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What happened to Andrea Knabel? Her case has attracted public interest, with much speculation as to whether she is alive or dead. Let’s take a closer look.
Andrea Knabel was reported missing in Louisville, Kentucky.
As the Discovery+ network airs her documentary series, she is once again a hot topic on social media following her disappearance.
Many streaming networks are now producing documentaries like this one to draw public attention to such acts.
What Happened to Andrea Knabel? Dead or Alive
According to reports and sources, Andrea Knabel disappeared on August 13, 2019 at the age of 37 and has not been found.
Her family, on the other hand, believes that she is still alive and has not given up hope of finding her.
However, there is no evence that she has been seen in the past two years, suggesting she may have left the country.
She was born and educated in Louisville, Kentucky. Her family is ready to give up hope of finding her alive after searching for her for 19 months.
Is Sister Sarah Knabel Partner Ethan Bates Involved?
Sarah Knabel is Andrea’s younger sister and Ethan Bates is her partner.
At the time of the incent, Sarah and Ethan were staying with their mother in Louisville, Kentucky. They helped with the renovations, and Andrea moved in with them shortly after losing her home and job.
According to the episode, the situation between them was chaotic.
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On August 12, Andrea was taken to the hospital by Ethan to be treated for an infection, after which she took a cab home. After an argument with Sarah, Andrea drove to Erin’s house, which was only a short distance away.
Erin was the mdle sister of the Knabel sisters.
According to the documentary, Ethan was suspected of cheating on Sarah with Andrea. A friend who appeared on the show stated that Andrea had previously been locked out of the house. Likewise, the neighbor sa that Andrea, Ethan and Sarah were constantly fighting.
Likewise, Sarah and Ethan have been accused of failing to help locate and distribute leaflets across the city.
Authorities investigated Ethan several hours after Andrea’s disappearance and found him not guilty. We are not suggesting that Ethan and Sarah were involved in any wrongdoing.
At the time, Tracy Leonard, a private investigator investigating the case, noted: However, according to the program, Ethan deleted all of Andrea’s data from his phone the night she disappeared, which later led to some suspicion.
Andrea Knabel Husband and Family
Andrea Knabel was a single mother, so there is no information about her husband.
She has two sons and two daughters. Mike Knabel is her father’s name and Erin Knabel is her sister’s name, but her mother’s entity is currently unknown.
They have been working with friends and private investigators to find Andrea ever since she went missing.
In addition, her father expressed his hope that his daughter is still alive.
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What Happened To Andrea Knabel? Dead Or Alive – Is Sister …
Dead Or Alive – Is Sister Sarah Knabel Partner Ethan Bates Involved? Andrea Knabel is a missing person from Louisville, Kentucky.
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What Happened To Andrea Knabel? Dead Or Alive
Is Sister Sarah Knabel Partner Ethan Bates Involved? Sarah Knabel is Andrea’s younger sister, and Ethan Bates is her partner.
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What Happened To Andrea Knabel? Dead Or Alive – Is Sister Sarah …
Is Ethan Bates, the partner of Sister Sarah Knabel, involved? Andrea’s younger sister, Sarah Knabel, is married to Ethan Bates, who is also her partner.
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The Missing Persons Investigator Who Went Missing Herself
Andrea Knabel spent countless hours searching for missing people. … Because Andrea’s sister Sarah Knabel and her boyfriend, Ethan Bates, …
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What Happened To Andrea Knabel Dead Or Alive – Is Sister Sarah Knabel Partner Ethan Bates Involved
What happened to Andrea Knabel? Her case has attracted public interest, with much speculation as to whether she is alive or dead. Let’s take a closer look.
Is Sister Sarah Knabel Partner Ethan Bates Involved
What happened to Andrea Knabel and how did she die? While her situation has piqued the public’s curiosity, there have been many conjectures as to whether she is alive or dead. Let’s take a closer look.
Andrea Knabel has disappeared, according to authorities in Louisville, Kentucky.
Her documentary series is now airing on the Discovery+ network and she was once again trending on social media following her kidnapping.
To raise public awareness of such crimes, several streaming networks are now producing films like this one.
What happened to Andrea Knabel after she was fired? Is it better to be dead or alive?
Andrea Knabel, 37, was reported missing on August 13, 2019 and has not been seen since, according to reports and sources.
However, her family believes she is still alive and have not given up hope of finding her at this point.
Meanwhile, there is no evidence she has been seen in the past two years, suggesting she may have left the nation.
She was born and raised in the city of Louisville, Kentucky, where she also received her school education. Her family is ready to give up hope of ever finding her alive after searching unsuccessfully for the past 19 months.
Andrea Knabel (39 years old) has been missing since August 13, 2019. I volunteered with the organization Missing in America. She was lost after disappearing from Louisville, Kentucky. Let’s show her face in front of as many people as possible. ❤️ #AndreaKnabel Photo courtesy of Twitter: rztxRD5lhK
— Jeydin Osorio (@JeydinOsorio) on January 1, 2022.
Is Ethan Bates, Sister Sarah Knabel’s partner, involved?
Andrea’s younger sister, Sarah Knabel, is married to Ethan Bates, who is also her partner.
Sarah and Ethan were living with Sarah’s mother in Louisville, Kentucky at the time of the event, which occurred that evening. Her support with the renovations led to Andrea moving in with them shortly after losing her home and job in the company.
According to the episode, the relationship between them was in a state of chaos.
In the early afternoon of August 12, Andrea was taken to the hospital by Ethan to be treated for an infection, after which she boarded a taxi home. Andrea drove to Erin’s house, which was only a short distance away, after her argument with Sarah at the time.
Erin was the Knabel sisters’ middle sister and she was the youngest.
According to the documentary, Ethan was accused of having an affair with Andrea while Sarah was away. A friend of Andrea’s, who appeared on the show, said that she had previously been thrown out of the apartment. As for Andrea, Ethan, and Sarah, according to their neighbor, they were always fighting.
