Zachary Michael Bernhardt (4 of Diamonds, Florida)

Dear honey, this is goodbye. By the time you get to Schletter both Petra and I will be dead, next stop, Wonderland. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind?

“Listen to death when artists wherever you get your podcasts.”

Our card this week is Zachary Michael Bernhardt, the four of diamonds from Florida.

Almost 26 years ago, eight-year-old Zachary vanished from a second floor apartment in Clearwater, Florida, while most of his neighbors were sleeping.

There was no sign of force entry, no sign of a struggle, no trace of him leaving. This was one of the early cases I covered on crime junkie more than seven years ago, but it's time to revisit it. And this time we have the inside track on what is now the longest running amber alert in the state of Florida, and one of the largest cold case investigations in the history of Clearwater PD. This investigation was extremely thorough. The interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people as part of this investigation. They searched miles and miles of area.

And we're talking about this case almost 26 years later, and we're no closer to finance act.

“For years, the investigation appeared to focus on Zach's mom, Leah. What was she doing away from home that night? Why would she leave the apartment unlocked?”

It could have been an innocent middle of the night walk or.

The second theory would be that Leah just isn't telling us the truth about what occurred that night.

A new lieutenant recently took over the case, and he is hoping that you can help him find answers. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. It was around 445 in the morning on September 11th of 2000 when a call came into Clearwater PD dispatch that would rearrange assignments for every officer on duty.

“The caller identified herself as Leah Hackett. She was calling from a second floor apartment at the Savannah Trace complex on the east side of Clearwater.”

Her eight-year-old son Zachary was missing.

Lieutenant Anthony Monty was on shift that morning. He was a beat cop on patrol in another part of the city. He wasn't part of the first brigade of officers

dispatch to the apartment complex. But by the end of that day, the entire department was consumed by this mysterious disappearance. I was one of a few patrol officers that was actually brought up to the criminal investigations to assist with. On going every day cases, while the entire division was investigating the disappearance of Zachary Burnhart. Lieutenant Monty is now the one in charge of the investigation as part of the Clearwater Police Department's Criminal Investigations Division. Anytime we get a call of a missing child, those calls are handled urgently. We send as many resources as we can to start searching for that child and those types of calls are taken very seriously.

Even though he's been with the department for just about 30 years, it was only this year that he was assigned the Burnhart case and he sat down with the files. All 38 binders full chronicling and investigation that has gone on for nearly 26 years. One that started with that panicked 911 call.

On that 911 call, Leah had mentioned leaving the apartment to go for a swim and having left the apartment unlocked.

“So it wasn't a surprise that they didn't find any sign of force entry. No broken windows, no pride open doors.”

Zach's clothes, his stuffed animals, his super Nintendo all in place, nothing packed, nothing taken. The apartment complex where Zach and his mom lived is now called the Eden at Clearwater. But in 2000 it was Savannah Trace, which faces Drew Street. Back then trees lined the sidewalk separating the complex from the road. The trees are mostly gone today, but even back then anyone walking down Drew Street could see the front door of their unit from the street. But it was before sunrise when Leah said that Zach vanished, so not a lot of people around to be paying attention.

And when police talked to Leah in those early hours, she told them that Zach would never have left on his own.

“Now we don't have audio of that first police interview, but Lieutenant Monti confirmed it was along the lines of what Leah told the 911 operator when she first realized that Zach was gone.”

Zach was eight years old and living with his mother and their dog Kasia in the two story apartment unit. He also had a half sister, Leah's other child who was living with her own father in Michigan. Zach lived with Leah, but actually for most of that summer, he had been staying with his grandmother, Carol. Zachary had only recently moved back in with Leah because he had gotten ready to start school, had pies and a her elementary school, so that was why he obviously returned.

Zach was in third grade that year.

“He was very polite, well-manored boy, some described him as timid, kind of a rule follower, whatever his mom told him he did, and just a very well-manored polite boy.”

All the things Leah told the 911 operator were true, including by everyone's account that she was a strict parent. She had strict rules for him, and during the course of this investigation, we learned that he wouldn't do things to put himself in harm's way. And I know part of the things that I read is he wouldn't leave the apartment complex without permission from his mother, and if she wasn't in the apartment, he was not to leave the apartment. So those kind of things tell us, or kind of lead us to believe that Zachary wouldn't have just left the apartment that night on his own.

