Original subtitles

Every person that worked on this case

was traumatized at some level.

If you started out as a search and rescue,

you know you have a certain amount of time

before it's going to be a search and recovery.

We start considering that there may have been foul play.

She had been painted as a monster.

But sometimes evil is afoot in the world.

That's when I realized.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh!

At the flip of the switch,

you would get this bloodthirsty almost animal.

That's just desperately wicked.

And she kept repeating, he's going to kill me.

And he shoots my daughter.

That's about the only time in my career

that I just wanted to shoot him.

You can run, but you can't hide.

Cole County is roughly 390 square miles.

One of the outlying communities is St. Martins.

It's a slightly more rural, smaller community,

a very solid community, good people.

Rarely had calls out there.

Teenagers may be driving too fast

or things of that order,

but really, it's a nice community,

a good place to live.

On that Wednesday, actually at 7:00 PM,

I was at one of the local churches doing

a church security workshop.

I received a phone call from one of my deputies

that said they had a report of a missing child

in the St. Martins area.

Elizabeth Olten was a 9-year-old girl,

by all accounts, a very nice person.

She attended a local grade school,

certainly was doing fine in classes.

She didn't seem to be unhappy with her family,

with her school, with anything that she was involved in.

She was just a happy, intelligent child.

Elizabeth Olten was our neighbor at that time, in 2009.

And she lived four houses, three or four houses down.

She is a girl that would come over to our house

from time to time, especially in the summer.

We have a swimming pool, and she came over

and went swimming a couple times.

We'd hang out at the Olten house,

and sometimes Elizabeth would be hanging out

with Emma, my little sister.

I get a call from Elizabeth's mother,

and she's asking about her daughter.

And I said, well, I've not seen her.

I don't know anything about it.

And she said, well, I can't find her.

And it's dark, and she's never out at night.

And we went down there, and we talked to her parents

and we talked to the police.

And that's when I realized that--

the seriousness of what was happening.

I didn't know if she was at a friend's house,

but then, obviously, we realized

that she's definitely missing.

Deputies are talking with the mother of Elizabeth,

the missing child, and finding out where she had been,

the last time people knew about her.

The mother had stated that her daughter,

she had been with some classmates, twin boys,

down the road.

They lived with their grandparents.

We just went to the Oltens' house,

and we were playing video games.

The sheriff showed up and spent more time

asking questions, more than anything else,

for a while.

And then that's when we found out that

Emma did go over there and knocked on the door

and asked if Elizabeth could come out and play.

And then, you know,

Elizabeth hadn't been home yet.

There's panic between, you know,

Mom and brother for sure.

And, like, you know, what could have happened to her?

Why wouldn't she be home by now?

The older sibling, which was Alyssa Bustamante,

had volunteered to walk her home.

And she said rather than walking on the road--

and the road has no sidewalks on it.

It's a rural, paved road.

So rather than walk on that in the approaching darkness,

they took the back routes from the back of the homes,

through some farmland and some wooded areas.

And Alyssa said that she walked her to--

in sight of Oltens' home and left her there,

with Olten walking home.

So we have that very short time of being inside

of the house and not seeing her again

and then never making it to the home.

So at that point, we're looking at perhaps

she got lost in the woods, or she fell and hurt herself.

A couple hours later, about the time

they really started searching in earnest,

it started to rain, which, of course,

made their search more difficult.

It was a dark night.

It was not just cloudy,

but we had torrential rains, great winds.

It was an uncomfortable time to be looking for a lost child

out in the woods and farm areas.

If you started out as a search and rescue,

you know you have a certain amount of time

before it's going to be a search and recovery.

You know, you want to be able to use things like helicopters

with forward-looking infrared radar,

which normally is available to us.

That first night, the weather was too bad.

We couldn't use a great deal of the aircraft.

And so we're taking the assumption that

she could have fallen and injured herself

or, in the darkness, gotten a little lost.

And it's not a good place to be lost in.

The woods are very thick.

There's a lot of undergrowth, a lot of brush.

The creeks are full of water and running

at a good rate of speed.

So in a situation like that, again,

you want to start looking at a search and rescue operation.

We got local fire departments,

and we set up a grid search with teams.

The way we do that is we pull up maps of the area

and we crosshatch it, covering literally

every square inch to every square yard,

all the way across it,

from east to west and north to south.

There was so much underbrush that it's hard

to fight your way through.

You've got people that were willing to get down

on their hands and knees and crawl through brush.

This is hours and hours and hours of work by people

in horrific conditions, and yet,

the rescuers did not give up.