Sarah and Ethan, on the other hand, have been accused of not helping with the search and distributing leaflets across the city.
After Andrea’s disappearance, authorities questioned Ethan for many hours before determining he was not responsible. We draw no conclusion that Ethan and Sarah engaged in any wrongdoing in this situation.
Tracy Leonard, a private investigator working on the case at the time, said: “However, according to the software, Ethan wiped all of Andrea’s data from his phone the night she disappeared, which later raised some suspicion .”
Following the kidnapping of single mother Andrea Knabel, the search for hard facts about her disappearance has uncovered even more questions than her family and close friends previously realised.
#DisappearedFindingAndrea airs tonight at 8/7c on ID. You can follow the show on Twitter at @zVJJyv3ukl.
On January 1, 2022, the account Investigation Discovery (@DiscoveryID) tweeted:
Andrea Knabel, her husband and their children
Due to the fact that Andrea Knabel was a single mother, there is no information about her spouse.
She is the mother of two boys and two daughters. Her father’s name is Mike Knabel and her sister’s name is Erin Knabel; However, the identity of her mother is still unclear at this time.
Since Andrea went missing, they work with family, friends and private investigators to track her down.
In addition, her father expressed his optimism that his daughter was still alive and well.
The Missing Persons Investigator Who Went Missing Herself
When Andrea Knabel’s girlfriend, Heather, went missing outside of Lexington, Kentucky on September 1, 2017, no one knew quite what to think. Some of Heather’s friends and family back home in Louisville (approx. Others knew that Heather, who was last seen leaving a Salvation Army shelter, was dealing with a mental health episode, was homeless and could harm herself. Also, she was having one active warrant out for her arrest and, according to her friends, she openly struggled with alcoholism.
Aware of the troubles Heather often found herself in, often announced via her own Facebook posts, some of those who knew her wrote off her disappearance as just another unpredictable episode. “She had really crazy paranoia,” a friend who was close to Heather in college tells me. “I knew drugs were involved.” Since Heather is missing, “to be 100 percent honest? I just shut it down” and stopped thinking about it, the friend says.
Not Andrea Knabel. One of Heather’s best friends since childhood, she reported Heather missing to the Lexington Police Department. As a mother of two boys and the eldest of three sisters, Andrea has long been known among friends and family as someone who tended to overlook a person’s demons in the face of their angels. (Growing up, her sisters called her “Mother Andrea” for her unconditional care, a name that stuck into adulthood.) Andrea spoke with a soft Appalachian accent, sometimes laughing with a voluminous snort, and in pictures had she often has a parting of ash blonde hair and a smile that looks unmistakably genuine. “Andrea was just very, very energetic,” says Suzzette Rodriguez, Andrea’s girlfriend of the past decade. “You could be in the worst mood ever, but as soon as she entered the room, your mood just changed.”
Shortly after she filed the police report, Andrea heard from Nancy Schaefer, the founder of Missing in America, a group of volunteer missing persons detectives, who offered to help with Heather’s case. Andrea accepted Nancy’s offer and towards the end of September they teamed up and made it their mission to find Heather and either rescue her or, if she had left town voluntarily, convince her to return home.
“We are concerned that she is a victim of human trafficking,” Heather’s friends wrote on the Missing in America page, “and that we only have a small window of opportunity to save her life.”
Andrea was afraid that someone might have kidnapped Heather against her will. She and the other volunteers met in Lexington to investigate a lead that Heather had been spotted alone under a viaduct in the Loudon neighborhood on the east side of the city. Since Andrea’s sister, Sarah Knabel, and her boyfriend, Ethan Bates, knew Lexington well (they lived there at the time), Andrea assigned them to comb the Loudon area. They eventually met Heather, who promised them that she and her boyfriend would meet them all at Sarah Knabel’s home in Louisville.
Heather didn’t show up. Four days passed. Suzzette and Andrea kept looking and eventually spotted Heather’s boyfriend at a speedway gas station. The two women confronted him and — according to a Facebook post Andrea later wrote — somehow managed to snag one of his diamond earrings. They told the friend that he wouldn’t get his earring back until Heather got home. It worked: later in the day, she finally showed up.
During this search for Heather, Andrea became friends with Nancy Schaefer. Nancy is a former New Jersey accountant who says she poured her life savings into Missing in America’s search and rescue method — think Guardian Angels meets overactive Facebook group — um, as Nancy likes to put it “Taking on the cases is unpleasant for others.” Nancy had previously helped investigate the murder of 29-year-old Tromain Mackall, she says, and she assisted local activist LaCreis Kidd in finding her daughter, Nayla, the case that first brought her to Louisville. During her time there, Nancy brought in several new volunteers, but most impressed Andrea.
“She was like a chameleon,” says Nancy, explaining that Andrea was able to go from “very professional” to “street slang.” “She could morph into both of those roles.”
“From here I can only hope my boyfriend makes better decisions,” Andrea wrote on Facebook. “And I want her to know that she has so many friends and family members who love her and are there for her.” In a photo accompanying the post, Heather stands hugged by Andrea, Sarah Knabel and another friend . It’s still unclear exactly what happened to Heather while she was away. “Andrea’s finding her made her feel like she really had a friend,” says Diane Stumph, a former Missing in America member. “That someone took care of her.” (“Heather” didn’t respond to requests for comment, but told friends that she didn’t want publicity. Given the sensitive nature of this case, Narratively chose not to publish her real name. )
Nancy, who would develop a close relationship with Andrea over the next two years, says the extra thrill of finding Heather has sparked a new purpose in her newest volunteer. But Andrea’s investigations would eventually run parallel to her own unfortunate demise.
Almost two years after Heather’s disappearance, in the early hours of August 13, 2019, Andrea herself went missing.