On the evening of September 10, according to Leah, Zach had been outside playing with the other kids in the complex until dusk. He had a crush on a girl, actually, who lived their name autumn. They had gotten into a mud fight, which, like, mud fight with your crush, named something better you can't. He came in dirty, showered, then he and his mom had dinner together and watched a movie. In around 10, 30 or 11, Leah told police that Zach climbed into her bed, rather than his own and fell asleep on the far side of the bed against the wall.

But Leah didn't have the same bed time as her eight-year-old son. She was a night owl, who regularly burned the midnight oil. So after Leah put Zachary to bed, that evening she did various things in the apartment. She had times who would be utilizing her computer and would be in chat rooms. There were times that she said she read four about an hour or so, and then she also started to watch the movie again that her and Zachary had watched earlier that evening. You know, as the night went on, she described being restless, was looking for something to do, and she decided at that point that she was going to go to the pool and go for a swim.

That was around four in the morning. The pool officially closed at 10 and was locked. But Lieutenant Monty took us to the scene to show us how she might have gotten in. She told us that she walked over to this area here between this building and this fence pole here and at the time there was a gap between those areas and she snuck into the pool area and went for a swim in the pool. Leah told investigators that she always locked the door behind her when she left Zach alone in the apartment, but her decision to go swimming in the dead of night made her do something else that she normally wouldn't do.

She put on shorts that did not have any pockets, so she had no place to put the key that would have been utilized to lock the door of the apartment. So she explained that she exited the apartment, didn't have her key, so she didn't lock the door that evening, but she simulated lock in the door.

One that she said took just a minute or two and then there were no cameras in the complex at that time that would have captured any of her movements.

“All told by the time she squeezed back out and made it back to her front door, she said she'd only been gone about 15 minutes.”

When she came back to the apartment, she described being, you know, soaking wet from getting into the pool, she had told investigators that she runs the air very low in her apartment, so that when she re-entered the apartment, she was extremely cold.

So the first thing she decided to do was to take a shower, to rinse off, maybe warm up a little bit, and it was after her shower that she went into her bedroom and did not see Zach on the bed.

For 20 to 25 minutes by her own telling, Leah was in the only shower in the apartment upstairs between the two bedrooms before she noticed that Zach was missing. It wasn't wet, odd if she had just gotten out of the shower like she said. And the responding detective even pointed that out. Now Leah said she didn't dry her hair, but she did take some time to knock on her neighbor's doors before she called the police, you know, trying not to jump to the worst case scenario.

“Even though Zach didn't have a history of sleepwalking and wasn't allowed to leave without her permission, she just wanted to rule out the possibilities.”

So her first instinct after she couldn't find Zachary in the apartment was maybe Zachary wandered off, and if he did wander off, maybe he would wander off to a location that he knows.

Obviously neighbors that have watched him before, or kids that maybe he has played with before, so she immediately went over and started banging on the windows of Fred and Ruth Jasper, because they were known to watch Zachary at times, and I think her thought was maybe Zachary had went there. Obviously they tell Leah that Zachary's not here, they then returned to Leah's apartment with Leah to search again, right? Maybe Leah missed something during her search. They searched the apartment again. Zachary's nowhere to be found. It was at that time that Leah contacted 911 to report Zachary missing.

“Monty says the first detective to arrive on the scene that morning described Leah early on as "tearful, red-eyed, emotional."”

But when she began recounting her story of going to the pool, her demeanor, according to the detective, dramatically changed. She was calm and relaxed, no longer watery-eyed. It's obviously something that any detective would take notice for, especially the mother that's reporting their child missing. Obviously not only are you interviewing them about what occurred, you're evaluating their state of mind, their emotional reaction of things. I just don't know if it commits to one thing or another, because everybody reacts differently to traumatic events, and some will argue that, you know, how somebody's supposed to act when their child is missing, and then some will say,

"Well, she's acting that way because she's lying and there's more to the story." By Sunup, the search effort was already massive and getting bigger by the hour. We had search teams, search about a two-mile radius in this area. The search included numerous local agencies, state agencies, federal agencies. We had Tampa Police Department assistance nurse, Penelis County Sheriff's Office assistance nurse, the state attorney's office. We had a large number of investigators that were involved in the search for Zachary during that time.

