vishal told the police he'd been playing video games in his room with the door closed the night Sarah died. A year later Feraro wanted to know exactly what game he was playing. Did they ever ask you what games you were playing and were you on, were you doing Xbox?

I don't see how it matters, so the game not playing, this is a video game. Well, it's called having an alibi.

“So if no one saw you, I'm asking you what game you played that night, okay?”

Well, usually the show when someone dies that you care deeply for, you usually have a really good recall because it's so traumatic, you remember these details because it's

a day you'll never forget.

What's frustrating about her interview with the show is that it seems driven by the same kind of speculation that would later appear on Facebook pages. A kid failing to remember a video game or screen name isn't evidence. Feraro never came to Oregon for her investigation, as far as anyone knows. And maybe for good reason, she isn't actually licensed to do PI work in Oregon.

But when she finished, she took all of her interviews to the police and told them to look into Vashal Moore. We asked Columbia County Sheriff's Detective Dave Peabody about it. We could see in records that at one point a private investigator named Vanessa Feraro sort of came into the equation and started doing an investigation essentially of your investigation.

Are you aware of that? And what did you think of her investigation of your investigation? I didn't really think much of it. Feraro declined our request for an interview. We've looked through her work and honestly, she didn't seem to turn up anything of substance.

When we asked the zubers about how they felt about Feraro's investigation, they said that

up to that point, she was basically the only person who offered them the kind of attention

and help they wanted. Number one, you know, Vanessa was as a big help, but just like a hard it was for, she's in California, she's on that pair, she's entering the scene, she's doing her best to work with what she has. And as far as an investigator, we don't know how good she is or how bad she is, but we appreciate

any help we could get from anybody. I mean, I'd be calling, I'd go to Frick and Anna Hyman, find Mickey Mouse, so Philon is here if I thought he could help me. And much like the police questions to Randy Zuber, all these pointed questions at the shawl, completely ignored the autopsy.

The medical examiner was clear that Sarah Zuber didn't have physical injuries that suggested she'd been attacked. And no evidence would ever connect Randy or Vishal to what happened. In some ways, it was hard to see how Ferrero's work on this case was any different than what an online sleuth might do.

Plant seeds of doubt, build suspicion about people and never resolve any of it.

I wonder how her report would have been different if she had ever actually talked to Vishal in person. By the time I reached out to Vishal, nearly six years had passed since Sarah died. And I thought he might say he wanted to put it all behind him, but instead he was more than willing to talk.

At the time, it was all very unreal to me. Vishal lives in his childhood home with his parents. Hello, I'm a net Christian and I'm Vishal's mother. My name is Samuel Christian and I'm the dad.

“Vishal is 23 now and his life is very different from 2019 when this all happened.”

Hi, my name is Madeline Christian, I am Vishal Christian's wife. Madeline and Vishal met at church and they got married about two years ago. As we sat down, she laid out a spread of cookies from the bakery where she worked. And as we started talking, it was obvious that Sarah's death changed all of their lives. Let's just say this.

I just want the truth, no matter what, let's just finally, and especially when it comes to my son, just finish it, just... It was like every year after that, it was, they would be needing to tell from another police. It didn't get to another investigation. It was just, you know, it was just like pulling off the scab with the floor.

Yeah. That idea of pulling off the scab, there's no way around that. Every time the family tells the story, whether to police or a private investigator or a true

“crime podcaster, it's adding scar tissue.”

So, as a journalist, there's an imperative to make sure that you're contributing something of value, not using someone's pain to sell mattress ads around. Well, I just want to say that, you know, I'm sorry that we were the latest people to call you and reopen this work again. But I give you a lot of credit for talking to us about it, because we're really trying

to capture this entire situation, and it's wild to us that there's just so... So much speculation and so little resolution still to what happened. We had spent months looking at records and doing interviews before we asked the Christians to talk, but it's still felt like an intrusion. And they were gracious and open to talking about all of it, especially about how much they

missed Sarah. That's best friend. We, like, kind of both had an epiphany simultaneously in separate places where we realized that we actually had, like, a genuine love for each other, and that's kind of the moment that everything changed and...

Vishal told us, Sarah really was the sweet girl everyone has talked about, but she was also complicated.

Background, she was a very nice person, she's very sweet, but she always gave more of herself

than she had to give. She had a very, very hard time with self-respect and, like, self-term, like, I don't know. She didn't, she didn't think highly of herself, she really didn't like herself. She... What makes you say that?