Tracy Leonard likes to tell new recruits that he was more or less forced into the career of a private investigator. After working for the US military for eight years as a small arms and artillery expert, his knees and face were mutilated in a tank crash. In 1994, in his late 30s, he was honorably discharged as a war invalid. Back home in Clarksville, Indiana, Tracy thought law enforcement was his best career in the US, and he applied to the police academy that year. However, due to his dependency on a cane, he realized that receiving a badge would be unlikely. Instead, he accepted an apprenticeship with a veteran detective, who told Tracy he had two options: join the Army Reserve as a part-time soldier or work as a private investigator. “It was at that point that I decided to become a private investigator,” says Tracy, a father of four with a short stature and square chin. “Damn, I wanted to make some money.”
Tracy has spent more than two decades building his reputation as the investigator of choice in the Northern Kentucky area. He estimates that by 2015 he had helped locate “about 40 to 50” missing persons, mostly young women from Kentucky, accomplishments that he says earned him the nickname “The Locator.” That year he changed his company’s name to Loc8tors — better branding, he says — and expanded the company to 17 full-time investigators, including his twin brother Ted, a former painter and celebrity bodyguard who, like Tracy, speaks in a mix of Appalachian Twang and Midwestern accents.
Everyone at Loc8tors has their own call signs: “Dick Tracy” for Tracy; “Robocop” for Ted. The Loc8tors come from a wide range of law enforcement and security backgrounds: from retired Louisville Metro Cops to probation officers and bailiffs. With a staggering record of worker’s compensation cases and infidelity scandals, Tracy is known for training newcomers through exhaustive fire tests, not prescribed regiments. “It kicked my ass at first,” says Jacob Nix, the Leonards’ brother-in-law and Loc8tors’ tech specialist, describing his apprenticeship at the agency. “But here you just get thrown in the shit.”
The Leonard brothers first worked with Andrea Knabel while investigating the case of a 17-year-old girl who went missing from her childhood home in Fern Creek, a suburb of Louisville. Nancy Schaefer had formed a connection with the Leonards during her first few months in Louisville. She appreciated Tracy’s interest in a possible documentary about her missing persons investigation and boasted about the great job Andrea had done in finding Heather. Tracy spoke to Andrea and concluded that her interrogation skills were a good fit for the case. “Andrea seemed more professional and articulate” than other members of Missing in America, says Tracy. “It seemed like she’d done it all before.”
While she was still pursuing her main job as an analyst for the health insurance company Humana, Andrea began volunteering with the Loc8tors. She traveled to the missing girl’s high school in nearby Fern Creek to question the teachers about the young man the girl appeared to be in love with.
“She convinced the teachers to let her search the girl’s locker,” Tracy recalls. “And found the child’s first and last name and date of birth in one of her notebooks.”
After a background search, Tracy found the boy’s address and drove to his home in Kansas City. The family gave him little information, so he interviewed their neighbors, who told Tracy that some unused license plates had been stolen from their garage. He let the plates go. Days later, Tracy drove to a one-story gray house in Kansas City across from a Walmart. He spotted a cat in the front window of the house. The missing girl’s mother confirmed via text message that it was her daughter’s Chartreux cat. Kansas City police officers searched the home. Detectives told Tracy Leonard the girl was found chained to a radiator in the basement and likely would have been trafficked, possibly to Mexico, where the boy was from.
For most of the following year, Andrea grew into her new shoes as a volunteer seeker. In August 2018, she and Nancy led a “Missing in America” caravan to Chillicothe, Ohio, where the team combed thick woods for signs of a missing 22-year-old woman who had just escaped from a Columbus rehabilitation facility after a crack-cocaine relapse . (Her body was eventually found by Chillicothe police in another rehab member’s basement. She overdosed.)
Nancy leveraged Diane Stumph’s four decades of investigative work as a producer and cinematographer and hired her to bring along a film crew determined to present the footage to Randy Tat, a Los Angeles producer with whom she was associated. “It was just an extension of us back then to help people,” says Suzzette Rodriguez. “I thought with the reality show it would give us more exposure, more names out there.”
Randy Tat remembers being impressed by Andrea. “She would do the research, would do the PowerPoints,” he tells me. “She was great at being organized.”
Andrea and Nancy also searched for Bret Broffman, Jr., a 27-year-old die-hard music festival lover whose abandoned car was found outside of Glasgow, Kentucky, after Broffman drove to the Bonnaroo music festival in June 2017 through thick undergrowth and back roads for signs by him. After Broffman’s clothes and a femur were recovered by detectives, Nancy says Andrea “viciously fought” on behalf of Missing in America to have Broffman’s alleged suicide — he died of a gunshot wound — reclassified as homicide. On May 8, 2019, after confirming Broffman’s remains, police announced a criminal investigation.
By 2018, Nancy says she’d developed a close emotional bond with Andrea, apparently more so than other Missing in America volunteers. Once, when Nancy went into anaphylactic shock while searching for Broffman, Andrea was the one waiting by her bedside in the emergency room. “She just was,” says Nancy, “always there for you.” In September 2018, Nancy, in need of a place to live, moved into an apartment on the south side of Louisville with Andrea, Andrea’s children and a childhood friend. Nancy also asked Andrea to be the maid of honor at her wedding.
It was around this time that Nancy said she began to resent certain other members of Missing in America. Instead of following proper search and recovery etiquette, the others, she says, broke protocol, and she worried they would tend to contaminate crime scenes. Perhaps the pressure to legitimize Missing in America in documentary form has put additional stress on a team that was already functioning as mere volunteers. “They showed up [to the search] in flip-flops and sundresses,” says Nancy, in a tone that oscillates between lamentation and sadness. “Dealing with law enforcement is a whole different ball game.”
Suzzette Rodriguez and Diane Stumph deny this, claiming that they maintained their professionalism throughout the 2018 Missing in America caseload. “It’s not rocket science,” says Suzzette. “You don’t touch anything without gloves, you write down coordinates. If it’s your group and their members aren’t doing things right, that’s their fault.”
“I’ve been doing this for over 40 years, for God’s sake,” adds Diane. “I know what I am doing.”