Investigators brought in a bloodhound, a dog named Lanzo to see if it could track Zach's scent. Lanzo tried east first across Fairwood Avenue into the apartment complex directly next door, but he got nothing.

They brought him back to reset Zach's door and he tried again. He never picked up any central of Zach leaving the apartment on foot in any direction.

The Clearwater Fire Department died teams searched the waterways and eventually fearing the worst cadaver dogs were brought in. They revisited several of these areas with cadaver dogs to research the area in the event that they missed something during the initial search. And none of those searches identified any evidence or anything that was related to Zach's disappearance. The search consumed the public's attention and Lee put herself out in front of local news cameras and pleaded for her son's return.

It was all over. His picture was all over. The community was really wanting to find Zach.

“We were getting numerous tips of sightings in the area, whether it was in Clearwater or different parts of Penelis County or various areas of Florida.”

And, you know, citizens were keeping an eye out and we received a lot of information at the time of possible sightings detectives followed up on those sightings. None of them ever resulted in being Zach. Even with a search that large and a case that public in the days that followed detectives were also working on the quiet parts of an investigation that often happened in the background. Like building a picture of what Zach and Lee's life looked like in Clearwater.

Lee at work mostly second shifts at a company called Special Data Processing and made enough to live paycheck to paycheck,

or I guess not really because she was in the process of being evicted. It was already noticed to her, and she was due to vacate the apartment by October 1st of 2000. And obviously Zacharies disappearance was September 11th of 2000.

“Lee's money troubles might have been less about how much she brought in, and more about how much was going out.”

Because as police spoke to people who knew her, they learned 29-year-old Leah liked going out. And actually, she had a pattern of going out at night. She enjoyed going to various bars in the Clearwater area. One of the places that she liked to visit were bars in Ebor City. This was learned from many people. This was not something new that we were learning.

And because we were seeing that information that at times Leah would leave Zachary unattended in the apartment so that she could go out.

Ashley Jasper, the 11-year-old daughter of the couple Leah had woken up when she first noticed that was gone.

Told detectives that she previously babysat Zach on approximately 50 occasions. Sometimes as late as 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. On some nights when Zach was left completely alone, Ashley told them that he would call her apartment every 30 minutes to check in and say that he was okay. Zach went missing in the overnight hours of Sunday into Monday, not a Friday or Saturday, but still. Obviously, we were concerned about whether that occurred on the night that Zachary disappeared.

But Lieutenant Monti told us the original investigators identified places that Leah had frequented.

Bars locally and as far as Tampa, he says they interviewed employees to find out if anybody observed Leah on the night in question.

And nobody could confirm that she was at any of those locations that night. Now alongside the background, physical evidence was also being collected. Clearwater PD Forensics processed both the apartment and Leah's vehicle. During the course of that process in numerous items were collected, whether it be bed sheets, clothing items, towels. They did vacuums of carpets, carpet samples.

They also processed both the apartment and the vehicle for latent prints in addition to DNA swabs. Monti says a total of 107 latent prints were lifted from both the apartment and Leah's car. He says that 80 of those prints were either identified or in police terms had no value, meaning the quality of the print wasn't good enough for an identification. Now the identified prints belonged to Zach, Leah, and a male acquaintance of Leah's who cooperated with detectives and provided his DNA and prints for comparison.

But for the remaining 27 prints, detectives couldn't reconcile those. Additionally, all the DNA that they identified in the apartment belonged to Zach, Leah, and that male acquaintance. However, there were two DNA profiles discovered that still haven't been identified to this day. Though to be fair, even if they were, they might not be the smoking gun that detectives are looking for. A lot of people think that DNA can break a case, you know, the problem with DNA, there's no time stamp on DNA.

So even though we have unidentified profiles of DNA in this case, it doesn't necessarily mean that DNA was left there on the night that Zachary went missing.

“So do we still want to be able to identify those profiles we do because that's just another lead in the investigation, right?”