We just kept looking.

But we didn't find her or any indication of her.

And we had to eventually call for that night

because it simply became too dangerous to be in the woods.

We were just totally in the dark

about what actually happened.

Her father was in jail.

A lot of people were thinking the same thing.

Perhaps somebody he knows had kidnapped her.

By the next morning, we had also started

having a dual command post.

One command post was search and rescue.

The other command post became investigative.

They had about 300 people were out

looking, trying to find her.

People we know, friends of ours,

everyone was out trying to find her

because we couldn't really figure out

what could have happened.

We were all just flabbergasted.

We had a good couple hundred volunteers,

not counting the fire department personnel,

the law enforcement personnel, ambulance crews.

Everyone wanted to volunteer.

We partnered with the Missouri State Highway Patrol,

and they set up checkpoints and literally stopped

every vehicle that came through

and asked what people had seen.

We had no visual sighting of her.

One of the other aspects that kept us on task

in this, certainly, limited--

big area, but limited--

was the fact that she had a cell phone.

We can't locate the phone, but yet we have

a broad area that it's pinging in.

We knew that the area we were searching that

that phone was in that area.

We kept tracking, looking for that,

until eventually, the battery on the phone died.

We had almost gotten to the point of purely

search and recovery because the weather had been so bad,

the likelihood of her surviving

to that point was pretty low.

So we start considering that there may have been foul play.

That's where you start looking at, well,

who is the person that had last contact?

And the natural outflow of that is

where you would start looking at a person of interest.

So the last person to see her had been

15-year-old Alyssa Bustamante.

Elizabeth Olten's brother came over and was

asking where Elizabeth was.

And we didn't know.

We had no idea.

Why are you asking us?

He said, well, because she left and was with Alyssa.

I'm like, I didn't know that.

So we asked Alyssa, and Alyssa kind of

brushed it off and said, well, yeah, she was.

But then she left and went home,

or she thought she went home.

Alyssa was going to a church function at that time.

So Karen took Alyssa to the church function,

and Elizabeth Olten's mother then got concerned

and was asking us, you know, what happened to Elizabeth?

The FBI wanted to talk to Alyssa

because they had been called in

since this was a missing minor.

They got her out of school

and took her in for questioning,

and she answered all their questions for quite a while.

They paid a lot of attention to her

right from the beginning.

I was there when she was born,

so I got to cut the cord when she was delivered.

Her mother was just 16.

And she was the teeniest little baby, so sweet.

As babies go, she was very happy and cheerful.

She seemed like a pretty good sister.

Like, she, you know, tried to show us

the way with some things and help us out.

And, you know, I never really, you know,

thought anything bad of her.

Then they moved to Missouri.

I guess you'd call her a tomboy.

She liked playing outside.

She liked climbing trees.

And we had quite a few trees around,

and she climbed them all.

I definitely remember as she got older,

she was more of like a recluse, almost,

you know, staying in her room,

doing her own thing, more, like,

depressed and definitely darker.

And it was definitely hard because, you know,

you remember her as, like, you know, a happy,

you know, sister.

And you can kind of, you know, also see her

transitioning into someone that's not very happy.

I think it was about the same time she was going

through puberty, and she had a real hard time

with that because of being a tomboy,

she wanted to be a boy.

And all of a sudden, she's developing,

and she didn't really want to develop.

So she had a real, what I would consider a dark period,

going through the goth stuff.

I couldn't get her to wear anything

that wasn't black or dark.

We'd go out, like, monster hunting, you know.

She made us believe that there were

actually monsters out there.

After school, the kids come--

get home on the school bus at 4:30.

Alyssa wanted to go out in the woods,

so I said, yes, you can go out in the woods.

That's something she did real often.

She went out at about 5 o'clock.

She came back at about 6 o'clock,

and it was just getting dark.

She went right upstairs to her room,

which is a little unusual.

A couple hours later, about 7:30,

8 o'clock, the sheriff was here and started looking

around for Elizabeth and started asking

questions of our family.

My first contact with Alyssa,

you would think that this is the person

that would be a good babysitter for your children.

She was engaging, good eye contact,

positive body language, comfortable with adults,

and seemed responsible.

We tried to help as best we could

because we still were wondering,

what the heck is going on here?

We never saw Elizabeth.

We used the FBI's evidence recovery team

to execute the search warrant,

and they went through with a fine tooth comb.

Goodness, there must have been 30

law enforcement people on this property,

including, you know, local people, FBI people.

And then you get the search of the bedroom.