But cracks in missing in America’s loose ties were soothed, says Nancy, by what Andrea had to offer: a special ability to get this kind of work done. Andrea “always put 150 percent into it. She had skills that nobody had,” adds Nancy. “Unfortunately, good people make bad decisions.”
The small suburb of Audubon Park is known as one of the safest places to live in the Louisville area. Located southeast of downtown, Audubon Park has its own police force, golf course, country club and bird sanctuary. It is known for its dogwood trees; The streets are wide and airy, populated with authoritative “No Soliciting” and “No Parking” signs. “People call the authorities … about everything,” says Erin Knabel, one of Andrea’s younger sisters. Growing up here, “it would be normal for someone to call the police [and say], ‘Hey! Your friend walked in my grass!’ you know?”
The Knabel sisters grew up in Audubon Park off Chickadee Road, which feeds into St Stephen Martyr Catholic School, where all the sisters attended primary school. It was evident to her father, Mike Knabel, early on in Andrea’s life that she had academic gifts to match her social butterfly personality. “She got an A without even trying,” he recalls, sitting in a chair in his spacious living room near the Ohio River. “I remember the tests. She was in the top two or four percentiles in some of those areas.” Andrea’s mother, Cheryl, and Mike—the two divorced when Andrea was 13 (and Cheryl didn’t respond to interview requests for this article)—sent Andrea to one nearby Magnet Middle School to challenge her, and then to Assumption High School, where, Mike boasts, “95 to 97 percent of people go to college.” Her grades there, he says, showed real talent. “There was no limit to where she could have gone. Where that could have taken her.”
Andrea later graduated from the University of Louisville with a degree in Marketing. She worked a variety of odd jobs for three years, including CVS district manager and waitress at the Tumbleweed Tex-Mex restaurant. After ending an eight-year relationship, she had two sons with two different men. She never married.
To support her family, Andrea took a job as a group Medicare analyst at Humana around 2009. Colleagues say that she initially excelled at her job and was unafraid of team building, whether it was a lunchtime workout at the gym, a group game of kickball, or after-work cocktails at Applebee’s. Loyalty to those she trusted was paramount, according to colleague Whitney Nechelle. “She would be the friend I would take to a bar fight,” says Whitney. “She’s a Spitfire.”
In 2017, Andrea brought a 34-year-old auto detailer named Brian Downey home to Mike’s house for Christmas dinner. Mike says that with his shaved head, countless tattoos and lewd jokes, Brian seemed like a complex character. Though Brian presented himself as a reformed father of three — he’d gone to school to become a respiratory therapist — he’d also been arrested on multiple counts for offenses ranging from stealing a car to one occasion earlier this year when he wandered around a Walmart naked and high on methamphetamines after breaking into a woman’s home. (According to Erin Knabel, the episode earned Brian the nickname “Naked Walmart Man.”)
Regardless of Brian’s motley record, he sold a better version of himself to the Knabels. “It seemed like he’d settled down and maybe learned his lesson and maybe he was on the right track,” says Erin. But “later, when they began dating months later, I realized that wasn’t the case.” (Brian Downey did not respond to an interview request since that story was reported, then passed away suddenly in January 2022, just prior to this article has been published.)
In the eyes of Andrea’s friends and family, Brian’s entry into her life started a downward spiral that was reminiscent of the very people she was looking for on Missing in America. She began living with Brian in March 2018, further troubling her friends and family members. Colleague Tarica Dow believes Brian was involved in the Louisville drug underworld and says she questioned the harsh integrity of the Andrea Knabel she thought she knew. “Their choices with men sucked,” says Tarica. “Insecurity will make you settle for anyone who gives you attention.”
For months, Mike and Erin watched Andrea and Brian’s relationship change from being sweethearts to both sides making angry, jealous threats. In spring 2018 he proposed. At Humana, her colleagues had their palms over their mouths. Whitney Nechelle recalls her surprise when Andrea posted a picture of the ring: “What the hell? Girl, what are you thinking?
The marriage never happened. On July 6, 2018, officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) pulled Brian into his home. They found enough meth (more than 2 grams) in his car to warrant a drug trafficking charge. Brian was sent to prison. This was good news for Andrea’s family. Andrea, it seemed, would have a chance at redemption. “When he was arrested, I was like, ‘Good! Maybe that’s the end of their troubles,” says Erin. “She will start over and get back on track.”
These hopes were not fulfilled. Though Brian isn’t in the know, Andrea’s friends say she’s still gotten into shady relationships because of her “Big Heart Syndrome.” In September, while Nancy and Andrea were living together, the relationship between the two closest missing persons in America members gradually began to crumble. Nancy remembers their shared slumlord-run apartment falling into disarray, and although she didn’t know it at the time, she now believes Andrea started taking meth instead of her prescription Adderall. “Andrea ran with the wrong audience,” says Nancy. “There were strippers [hanging] on the couch, drug dealers coming in and out of the house. ‘This is my home! I’ll help pay the bills!’” In December 2018, a credit card debt led Andrea to file for bankruptcy for a second time. At the same time, she was handling a custody case involving one of her sons. And earlier that winter, she’d lost her job as an analyst during a company-wide layoff — though a work friend, Tarica Dow, says Andrea was fired for poor performance reviews and not waking up until midday.
Although Mike remained silent during most of the chaos that afflicted his daughter, that year was a turning point for him. He often spent late nights on the phone with Andrea, helping her arrange rides for her after her Nissan Maxima broke down on the freeway and was damaged by a snowplow, or sent her money to mitigate her 2018 bankruptcy. He wanted Andrea to, as he puts it, “take himself to a hospital for help”.
By the spring of 2019, Andrea was living on food stamps and soon she could no longer afford the apartment she and Nancy had been living in. Virtually homeless, Andrea moved into her mother’s house – the house on Chickadee where the Knabel sisters grew up – while Andrea’s sons’ fathers did most of the childcare for the boys. That summer, Mike exploded. “I read her the Riot Act,” he says. “I said, ‘You lost your job. you are homeless you don’t have a car You have no money. you are in debt You can’t afford your children.’”