Because if we identify who's DNA that belongs to, then that's just another person that we want to interview as part of this investigation. And find out the relationship between whoever that person is, and Leah, and the relationship between that person and the apartment.

The exam in the scene, there's no evidence of forced entry, there's no evidence of a struggle, there's no evidence of really anything, but Zach is missing.

“And here we are almost 26 years later, and we're no closer to finding Zach.”

Based on his recent review of the decades long investigation, Monti told us that everything Clearwater PD has ever looked at. Splits into two possible interpretations of the story that Leah gave dispatch on that 911 call.

The first theory would be that Leah Hackett has tell him the truth, and that she was home with Zachary that night.

I'll leave then that she left her apartment for this period of 15 minutes that she walked from her apartment to the pool in the complex. And then upon returning to the apartment, Zachary was gone. The second theory would be that Leah just isn't telling us the truth about what occurred that night.

“And there was one detail Lieutenant Monti zeroed in on that had detectives leaning toward the latter.”

Shortly after police got the call that Zach was missing, a patrol officer in the parking lot had put his hand on the hood of Leah's older black Dodge sedan.

And he felt that it was warm.

During the initial apartment canvas and the search for Zachary, the patrol officer in the parking lot had asked Leah for her car keys, wondering if maybe Zach might have like been in his mom's car for some reason. He wasn't, but the officer noticed that the car's hood was warm. Leah, the officer noted, appeared startled when he did this.

“And then she volunteered a piece of information that she had not shared during any of her preliminary questioning.”

She said that she used the car earlier to drive two bags of trash to the complex dumpster because her body still hurt from a traffic accident two weeks earlier.

So that was why the hood was warm. She added that the car ran hot, even a short trip left it warm. Lieutenant Monti retraced that route with our team, showing us the same real-world test that the early detective on this case took to try and validate the trash run story. What was interesting with the investigation is detective Klein soared she was one of the lead detectives at the time. He actually drove this route and determined the distance that it would take from Leah's apartment all the way to the area of the dumpster in the complex.

He estimated that distance to be about seven tenths of a mile. In addition to estimated in the distance, he also timed it. He determined that the approximate total time that it would have took Leah to travel there. Exeter vehicle, dump the trash, and get back in every vehicle and return to the apartment was approximately four minutes and 30 seconds. What he later did is he utilized Leah's vehicle to reenact this drive.

He then felt the hood of Leah's vehicle after the reenactment and the vehicle was still cold to the touch. After the exact route Leah described, and there were witnesses who further complicated her account of that night. Three of them. Two neighbors in the complex and the cab driver with no connection to any one in the case. Now neighbor number one said that they had spoken to Leah earlier in the evening which would have been September 10 and Leah had mentioned to them that she planned to go out that night.

When the neighbor offered to watch Zach, Leah reportedly said that she would ask her mother. The neighbor then told investigators that she observed Leah's car leaving the complex around 10 p.m. and returning around 245 a.m. But that observation didn't match what detectives found when they pulled Leah's AOL logs which put her online on dial up from 9.50 p.m. for more than two hours. And don't worry, I asked all the questions like are we sure it was her and not Zach just using her computer if one of the concerns was about her leaving him home alone to go out.

While Monti has a decently detailed log for the time of you know what the activity was what accounts were being used and their confident it was Leah who was on the computer. Now neighbor number two told investigators that she got up at around 330 a.m. that Monday to see her partner off to work. She walked outside with him at 345 and she noticed Leah's car was not in the parking lot and there is another thing that neighbor number two later shared with detectives that stuck out to Monti.

Now when she spoke to Leah, she described it as after the law enforcement response to the scene that Leah had contacted her and asked her or made the comment.

Did Zachary spend the night with you last night and that's an unusual comment to make to somebody if you are home with Zachary that night and according to your timeline your home was Zachary the entire time with the exception of this 15 minute window that you left to get in the pool.

“When obviously neighbor number two makes investigators aware of this comment that Leah made to her it makes us question again was Leah in fact home during the night.”