I remember whenever I go to her house, her inner bedroom, she had a mirror, and her mirror would always be covered up by, she had a sweater that she just thrown it. She never liked seeing herself or perceiving herself. And every time I go over there, I'd just take it off and be like, "It's okay." Like, you can...

This is what you are. And it's okay. Like, I think you're beautiful. The initial aftermath of her death, Vishal said, "He's spiraled between sadness and confusion, and grief, and trying not to feel at all."

I shouldn't have, but I became cynical, I became... I definitely kind of rejected it in my mind because I felt like I felt... I just felt bitter in general.

“I had after she passed, I had accepted it and I had taken it for what it was, but I think”

part of my acceptance was just me, trying to move on as fast as possible. He said, "He and Sarah shared a hard side or once on New Year's Eve. We asked him about Sarah's social media. She often used a handle vodka coffee, but Vishal said the best he could understand it. She just thought that handle was provocative and funny.

He never saw a drunk. Didn't think she'd ever been drunk.

So her death by drinking never made sense to him.

He is obsessed over their last messages, wondering if something he said upset her and

He told us that Sarah and her younger sister, Katie, had been fighting a lot, and Sarah had

been texting Vishal for advice.

“Vishal encouraged her to stay calm and be patient.”

The Katie had also confided in Vishal about personal issues she was having, and Vishal didn't want to betray her trust even to Sarah. So he felt caught between the two sisters, trying to calm Sarah down while also being a good listener to Katie. Sarah wanted to know what Katie had told him, but he wouldn't say anything.

If you read the text messages, which I did this morning, I was like, "I mentioned that, we were talking about that," and then I kind of changed the topic, and then she pushed

today to ask me again, and then I changed the topic again, and then she pushed to ask the

question again, and I changed the topic again. That's when we stopped talking that night, and then she said, "I love you," and she said, "I love you," and then she said, "Too much," which was kind of a weird, it's not a weird per se, but it's like in the context, it's like, "I love you too much," and it's like, "I might be a, just, am I come from a place of pain?"

“So I think maybe she was protecting my feelings by not outright saying, "I'm upset”

about this," and saying, "This is fine, I love you," but I think she didn't want to hurt me, and so she was probably hurting herself, and she, like, emotionally. Michelle has read and re-read these texts with Sarah, trying to parse meaning out of one message she sent him. I love you, too much.

When we met, he was blaming himself, thinking if he hadn't ever mentioned he'd talk to Katie, they wouldn't have had their argument that night. Sarah wouldn't have gone out for a walk and died. But when Michelle's parents Samuel and Annette think about blame, they're thinking about the police and Vanessa Ferraro.

They remember coming home from work to a detective interrogating their 17-year-old son in their living room. We carpool, we walk in, and there's the show is sitting there with this blank look on his face. And I don't mean, like, emotionless exactly, just sort of like a shocked innocence.

Yeah, during the headlights, and there's a guy there, maybe 30 years old or whatever, the polo shirt on, and then he says something's defective, someone like I'm sorry to inform you that Sarah's Uber died. And apparently, between the police and Vanessa Ferraro, a cloud of suspicion seemed to follow Michelle in his 2021 memo, closing the Uber investigation, District Attorney Jeff Oxyer

wrote, quote, "It is the unanimous decision of law enforcement that Mr. Christian had nothing to do with Sarah's death."

But that information never seemed to reach the Christians, and police we talked to for

this series also wouldn't say he was innocent. In 2022, three years after Sarah died, Jennifer Massey reached out to Michelle with questions, as she was getting ready to start the justice for Sarah's Uber Facebook page. Basically what happened is, from what I understand, a woman named Jennifer Massey, I'm not Massey, I'll just say Massey, Jennifer Massey, her husband was running for sheriff

and part of their campaign, essentially, was they wanted to find a case and hone it on it and kind of make the case right so they could, obviously for the community, they're kind of helped the community, but it was also political, not trying to disinembody, but the nature of it, I believe, was somewhat political, so it was kind of a was to reopen the case and it was for justice for Sarah, but it was also a dig at the police department.

“So, you're understanding was they were looking for cases, that's what they told me that they were,”

'cause I did an interview with Jennifer and I did, yes. Michelle was very clear with us that he didn't want to criticize Jennifer, she seemed to genuinely want to help the Zubers and get the case reopened, and Michelle wanted that too, so he answered her questions, but his wife, Madeline, wasn't as reserved as Michelle about all this suspicion on him.