But he also offered her “help and hope,” he says. “I wanted her to hit a rock bottom where she would bounce back.”
For her part, Nancy moved to live with her sister in Pennsylvania in July 2019 for an emotional breather. She divorced her husband (they had been separated for some time) and took time off to reflect on the Louisville days from a distance.
Others, like Suzzette and Diane, had already begun to resent Nancy and her efforts at self-promotion, and were now questioning her overall credibility. They point to an unfortunate episode in July 2017 in which Nancy filmed a YouTube video with a woman named Michelle Hooper. Nancy claimed that the woman was actually Jennifer Klein, who disappeared in 1974 at the age of 3 from a campground near Moab, Utah. When it comes to missing persons breakthroughs, this one has been as big as it gets.
But Nancy was wrong. Michelle’s DNA was analyzed and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System determined it was not Jennifer Klein’s.
“It’s no secret that Missing in America has had a rough time,” Nancy tells me. But she points to the obvious misconduct of her former colleagues. “I mean, if you’re a person who wants to make a difference and the members don’t want to stick to protocol? I take it personally.” (“Nancy, I think her heart is in the right place,” Erin Knabel tells me, “but she doesn’t get on with anyone that long.”)
Back at the Chickadee house, Andrea lived in a bizarre sort of reunion. A month earlier, her other sister, Sarah, and Sarah’s fiancé, Ethan Bates, the dark-haired owner of a Lexington construction company, had also started living with Cheryl — rent-free, Mike notes. Cheryl’s pipes had burst in her upstairs bathroom, so she’d hired Ethan, and therefore Sarah, to do what was initially expected to be quick work. But a month and a half later, on August 12, 2019, not even the fugue was finished. Mike laughs at the ridiculousness: “Apparently they had a good old days there,” says Mike, “and didn’t remodel much.”
The nine and a half hours between 9 p.m. August 12 and 6:31 a.m. August 13 were covered by so many — Reddit users, YouTube psychics, several Louisville Courier-Journal reporters, six private investigators, two police detectives, and thousands of members in half a dozen Facebook dissect groups – and their differing interpretations of the night’s events are often completely at odds with one another. After analyzing a dozen accounts of Andrea’s family and friends, and reviewing relevant Facebook posts and text messages, as well as the official schedule of LMPD events, here’s what we know about what happened to Andrea Knabel that night.
Around 8 p.m., after eating Chinese takeout from nearby Double Dragon, Andrea got into a fight with her mother, Cheryl — “Nothing out of the ordinary” for her family, Erin says — and this ended in a scuffle with Sarah and Ethan , whose criticism, Erin suggests, had veered toward violence. (Sarah and Ethan did not respond to interview requests.) At 9:50 p.m., Andrea, who was suffering from either an eczema outbreak (common among the Knabel women) or stress-related facepicking, was dropped off at a hospital a few miles away after being driven there by Ethan was driven, who was also accompanied by Erin’s teenage son. After that, Andrea took a Lyft back to the house on Chickadee, arriving at 11:34 p.m. Irritated, Ethan and Sarah didn’t let Andrea in.
At 12:15 a.m., teary-eyed and overheated from the mild August heat, Andrea walked a mile south to Erin’s fixer-upper on Fincastle Road, a dense, low-income neighborhood full of apartment buildings. Erin was having a glass of wine with her neighbor Michelle when Andrea arrived and she could immediately see the desperation on her sister’s face. On the porch, Andrea told Erin about the fight, how Sarah repeated Cheryl’s attack, and how Andrea abandoned her own sons. To calm her, Erin invited Andrea into the apartment and let her watch TV while Erin’s two younger children tried to sleep in the living room. Erin called Cheryl — who wasn’t at the house on Chickadee at the time but was with her sister — and urged Cheryl to tell Sarah and Ethan to let Andrea back inside.
At 1:03 am, Erin dropped Andrea off at her mother’s. Less than seven minutes later, she received a text message from Andrea: “You’re not letting me in.” At 1:15 am, Andrea entered Erin’s apartment through the unlocked back door and again begged her reluctant sister to let her stay the night. “Please,” Andrea pleaded with Erin, “I’ll sleep on the floor!” Erin declined; Andrea, unpredictable and nervous, was too much of a burden. (“If you stay with me you will ruin our lives,” Erin wrote to Andrea the next day, suggesting that she had to apologize to her neighbors so they wouldn’t try to evict her.)
In tank top, shorts and Nikes, Andrea went down Erin’s stairs, turned left onto Fincastle sidewalk, passed about three dozen houses, crossed the tiny bridge that connects Fincastle Road and Audubon Park, and hasn’t been seen by anyone since.
The more than two years since Andrea’s disappearance have generated an endless pool of ideas about what happened that have captivated armchair detectives and social media viewers everywhere. Some of the theories, none of which have been confirmed by LMPD, challenge the imagination: Troubled by her family’s hostility, Andrea left her life and fled to an undisclosed location in Indiana or Ohio; Andrea returned to Cheryl’s house on Chickadee, called a “friend” to take her away, and this “friend” killed her; Andrea was forced into a vehicle after leaving Erins and kidnapped; Andrea walked away and then committed suicide (all family members and friends I interviewed wholeheartedly deny this theory); or, in perhaps the most bizarre theory proposed by the myriad of internet sleuths, Andrea and her friend Nancy collude and use their unique case – seeker-turned-wanted – in favor of Missing in America.
“I have no motive! I was in Pennsylvania [at the time],” Nancy says in response to that idea, adding, “Andrea was a very dear friend of mine.”
In 2020 alone, 59,369 women over the age of 21 went missing in the United States, yet only a small proportion of them — usually white women — get national media attention. Andrea’s case has been covered in everything from a four-part miniseries Finding Andrea to Investigation Discovery (produced by Randy Tat, the filmmaker Nancy was in contact with before Andrea disappeared) to a recent segment on Dr. Phil. Es hat auch einen eigenen Subreddit. Und genau wie die Fälle von „Missing in America“ für Andrea, ist jetzt ihr eigener Fall zum Futter für andere weibliche Sucher geworden.