And you start finding out that,

well, there's a lot of darkness.

When you think of a child

writing something on the wall,

you think of a little kid with a crayon

or a paintbrush or a magic marker.

You don't think of a teenager immortalizing that which

is aberrant to society, looking like there's blood on the wall

or writing horrific statements on the wall.

They were focusing upstairs on Alyssa's room.

And I mean, looking back, I don't know why

I didn't catch something, but we really didn't.

I just--I didn't catch a thing.

But they were taking pictures,

and that's when they found her diary.

It turns out that that was absolutely crucial to the case.

She hid so much of herself from even her closest contacts,

but she surely shared her heart in her journal.

One of the investigators with my agency

was looking at the diary, and as he's going through it,

on the last entry on the last page

that she'd done anything on was a large section

that had been scrawled over with her pen,

so it was just all blacked out.

And honestly, he took a 20,000 candlepower flashlight,

put it under it, and you could clearly read

what was written on the page.

She's killed someone, strangled her,

stabbed her, and cut her throat.

I remember when my detective shared it with me.

And...

It's a confession.

It's a written confession.

I would say we were in the 95 percentile that this is it.

We've got her.

When Alyssa was 7, and right before the boys--

her younger brothers turned three years old,

her mother came to California

because she split up with her husband.

We soon discovered that her mother was a drug addict,

and what had been going on in Missouri was not good.

The kids were not very well cared for.

There was one particular night

my husband had called me to tell me that

he went over to see the kids.

We'd gotten them a little trailer so they could have--

Michelle could have a little privacy.

We were hoping that would help.

Anyway, it was a disaster.

And so beer cans were all over.

And she was not--

she was there, but she was--

I think she was passed out on the bed.

And so, um...

I really didn't want to take these children away

from their parents, but we did.

We had to.

One of the things that the state-appointed counselor

said from the testing she had done with Alyssa

is that she wanted me to be aware that there was

a possibility that her behavior

was going to get a little bizarre.

And I was really glad she told me this,

because it did.

We would be out, like, at a store,

and she would just go down on the ground.

Now, bear in mind she was 8 years old at this time.

And she would act out things like a 4-year-old would do,

like she was a giraffe or a donkey or whatever.

Or she would chase in and out of the clothes at the store.

And of course, people that are around at that time

are looking at me, like, well, aren't you going

to do something about this?

You know, this behavior is rather odd.

I don't know that any of us can understand

what it feels like to have a parent, not just one,

but two parents abandon you,

and not just once, but over and over.

She wouldn't trust us with her feelings.

She thought she had to hide them.

Because, you know, her experience

with adults in her early life was such that

when she did share, it--

bad things happened.

We eventually moved to Missouri.

I only saw her cry once, one time.

It was after one of the times her mother had left.

This was a little bit before Alyssa turned 12.

She was in her bedroom, in bed,

and she had the covers over her head.

And I could hear her crying.

And I went in and I lowered the covers,

and we cried together.

And--because we were both sad.

To have--to have a child that's an addict

is very difficult for a mother, a parent.

And for Alyssa, it's her mother, and she loves her.

And she's left her again.

And I think that in her mind, it was hopeless,

and wasn't going to get her life together.

And she finally had to face that.

Her mother wasn't coming back.

I guess she decided that it was more than she could handle,

and that's when she attempted suicide.

Once we tried to get help for her,

she was diagnosed as being bipolar.

And that's sort of explained her behavior in a lot of ways,

that she was down and up and so on.

And she would self-harm.

You can definitely see the scars on her arms

and, like, you know, how fresh they were sometimes

when she would cut herself.

And she would definitely get in, like, dark moods

where she wouldn't really talk, or, you know,

you could tell that something was bothering her.

When I looked at some of the things she was looking up,

she was looking up more ways of how to kill herself.

But at that point, she was at school.

We sent deputies to take her into custody.

As a 15-year-old, they just wanted us

to bring Alyssa to the FBI office on Friday morning,

which is what we did.

Alyssa and I went in, and we were being questioned

by the sergeant, as well as they had

a juvenile officer there.

If you don't mind if I sit here so I can write--

Yeah.

'Cause I'm going to be taking a lot of notes, so.

OK.

We really want to know, did you do it?

Which the diary gave it to us, but we want to hear her say it.

But we also want to know why.

Finally, he started asking her more pointed questions

and pretty much putting things--

I remember thinking, wow, why is he--

why is he saying this stuff?

At that point, I was still 100% sure that

Alyssa had nothing to do with anything.