Did she not leave for a longer period of time because a comment like that would make me think that maybe you were home during the time that you explained to investigators and maybe that window is larger than 15 minutes. The third witness was a cab driver who was parked in a lot directly across from the complex wall and shift with yellow cap. He was waiting to head off customers who would sometimes use a nearby pay phone to call a taxi.

Well he said that he observed Leah's car turn into the complex at approximately 347 a.m. now he had never met Leah or Zach didn't even know it was Leah's car that he was looking at at the time.

But he knew that that car belonged to someone in the complex because he recognized it from picking up regular fairs to and from that building. So the cabby's memory of that night seemed to drive with what neighbor number two told them the car wasn't in the lot at 345 because it pulled in around 347. The timeline was a puzzle and the pieces of Leah's story about what time she left to take the trash out and what time she came back kept shifting until it fit. It was just a lot of time. It just felt like not it didn't feel like check what time is it just.

Oh no, what time it is.

But you had that feeling it was it was got a little bit later.

I knew it was a really part of the late part of the you know you get a sense of your out nights. You get a sense of, okay, it's after this hour or it's more as closer to dawn than the night. I read in one of the patrol officers report that she approximated the time at about 11 p.m. Then it seems like when detectives interviewed her that time went a little bit later to about 1 a.m. And then during the course of another interview, it was around 245 a.m. that she drove her vehicle to the dumpster in the apartment complex.

Days after Zach vanished, the FBI's Clearwater Field Office joined the investigation. And upon request from the lead detective at the time federal agents conducted their own interview with Leah. It was in that FBI interview that Leah's account of the trash run slid its latest to 245 in the morning. And it was the FBI working with Clearwater PD who then asked Leah to take a polygraph. She agreed the polygraph was administered by an FBI examiner at the FBI's Clearwater Office on September 21st.

The examiner at the conclusion of her polygraph informed investigators that it was the examiner's opinion that Leah showed deception in the polygraph results. Leah was told the results, but she didn't change her story. Almost everyone who comes across this case seems to agree that Leah is lying about something.

“But what? If it's not the truth about what happened to her son, what then?”

What else would she be so motivated to hide? I wondered if maybe there was substance use at play. Something she wouldn't want to admit to police, even as they were looking for her son. There was no information that I read that Leah had any substance abuse issues. They even asked various people whether or not Leah was a drinker from what everybody described is the only time they really saw Leah drinking was when she would go out to nightclubs.

And even then she was a social drinker and that she didn't really consume a lot of alcohol. Maybe what Leah could have been trying to hide was how she showed up to Zach as a mother.

“There was a period in the mid-1990s that stood out to detectives and I think speaks to this.”

The father of Leah's daughter, traveled of Florida, had his daughter and he also watched Zach more likely to give Leah a break.

During that time, the father of Leah's daughter made multiple attempts on corner. At one point, this went on for a couple of days and he became concerned enough to reach out to Leah's family. Nobody could get a hold of Leah during this time and this went on for several days.

“At one point, I think it was Leah's family that contacted the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office and reported her missing.”

Soon after that, Leah finally contacted the father of her daughter and basically made comments that she needed a break.

And that things were tough and it was decided during that time that Leah allowed the father of her daughter to take her daughter back to Michigan. And Zachery during that time went with another family member of Leah's. There is one more piece of Leah's background that detectives had to work through in those early days. And it involves Zach's father who lived at a state.

“Detectives obviously wanted to interview Zachary's father to see, you know, he potentially come get Zach.”

Zach. It was during the course of that investigation that Zach's father was never sure that he was the father of Zachary Bert Hart.

That years prior, Leah had contacted him out of the blue and basically told him on the phone that you're the father of my son Zachary. At the time, he said, well, then, you know, I want to, I want to have eternity testing done. Then there was years of gap between any contact between Leah and Zachery's father. Several months before Zach vanish, Leah had reached out to Zach's father again and reportedly pressed him to be a part of Zach's life. He heard from her once more on September 12th, 2000, the day after Zach was reported missing.

DNA testing during the investigation later confirmed that he was, in fact, Zach's biological father. He was interviewed, cooperated, and was cleared. So detectives were at acrossroads. Zach's father had been rolled out, and while the timeline didn't add up, when they talked to Leah's family, they confirmed Leah's history of late night outings. But none of them thought that she could have something to do with Zach's disappearance.