„Dies wird einer der tabusten Fälle sein, die ich wahrscheinlich behandeln muss“, sagte Zahara Hasina Willis, eine Schauspielerin, die auf ihrem YouTube-Kanal Mystery Muze über wahre Verbrechen spricht und glaubt, Andrea hätte die Stadt überspringen können. „Sie hat sich eigentlich freiwillig gemeldet, um vermisste Personen zu finden – und jetzt wird sie vermisst. Das ist verrückt.”
Melissa Ellen, die auf ihrem YouTube-Kanal True Crime History auf Fälle von vermissten Personen aufmerksam macht, hat mit der Scherztheorie gerungen und bemerkt: „Die Leute haben bis heute das Gefühl, dass [der Vorfall mit Jennifer Klein] alles Teil von Missing in America war versuchen, einen Schwindel zu machen, ihre Ansichten zu verbessern und etwas Einfluss zu erlangen“, sagte Ellen in einem 30-minütigen Video. “Das ist eine Möglichkeit, und das ist es, was viele Leute da draußen veröffentlichen.”
Die unterschiedlichen Theorien haben Sucher oft gegeneinander ausgespielt, einschließlich derjenigen, die Andrea am nächsten standen. Nancy hat eine Facebook-Gruppe „Gerechtigkeit für Andrea Knabel“ gegründet, die, anstatt Missing in Americas aufrichtigem Rhythmus zu übernehmen, in einem größtenteils anklagenden Ton kommuniziert und behauptet, dass die Familie Knabel, einschließlich Erin, nicht alles preisgibt. (“Warum hinterlässt Erin immer noch Posts, die dreiste Lügen sind?”, heißt es in einem Post. “Was ist ihre Motivation? Hilft diese Art von Unehrlichkeit den Bemühungen, Andrea zu finden, oder verletzt sie sie?”) Das Ergebnis ist eine endlose Salve von Anschuldigungen: Jede Seite glaubt, dass die andere entweder Wissen zurückhält oder sich weigert, mit der Polizei über den genauen Zeitplan der Ereignisse zusammenzuarbeiten.
Diese Spaltung hat zu einem säuerlichen Geschmack im Mund ehemaliger Mitglieder von „Missing in America“ geführt. Zunächst führten Nancy, Suzzette und Diane im August 2019 ihre eigenen Durchsuchungen durch und klopften an Türen entlang der Fincastle Road in der Hoffnung, Zeugenaussagen oder Kameraaufnahmen zu erhalten. Mahnwachen wurden besucht. Flyer wurden ausgehängt. Suchen wurden in der Nähe des Ohio River orchestriert. Michelle Freeman, Mutter von drei Kindern, die zu Beginn von Andrea’s Fall zu Missing in America kam, sagt, dass die Suche nach Andrea zunächst ehrlich und von Herzen kam. Dann, einen Monat nach Beginn des Falls, begannen emotionale Spannungen zwischen den Mitgliedern, jede gezielte Anstrengung zu entgleisen, was Michelle auf das zurückführt, was sie Nancys „missbräuchliches“ Verhalten und ihren vulgären Führungsstil nennt. „Es gab Zeiten, in denen ich einfach nach Hause kam und anfing zu weinen“, sagt Michelle in einem Telefoninterview. „Du tust alles, um Andrea Knabel zu finden – und nichts ist gut genug.“
Zwei Monate nachdem Andrea vermisst wurde, verließen Suzzette, Diane und Michelle Missing in America, sagen sie, wegen zerrissener Verbindungen zu seinem Gründer. In ihren Augen war die Suche nach dem verlorenen Mitglied von Missing in America legitim und notwendig, aber fast „unmöglich“, sagt Michelle, mit Nancy an der Spitze.
„Es ging nie um Andrea“, sagt Michelle. „Es ging um Ruhm, Geld, Aufmerksamkeit, was kann ich daraus machen.“
Nancy ihrerseits widerspricht: „Ich bin ein guter Mensch, der für diese Sache Opfer gebracht hat. Aber ich muss mich schützen“, sagt sie mir per SMS und fügt hinzu: „Hier ging es um Andrea.“ Sie hat es abgelehnt, sich weiter zu äußern. In Bezug auf ihre Organisation sagt sie: „In Amerika wird nicht mehr vermisst. Ich bin von allem weggegangen.“
Obwohl das LMPD 2019 die erforderlichen Hundedurchsuchungen durchführte, ließ die Begeisterung der Polizei nach, sagt Tracy Leonard, „sobald Meth ins Bild kam“. (LMPD rejected a request for an interview for this article, but it did provide its own timeline of events, which is similar to the one provided by the Leonards, with only a few small discrepancies.)
The only thread these rival parties agree on is that Ethan Bates is an undeniable person of interest. Several of these investigators say that they suspect him, for a multitude of reasons: Ethan and fiancée Sarah have refused all interview requests — including one from Narratively — except for a two-hour interrogation that LMPD did shortly after Andrea disappeared. Ethan pled guilty to cocaine possession in 2009, and the Leonards suggest that he, like Brian Downey, is linked to the vast Kentucky meth market. In the summer of 2021, LMPD said in a statement that its detectives attempted to perform a polygraph test on some members of Andrea’s family and were denied.
Some, like Victoria Quibbel, who know Ethan believe that he was the ultimate source of the conflict on August 12, 2019, that apparently led to Andrea’s disappearance. “I 100 percent think Ethan knows what happened,” Victoria tells me. “And I’m almost certain that Sarah does too.” (Tracy Leonard also attempted to interview Ethan, who declined due to what he called “slanderous accusations” against him from Mike and Erin.)