If somebody had asked me, it was 100% sure

I knew that she was not involved in that.

But her denial then was contrary to

what the facts were that she was confronted with.

And they told her that they had found her diary

in which she mentions what she had done.

When you're doing an interview or an interrogation

with an individual, you're trying to get to the point

that the situation is set up where the only thing

where they sense relief is the truth.

Oh!

That's when I realized.

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my gosh!

And I just had a breakdown right there

in the middle of this whole situation.

And I turned just to get out.

I just--I couldn't breathe.

You saw how shocking it was to the grandmother.

Can you imagine finding out

that a person of your own blood

has acted out this horribly?

It was like something out of a movie.

And all of a sudden, you're in it,

and it's not where you wanna be.

She confessed.

And honestly, it was shocking to the two investigators

that were in there, to hear her coldly lay out what she did.

This girl didn't care who she killed.

She cared that she killed.

That's frightening.

So at that point, she gave directions

to recover the body.

The grave site, that was under a tree

and some brush in the area.

When the body was recovered, it was in a shallow grave.

It was covered with some debris.

A lot of leaves were falling at that time of the year.

People had walked right there.

So it's not that that area wasn't covered.

It was covered.

They, of course, found the cell phone.

The autopsy report is sufficient on all

of the injuries, the violence, the anger demonstrated

by the method of death.

It's incredible to me that a 15-year-old girl,

as an outflow of her life,

was wanting to destroy other people,

was wanting to do it brutally.

And I think that we need to remember that for most

of us in society, this is so aberrant

that we are not going to understand it

because we're not that way.

And I thank God that we're not that way.

On that particular night, I had a big church activity.

And so I was preparing.

I had to bring the treats, and we were

going to be teaching dancing.

And Alyssa was going.

And I remember she asked if they could go over

and see Elizabeth, and we said no,

because it was already 4:30, and we needed to leave.

Then I think she came back and asked if they could--

her and Emma could just go out in the forest

for a little bit and come back.

So they went.

And we agreed that they could do that,

and that's where we thought they were that night.

Later, it was obviously discovered that

Emma went over and got Elizabeth,

and then they went out into the woods.

And then I guess they ditched Emma and kept going,

you know, out in the woods.

While Alyssa was walking Elizabeth home, at one point,

out of view of anyone else, she started to strangle her,

and she found that the girl was too strong.

And when she was resisting being strangled is when Alyssa

had said that she pulled the knife out,

the kitchen knife out and began stabbing her.

She stabbed her repeatedly and cut her throat.

The brutality of it is just-- is shocking to the conscience.

And of course, the question there is,

where does the 15-year-old get this anger?

I don't know.

So at that point, for her,

she'd done what she wanted to do.

She'd seen the light of life go out--

go out of a person's eyes by her hand.

That's just desperately wicked.

She was in the vicinity of the grave that she had dug.

She drug her to that grave, placed her in it, buried her,

spread some debris over it, walked back home,

threw the knife in the dishwasher

and turned the dishwasher on,

and went to her room like nothing else had happened,

wrote some information down in a diary,

and then thought better and scratched it out.

I distinctly remember the front door slamming open

and Alyssa running up the stairs

like a herd of elephants, which she didn't normally do.

I had met her briefly that first night.

She appeared to be concerned that

Elizabeth did not make it to her home.

In retrospect, you look at her and you go,

wow, she's thinking she pulled this off.

She's thinking that she's gonna walk on this.

She's thinking that we'll never figure it out.

And it seemed with her that it's like flipping a switch.

She would be this nice, normal person

that people were dealing with.

And then at the flip of the switch,

you would get this bloodthirsty almost animal.

She's detained as a juvenile,

and then the application is

made to try her as an adult.

And when that goes through, then she's charged

as an adult with first-degree murder,

premeditated murder.

We have to remember that regardless of your age,

there's got to be accountability.

We had a 15-year-old that demonstrated

all facets of evil.

And she's accountable for her actions.

If you act like adult, you can be charged like an adult.

And that's what happened in her case.

The lawyer for a teenager accused of killing

a 9-year-old neighbor says his client

shows signs of depression and tried

to kill herself two years ago.

It wasn't the Alyssa that I know.

She was on some kind of a high drug,

as far as I could tell, from the medications

that we were giving her, that the doctors were giving her,

and that I allowed them to give her.

She should have been institutionalized so that

we could protect her and anyone else while

we went ahead and messed around with what's going on

in her brain as a 15-year-old.

I think that maybe it was the medicine

that kind of drove her, you know,

crazy, I guess you would say.