“I think, you know, some of them said they didn't believe that Leah would hurt Zach, that they just didn't think she would have a reason to hurt him.”

But they were concerned about the timeline of events that she reported to investigators. The case filed documents a conversation Leah's sister, Billy Joe, had with Leah the day that Zach vanished. Billy Joe asked whether she was out all night, and whether she had hurt Zach. Leah told her no on both. Billy Joe told the detective that she believed Leah wasn't involved, but she didn't believe that she hadn't been out that night. The other sister, Carol Joy, page the lead detective eight days after Zach vanished. She conveyed her mistrust of Leah's story and hoped that he would quote, "bring her in" and make her tell us the truth and quote.

Carol Joy said that she had lost it, and tried to grab Leah by the throat because Leah wasn't reacting the way that Carol Joy thought a grieving mother should. Then, on November 22nd, over 10 weeks now after Zach vanished, two other detectives, Joe Eger's and Steve Bulling sat down at Billy Joe's home with Leah, her mother, Carol, and a niece named Amanda. During the meeting, according to the detective's report, Leah admitted to detectives and to her own family listening in that room, that on Saturday night, September 9th,

the night before Zach vanished. She had gone out at 10 p.m. and she did not come home until 3 or 4 in the morning.

Zach did not have a babysitter that night. Eger's notes described the family members present as motionless when Leah said this. It was the first time that they'd heard it.

Now, it's not lost on me that this fits neighbor one's timeline for the night of the 10th. Kind of makes me wonder if they got their nights mixed up. Or maybe that was a regular schedule that she kept on the weekends. Either way, leaving Zach alone and having something to do with his disappearance were two very different things. Investigators wrestled with that tension for months into the following year, but just when they were feeling sure that Leah was the key to unlocking answers, a new leap came in at a left field.

The tip came in in May 2001 from a confidential informant at the jail in Marion County. He said that an associate of his name Kevin Jalbert was bragging about being involved in Zachary Bernhard's disappearance.

“According to the CI, not only did Jalbert admit to being responsible for that crime, he was planning something else.”

In addition, Kevin Jalbert was trying to recruit somebody to assist him in kidnapping and murdering another child.

This person that was providing the information was an inmate who provided the information to the local enforcement. That agency contacted Clearwater and said, "Hey, we're getting this information. It's possibly related to your case in Clearwater. Finally, what we did as part of the investigation is we utilize this confidential informant to assist us to introduce one of our undercover detectives as another associate and to introduce that undercover detective in this circle of friends that also involved Kevin Jalbert.

“Ultimately, over time Kevin Jalbert and the undercover detective communicated on several occasions.”

He seemed worthy of an undercover operation and maybe it was because during that phase of the investigation, Jalbert's alleged confession started a fall apart. When he was discussing his involvement in the case during that time, he gave several inconsistencies in his story and to the facts that we knew it related to Zach's disappearance. During that time, he said he had kidnapped Zach from an apartment within this apartment complex. He pointed out the wrong apartment. He didn't know exactly where Lee and Zach were residing pointed out another apartment that he had kidnapped Zach from.

And also describe the apartment differently. He described the apartment as a first floor apartment. He described that he went in through the back through slaying glass doors. I think, you know, obviously Zach and Lee is apartment. It doesn't have slaying glass doors.

Even though Jalbert's story didn't mesh with Zach's case, he was ultimately charged for serious but unrelated crimes that he plotted with the undercover detective.

Solicitation to commit kidnapping, solicitation to commit sexual battery, and solicitation to commit murder in the first degree. He's now serving time in Florida State Prison and is expected to be released in 2036. They explored all avenues during that investigation. I mean, they not only interviewed Jalbert on multiple occasions. Jalbert cooperated, provided his fingerprints, provided his DNA. They did search warrants at his residence. They did search warrants at his vehicle. They also did an analysis of his computer, which revealed obviously additional images of children that he was charged with additional crimes for.

But none of that information ever linked to Zachary. They never found any physical evidence to link Kevin Jalbert to the scene.