As for Sarah’s possible involvement in her older sister’s disappearance or murder, Mike can’t find the energy to even entertain the thought. Like his daughter Erin, he’s spent the past two years mired in a routine of posting flyers, checking out possible sightings, and talking ad nauseam to news reporters about Andrea and her work with Missing in America. For Sarah, and by extension Ethan, to be involved, Mike says, would be atrocious. “She hasn’t spoken to me in a year and a half,” he says. “She thinks I’m accusing them of everything. Which is exactly the opposite. Erin’s heard me say it’s my worst nightmare every time — that they would be responsible for anything to do with this.”
Ethan Bates remains just one figure among many whom the Leonard brothers have investigated over the past two years. Like the Missing in America team, they have endured a plethora of leads that have gone nowhere: walks around soup kitchens and homeless camps in response to reported sightings, long stakeouts at shady drug houses, thousands of calls from so-called witnesses, and wild attempts to swindle the $10,000 reward the Leonards have offered. (In one incident, a Louisville pimp in a Walmart parking lot tried to convince Tracy Leonard and Mike that one of the blonde sex workers whom he employed was Andrea.) In early 2020, the Leonards had assigned an investigator, Mark Baker, solely to Andrea’s case, and he spent up to 80 hours a week responding to witness calls or working surveillance. Tragically, Mark Baker died abruptly from a brain aneurysm in December 2021.
Tracy Leonard says he has been working the case pro bono, and he estimates that he and Loc8tors have spent more than $100,000 tracking down leads in four states. Both he and his brother Ted say that their persistence is necessitated by the state of law enforcement: LMPD lost 20 percent of its officers in 2020, many to transfers and early retirement, after Breonna Taylor was killed by LMPD officers and large protests broke out. Nearby police departments in Clarksville and Jeffersonville have helped the Leonards — accompanying them on a trip to a homeless camp, for example — yet LMPD, Ted Leonard says, “asked us not to interfere with their investigation.”
Nearly two years after the case began, the Leonards understood that if Andrea were to be found, it would likely have to be without much police collaboration. During a recent ride-along in his Chevy Avalanche, flanked by AR-15 rifles and a K9 dog named Duke, Ted Leonard tells me that police don’t want to share information with him: “Which is kinda crazy. We’re out here doing all the legwork, we’re out here knocking on doors, watching surveillance.”
In August 2021, Ted and Tracy were driving back from an unrelated surveillance job in Texas when they got a call. It was a Northern Kentucky area code, so Tracy picked up. The caller, whom we’ll call “Megan” here to protect her privacy, said that she was there the night Andrea went missing. Although he has fielded hundreds of calls like this, Ted says that the tone of Megan’s voice “made the hair stand up” on his arms.
“This lady was in-depth with detail,” he recalls. “You could hear it in her voice. She didn’t want the reward. Most people are calling for the reward: ‘Hey! Send me the money first and I’ll tell you where [she’s] at!’”
“I was there,” Megan is heard saying in the recording, which the Leonards shared with me. Her voice is fragile and sprinkled with sniffles, as if she’d been crying for hours before calling.
“Can you give me some details?” Tracy asks.
“She didn’t know what was going on,” Megan says. She says that Andrea was raped by several men, and killed, in a house that’s a 15-minute drive from Audubon Park. She gives the Leonards explicit details about how and where. Megan escaped, she says; Andrea did not. She tells Tracy that it was all at the hands of an African-American motorcycle gang.
“Do you know what they did with her body?” Tracy asks, matter-of-factly.
“I tried to stop it. I tried to stop it. I couldn’t.”
“I’ll tell you what. Can you give me your name, and it will stay confidential?”
“I can’t talk to cops.”
“I know … you won’t talk to cops, you’ll talk to me …”
“Was there any other girls there? Any other people present?”
“Yes, there was other girls.”
“And were they being held against their will?”
“Yes.”
“So is this a human trafficking issue?”
Megan sniffles after a short pause. “Yes,” she says.
Joe Fanciulli flew into the Louisville airport for the first time in January of 2021. A retired homicide detective at the police department in Lakewood, Colorado, he joined the growing ranks of investigators in Andrea’s case mostly out of pure interest. Unlike the Leonards, Joe prefers to work alone, and he seems to take voluminous pride in his skeptic’s view of the criminal world. “I care about one thing and one thing only,” he says. “Facts.” In December 2019, Nancy reached out to Joe for his thoughts on Andrea’s case. In January, the two started dating, and shortly after that, she moved in with Joe in his home outside of Venice, Florida.
Joe claims that he tried to meet with Tracy Leonard on multiple occasions, but that Tracy stood him up every time. Instead, Joe stuck to his trusty brand of orthodox policing — what he calls “Investigation 101” — bringing takeout pizza to question homeless people, knocking on neighbors’ doors on Fincastle and Chickadee, and surveilling known drug houses in Louisville’s rougher neighborhoods. A 74-year-old bike enthusiast who tends to sport aviators in photos, Joe conducted his research with caution: “There were always three of us around,” he wrote in one Facebook post: “Me, Smith & Wesson.”
Joe dismisses the outlaw motorcycle gang theory (as does the LMPD; the Leonards passed the mystery caller’s tip on to the police, but they say the police dismissed her as an unreliable source). He’s continually frustrated by the zigzagging nature of Andrea’s case. It’s “like the whack-a-mole game,” he says. “One scenario to the side, another pops up.” His rule of thumb, as with most missing persons cases, is to look at those closest to the victim first. He says he’s focused on Ethan Bates. He points to Facebook screenshots that show Ethan and Sarah “changed their minds” about their reactions days after the investigation opened. At one point, Ethan said that he and Sarah wouldn’t let Andrea inside Cheryl’s house; but at another point he said they “were asleep.”