Was she mentally ill?

I don't think so.

I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

But it doesn't seem so because she functioned

in everyday society well.

But yet there was that side that when

the switch was thrown, she was willing to do what she did.

On her Twitter page, 15-year-old accused killer

Alyssa Bustamante lists her location as

"somewhere I don't wanna be."

That somewhere is now a jail cell,

as a Missouri teen awaits trial

for her role in the death

of 9-year-old Elizabeth Olten,

who prosecutors say Bustamante strangled

and stabbed in a premeditated murder.

She had premeditated murder as a charge

because she planned it by digging the grave.

She planned it by taking the knife,

and she planned it by waiting for the opportunity

to get this little girl alone and brutally kill her.

That defines premeditated homicide.

Bustamante has pleaded not guilty,

but a dark picture of the teen has emerged online.

In this video, Bustamante shown touching

an electric fence while encouraging her younger

brothers to do the same.

I knew about the electric fence video,

but I guess, as a kid, we didn't really think--

we didn't know anything about, like, YouTube or much then.

I guess it's not really

even a big deal for us

because, I mean, people could see that and be like,

oh, wow, like, she's forcing them to touch this

electric fence when, in reality, like,

we're growing up, you know, around horses

and around, you know, that type of stuff.

Like, you know how many times we accidentally

touched an electric fence?

And it's, like-- it's just a little shock.

It's not, like, oh, wow, like, that really hurt.

Joining us now from St. Louis is

Jennifer Meyer, who is best friends

with Alyssa Bustamante.

Did she ever, in any conversation with you,

talk about wanting to hurt somebody else?

Yes.

In one conversation we had back in January,

she just pulled me off to the side

and basically told me, you know--

she said, I wonder what it would be like

to kill somebody.

I thought it was kind of strange,

but I just dismissed it, I guess.

I wouldn't really think that my best friend would do that.

She had been painted as a monster.

Awaiting trial, she was in jail.

And because she was a minor

and because there was ill feeling against her,

they thought she was in danger in jail,

so they kept her in solitary confinement

for a year and a half.

And by this time, she was ready to do anything

to get out of solitary.

So when her attorney suggested that they offer a guilty plea,

she went along with it, just because

she knew that she'd get out of it.

At that point, she elected to enter a plea of guilty.

In Alyssa's final statement, I think that

as best she could, that she truly did feel remorse.

Granted, she was under the influence

of extra medication,

but I think that as best she could,

she really did feel the remorse.

And if she could have switched places,

she would have.

Since she was pleading guilty, there was a sentence.

And the judge basically gave her

the maximum sentence she could.

It was like two 30-year terms

to be run consecutively.

I look at all the cases that I've been involved in,

in 34 years of law enforcement.

This was one of the two most difficult cases

that I was ever involved in.

Every person that worked on this case

was traumatized at some level.

But I can tell you that the technician for the FBI

that brushed the soil from Elizabeth's face was,

at that same moment, recognizing

she had a 9-year-old daughter at home.

I just never, ever, in my wildest dreams,

imagined that Alyssa would have the capability

to do what she did that night.

Never, never in my wildest dreams.

Sometimes it's not that anyone failed her.

She was getting counseling.

She was involved in a local church.

She had grandparents that cared deeply

for her and her brothers.

But sometimes evil is afoot in the world.

And in this particular case with her,

that's what I think was there.

So I know that, you know, on the outside,

people definitely see her as, you know, a villain.

And, like, you kind of, like, see her like that a little bit

on the inside of the family, but she's still family.

And, you know, with the things that happened to her and stuff,

it's hard to put, you know, all the blame on her

and not, you know, other circumstances.

She didn't have remorse at that time.

She has remorse now because now she has matured

and finally understands

what it was she has done.

She is much better now.

She doesn't have to take drugs.

And where she is in prison,

she still needed rehabilitation,

and she's gotten it.

If her life changed dramatically

and they could document that it changed dramatically,

I would say you might have

a more sympathetic parole board.

In this case, I don't know that she can change.

You have hopes, but I don't think she can.

It's so aberrant to the average person

that you can't make sense of it.

I'm not so naive to think that there's

no evil afoot in the world, because there is,

and I know it because of people

like Alyssa Bustamante.

To shoot two people six times each?

I can't even climb into that darkness.

The creepy dude was most likely right there.

They assume that

the murderer knows the victims.

Everyone is a suspect.

Gabby Petito never goes outside.

Did Brian Laundrie have something to do

with the disappearance of these two girls?

This blew my world apart.