Jalbert told detectives that he had made the statements about Zach to impress people in his circle. The details he had, though, he said he picked up from local news coverage. Still, in a media interview, Zach's Aunt Billy Joe said that she was not fully convinced that Jalbert should have been cleared, saying quote, "Even though the police department has said that they rolled him out, you know, there's still things that I wonder myself about." Clearwater PD maintained its position. Everything they'd collected on Jalbert, his prints, DNA, vehicle residents, and computer never tied him to Zach.

“When all is said and done, they were right back where they started, with a missing boy, and his mom, whose story still didn't make any sense to them. So on December 18, 2001, what would have been Zach's tenth birthday?”

Police made a decision to interview Leah again. Two detectives drove unannounced from Clearwater to Jacksonville, North Carolina, where Leah was staying with a friend to confront her with the inconsistencies they had spent the last year documenting. In one detective's report of that meeting, he documented Leah saying, "And this is a direct quote. I knew I would be putting a news around my neck when I told you some things." And then, arrest me. Now they did not, because what Leah told them, it wasn't a confession.

It was just two words that could be read as an exasperated challenge from a woman who had spent a year under a cloud of suspicion all while police still couldn't even say for certain what happened to her son.

Lieutenant Monty walked us to the exact spot where it took place.

We had a five year old boy abducted from this complex from the information that I read on the case. The boys were playing in this vicinity between buildings five and seven when a male in a white truck drove past them. The truck was driving northbound through the complex.

“Ultimately turning around a little bit further north of us and coming back and approaching the boys that were playing. It was during that time that the person the vehicle stopped.”

The five year old boy thought it was a person that was selling ice cream due to decals and stone cold Steve Austin stickers or decals on the vehicle as a five year old boy approached the male grabbed him and brought him into the truck.

When the vehicle at that point was already face in southbound, the suspect fled, exited the complex, and went eastbound on jewellery.

A statewide bolo went out immediately. A panellist County Sheriff's helicopter with forward-looking infrared went up over the city and officers can visit the complex door to door. Just before 430 the following morning, a man named Jerry Overshiner out on state road 48 in Bushnell, Florida, roughly 80 miles north of Clearwater, heard a boy yelling from near a garbage dumpster off the road.

“The suspect had placed the boy inside and closed the lid. The boy had climbed out on his own.”

Overshiner drove him to a nearby business and called the Center County Sheriff's Office. Clearwater PD's phone rang minutes later. The child was slightly injured, but did not require medical treatment and was reunited with his mother that afternoon. Now the search for the kidnapper drew immediate national attention. Good morning America and Inside Edition covered it. America's most wanted air to segment as well. Clearwater detective David Dalton flew to DC to work the tip line during the broadcast and Ours 60 tips came in that night.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement sent in a criminal pro-filer, a forensic artist named Jean Boyland produced a sketch of the suspect from her interviews with the five year old and other witnesses. Within three weeks the number of tips grew to more than 300 and the Clearwater PD had run them all down. None led to a suspect or a vehicle.

“The white pickup with the ice cream decals and the stone cold Steve Austin stickers as well as the man himself have never been identified.”

Now the department's position is that the two cases cannot be conclusively connected. However, without identifying the suspect in that 2001 case, they also can't definitively roll out a connection either. And that's kind of the purgatory that this case has continued to live in over the past two decades. This thing looks suspicious, but there's no proof. Been wait, look over here, that's odd, right? What are the odds? Can't be a coincidence, but maybe it is. Over the years, Leah's contact with law enforcement has tapered off.

So by 2020, on the 20 year anniversary of Zach's disappearance, newly assigned detectives attempted face-to-face contact with her to reintroduce the case and let her know it was still active. The reception was not welcoming. Apparently, the detectives spoke to some neighbors that got a message to her and Leah was not very happy that detectives tried to make direct contact with her. In fact, she was very angry, but really the detectives all they wanted to do is introduce themselves to Leah, you know, reassure that this case has not been forgotten that there's always going to be a detective assigned to this investigation.

And they just kind of wanted to get to know Leah, wanted Leah to get to know the new detectives involved in the case, but it was clear that she wasn't interested in communicate with them. Our producer also reached out to Leah for comment on this episode. As of this recording, we have not received a response.

But even without Leah's help, Monti says that Clearwater PD will never stop searching for Zach.