Last spring, Joe walked the same path Andrea is believed to have taken the night of August 13, 2019. He wanted to replicate her exact footsteps, looking for unseen clues, so he started at the steps of Erin’s house on Fincastle, and eventually, after 20 minutes, crossed the short bridge into Audubon Park. Standing near Cheryl’s home in the wee hours of the morning, Joe says he felt like he was at square one yet again. How, he thought, could a 37-year-old, tough-as-nails mother go missing here? “There were people on bicycles, people with dogs — no Black bikers,” he says, verging on laughter and disbelief. Being there pushed Joe to narrow down the possibilities. “Either something happened to her at that house,” he concludes, “or she reached somebody who came and got her, and that somebody might have been somebody she shouldn’t have called.”
The premiere of Finding Andrea has brought even more attention to the case, and the docuseries, which relies heavily on testimony from Nancy and Joe, only seems to have exacerbated the disputes between Nancy and some of the former Missing in America members. Randy Tat, the producer who first met the Missing in America crew back in 2018, says that he’s aware of the former members’ feelings about Nancy. But, he says, “I don’t know that side of her. I know that she’s a big personality, type A. Underneath it all, I think she’s had the best intentions.” He says that his team strove to “make a candid, authentic” documentary and that the discord among the various participants is disheartening. “It bothers me that there’s so much destruction and animosity, and watching it play out on social media just breaks my heart.”
In October, after Finding Andrea debuted and exacerbated tensions between various players in Andrea’s world, Nancy, Joe, Erin and Mike all flew out to Los Angeles to appear on Dr. Phil, to discuss the case’s emotionally taxing nature and the resulting feud.
“You said, ‘In 50 years, this is probably the most complicated case you’ve worked on,’” Dr. Phil recounts to Joe. Nancy sits next to him, wiping her eyes. Joe discusses the “holes” in Tracy’s timeline, the whereabouts of Andrea’s phone, how “there are family members who have not been cooperative since day one.” As Erin and Mike wait patiently in a backstage green room, Joe suggests that Andrea’s sores were meth-related, not from skin picking, and that she was involved — undoubtedly — in the meth trade.
“I’ve been doing this for over 45 years, and I’m telling you nothing helps more than all hands on deck,” Dr. Phil tells Erin after she and Mike replace Joe and Nancy on stage. “You want everything. Everybody needs to be leading in the same direction here.”
“I agree completely,” Erin says.
“I think we should both work with them,” Mike adds. “And I think there is maybe a couple of trivial things that may have gotten loose on social media, and they should be all put behind us.”
dr Phil breaks eye contact, calling backstage to Joe and Nancy. “Can I broker a peace here, guys?” he asks. “I know the best for Andrea will come to pass much faster if all four of y’all are working together.”
The camera switches back to the green room. Joe agrees, citing a commitment to Mike that seems to transcend the theatrics of television. “The last thing I said to him was, ‘I’m not going to go away,’” Joe says. “I’m not going to walk away from this.”
Two years to the day that Andrea went missing, on August 13, 2021, Erin and Mike Knabel retraced her steps from that fateful night. Just like Andrea, they went on foot, with Erin’s poodle, Luna, scrambling around on a leash, starting on Chickadee Street at 1:30 in the morning. Twenty minutes and 40 seconds of the walk was aired via Facebook Live, and later shared in the “Where is Andrea Knabel?” group, where Erin still posts updates almost every day. “I feel like if I don’t say anything,” Erin says in the video, “then people will just forget she’s missing.”
Throughout the entire video, both Mike and Erin say little to nothing, as if their minds are busy memorizing potential clues. Erin’s camera tilts to the water runoff under the Fincastle bridge. There are just a few people out, and as usual, Fincastle is dense with parked cars, a chorus of humming crickets and the yellow light of halogen street lamps. Two and a half minutes in, a viewer comments on the livestream: “Someone would have heard her screaming if she was abducted, it is so quiet.” Erin responds, “My thoughts exactly.”
In September, three weeks after Mike and Erin posted their anniversary walk, Mike invited me to his home in northeast Louisville to talk again about his missing daughter. Erin joined us, bringing along Luna as well as her youngest son, who tinkered with the decorative items shelved around the room. On the front of Erin’s T-shirt was a photo collage of Andrea, which matched the flyer on her screen door, which was also stapled to telephone poles on Fincastle. For two and a half hours, Erin and Mike detailed two years of false leads, difficult detectives, split family connections and hateful criticisms from strangers on the internet. We talked about the documentary, the continuous sparring with Nancy, and about the people who go missing in Northern Kentucky. We talked about the sad truth that while Andrea’s story has received attention, she is only one of many people who have gone missing.
“Let’s face the facts,” Mike says near the end of our interview. “This story would have not gone anywhere if Andrea had not looked for missing people.”
Could she really have just given up? Could Andrea truly be hiding in some arbitrary basement north of the Ohio River? Could she have torn herself away from her love for her two sons and just left? Or been pushed by family drama into suicide? Could she have been picked up by a random trafficker who managed — despite Andrea’s well-documented spitfire personality — to take her against her will, lock his doors and drive away into the night?
Mike says plainly from his chair, hands cupped together on his lap, “Every law enforcement person bar none has said she’s gone by now. She’s not alive.”
“I don’t want to accept that,” Erin says, across from him on the sofa.
“I don’t either, but — ”
“None of us do.”
Mike recalls one particular episode from the past two years. As they had with Andrea, the Leonards showed Mike the ropes at Loc8tors (how to do a grid search, how to do interviews), and they had him follow a tip about a hotel near a highway that might have been linked to his missing daughter. “I’m talking about a bad area,” Mike says. “Not good.” Mike drove there alone, hoping to pick up on some shadowy behavior, some tip that might help. He didn’t find any information about Andrea, but at 12:30 in the morning, a car pulled up. A girl of about 10 or 12 got out, and was dragged by a man. “Nothing a parent would do,” Mike says. He was “dragging her against her will.” Mike called 911. Another investigation was opened up. “But I don’t know what happened,” he says.
“Crazy, terrible things happen to vulnerable women,” Erin says. “It happens more than anybody realizes.” And, she adds, “I wouldn’t have realized any of this stuff if Andrea hadn’t gone missing.”
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