She and Michelle didn't start seeing each other until long after this happened, but even so, Sarah's death looms large in their lives, and I righteously angry for him, when I hear about all the stuff that went down in the perceptions and the jumping to conclusions and the isolation that he experienced during that time.

And now, she's living in a community where her husband has to worry about people talking

behind his back, saying, 'Hey, see that guy? That's who dated Sarah Zuber.' When you decided to move back here, did this factor into the conversation at all, that this had happened? I don't like that.

I mean, and in terms of, did we? Well, it didn't factor in for you, but it did for me, but that's again because you're understanding people and you're genuinely unbothered, which I love about you, but I was worried for you, and like your mom and I still talk about this from time to time, and, you

know, it's beautiful to walk, and every other local business to see the justice for Sarah

“posters, but every time I do see those, I think, 'My God, are they going to start pointing”

fingers at him someday?' I don't know. And, like, when we have kids, if we stay in this community, is that ever going to become like teasing material for middle school or elementary school punks? Right by where we sat in the Christian dining room, there was an altar with a bunch of

photos. One was of Sarah. They explained that as Orthodox Christians, they pray for the dead. She's a part of our lives, yeah. Yeah.

Really, I mean, we pray for her, our whole family does, honestly, sometimes I even feel

“guilty for being in this spot in his life because it was meant for her, originally, which”

is a weird thing to say, but everybody knew when they were together back then that, like, they were like, end game for each other. And so, I tried to do right by him so that when she's looking down on us, she's not looking him abandoned. There are these two families in Columbia County who are in so much pain over what happened,

the Zubers who lost Sarah and the Christians who also mourned Sarah and whose son has been repeatedly pointed at as a perpetrator, even when there's no evidence. But the lack of evidence of his involvement or any person's involvement hasn't made the police or the Greek chorus less suspicious. If anything, it's only added to it.

Vishal told us he thinks any suspicion directed towards him goes back to the way the police in the community talked about Sarah's death as a murder in those early days. I guess that's kind of the thing is like, when you kind of make a boogieman and then say the boogieman doesn't exist and now we're going to forget about that now it's this thing,

“then it's like, everyone's like, where's the boogieman?”

Well, I was just scared of the boogieman. Columbia County District Attorney Jeff Oxyer closed the Sarah's Uber investigation and said she died from alcohol and hypothermia. But through our reporting, we found plenty of people who had no idea that was Sarah's official cause of death.

There's somebody responsible and that was what was echoed throughout the entire town.

Somebody responsible and then it comes out, finally comes out and they closed it and

they say, oh, no one's responsible. And so I think that will, like, the natural reaction for a community who is just getting like raising pitchforks is like, wait, I'm confused, like, is somebody responsible or not? Are we going to like, you know, set fire anything or or not? The longer this affair has gone on, the more conspiracy and conjecture have filled in the

hole where Sarah's Uber used to be. More and more people have been pulled into the hole over time and that's continued in part because the police and the community haven't been able to find and real answers. In the past, local newspapers were staffed by journalists trained in differentiating between fact and fiction. Their job was to fill in that empty space between what's known for

sure and what's a guess. But just as we were getting started on the Sarah's Uber story, the last newspaper in Columbia County closed its doors. We were about to see what happens when professional reporters are replaced by the rumor about like, I talked to someone who said something along the lines of, you know, it's sad to see you close. Like, I thought you did a good job, but unfortunately this is a community that just relies on Facebook

for their information now. That's next time.

Preston. Our editors were Sage Van Wings and Anna Griffin. Steven Craig mixed this episode

“and the Lean Silva was our audio engineer. Our show art is by Dana Ryerson, photography”

by Christina Wenzgraff, additional art and marketing guidance from Van Kooley and Jennifer McCormick.

Tony Schick fact-checked this episode. Legal review was by Rebecca Morris. We had public records

“assistance from John Bial. Website production for this series by Sukjot Saw. Thanks to”

Johnny Audinland, Peter Frick Wright, Jen Chavez, and Tony Schick for helping shape this series.

Thanks to all the members who make podcasts at OPPB possible.

“Visit the hush homepage on OPPB's website at opb.org/hush. You can also email us with tips for”

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