Every detective has looked for that one thing that the guy or gal before them missed. Though the department has kept a detective assigned to it at all times, who that was has changed more than a few times over 25 years. Actually, it'll be 26 next week.

What it lots were researched when the smell of decomposition was reported.

“Zach's case was featured on America's most wanted, and the department has consistently released age progression photos to simulate what Zach might look like as an adult.”

Missing at age eight. Today, he would be 34 years old. And Lieutenant Monti said the department plans to rerun the latent prints taken from Leah's apartment and her car. So, Penelis County Sheriff's Office handles all of our latent examinations. I had a discussion with him about this case. And we talked about the open prints, and he informed me that he wanted to rerun the 27 open prints that there could be with today's technology.

And being able to examine these prints a little more closely, that some of those prints may still be Leah and Zachary, but maybe there wasn't enough ridge detail with the type of equipment that they utilized in 2000 to make that exact identity. As for those unidentified DNA samples that they're still sitting on, well in 2002, they were entered into the Florida DNA investigative support database, which ties into codice. But they didn't get a hit. Monti plans to rerun them, hoping that a match at the minimum might provide a new lead.

Beyond the physical evidence, Monti wants a fresh forensic look at the mirrored image of Leah's home computer on the chance that today's tools get more out of it than 2000s could.

And he still holds out hope that a breakthrough might come from someone listening or watching this podcast today.

“Our hopes with this case is that it gets back out into the public. I know you have a large viewership with your show. We're hoping that, you know, this show comes across somebody out there that has information in this case, right?”

The bottom line is we have an eight year old boy that has vanished and we have no evidence to support what has happened to this boy. And we're hoping that there is somebody out there that has information, you know, as relationships change in life, there could be people that have had interactions with people involved in this case, maybe they talked about this case, maybe they shared information about this case that they didn't share with law enforcement years ago. And we're just hoping that somebody out there has information that will help us with this investigation and help us locate Zachary.

If you have any information about the disappearance of Zachary Michael Bernhardt on September 11, 2000 from the Savannah Trace apartment complex, now called the Eden at Clearwater on Drew Street in Clearwater, Florida. Please contact the Clearwater Police Hotline at 727-562-4080. You can also submit a tip anonymously through Crime Stoppers of Tampa Bay at 1-800-873-tips. This is the last episode of the deck, an audio chuck production with some of the best podcast theme music in the biz by Ryan Lewis, and it has been my privilege to shine a light on cases like this one for the past four and a half years.

Thank you to every family member who was willing to relive some of their worst days to share their story. Thank you for trusting us, and thank you for being vulnerable and open. Thank you to every law enforcement agency that opened their doors to us, some more willingly than others. Listen, we talk a lot about the ways in which a case went wrong. The past steps not taken mistakes that were made, but that is the world we live in. It is not perfect or polished or pretty, and the law enforcement officials that we have met along the way who will look that right in the face and say, "Yes, but I don't need to control an narrative. I just need to learn from past mistakes and try to solve a case now. You are what gives me hope. And that's a rare thing to find in such a dark space.

I also want to say thank you to my audio Chuck team. Every reporter or producer editor project manager who touched this show and made it what it was. I am really proud of what we did. We told stories that mattered. The victim didn't need to be perfect. The investigation might have been messy and rarely was there in ending that had a nice tidy bow.

“That's actually almost impossible to find in the entertainment world, but that is real life, and I believe there is magic in having a mission.”

And what I love so much about podcasting is that this gets to live on forever.

Always right at the tip of someone's finger ready to hit play, wherever whenever, that the impact of our work can live on long after today.

So we've given a $100,000 endowment to crime stoppers USA with that every year they're going to work with an affiliate program at theirs to help create a new deck and distribute roughly a thousand copies of it.

“This will continue every year forever and ever in perpetuity so the deck can live on.”

And you guys we couldn't have done that or this show without you.

So thank you to every single person who has tuned in.

You are deeply woven into the show's DNA.

“Because without anyone to listen, is it even a podcast?”

I love you all dearly.

And if you miss me, you can still find me every Monday on a crime junkie wherever you get your podcasts.

I know Chuck would approve.