FBI TRUE

- Hi everybody! I hope you all are having a great,

powerful and majestic day.

- A missing 14 year old girl from East Dubuque, Illinois.

I gotta go, go, go.

- Family had found a note inside of the car.

The note said, don't look for me. I don't want to be found.

- I believed she was 100% a runaway.

- I get bored, you know. But no, nobody cares.

- She had not left with her cell phone.

She didn't have shoes. She didn't have any money.

This isn't adding up.

- I definitely thought someone else was involved.

- I'm supposed to be video connecting with a friend.

- The people she had been online with

had a sexual undertone to them.

- He's a nice dude. He's a nice dude.

- We found a YouTube video where this man comes into the room.

She stops him and she whispers something in his ear.

- Immediately I thought of grooming

or that there was a sexual relationship.

Get away. Help!

- Her very best friend broke down into tears.

Where is she?

In the FBI we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts, mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it. - Freeze!

- FBI. - FBI!

But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down?

We save that for each other,

when we're talking agent to agent.

This is FBI True.

- Kim, we haven't seen each other in years

since we were in DC.

And Wayne and Casey, it's really nice meeting you.

Cindy Coppola is a 23-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked on cases that included organized crime

and terrorism, and took part in multinational investigations

into drug trafficking and money laundering.

How did you all get together?

- The first time I met Wayne was working this particular case.

It was the Chyenne Kircher case.

Casey Folks has been part of the Jo Daviess County

sheriff's office for 29 years,

investigating everything from fraud to crimes against childrn

to murder.

- So, Wayne, you get a call to join this team.

- So my supervisor approached me.

He forwarded me the email chain and as I read through it,

I thought no, this is a real case

involving a missing teen.

And yes, I want to be part of that.

Wayne Jackowski was an accountant who joined the FI

to investigate financial crime.

He's been with the Rockford, Illinois resident agency

for 14 years, investigating bank robberies,

human trafficking and murder.

- I was working violent crimes against children

on the squad in Chicago.

Wayne gave me a call to tell me about the case

that he had been asked to provide some assistance.

The daughter of an FBI agent,

Kim Castro spent her first decade in the bureau

working international terroris,

before joining the violent crimes against children

task force for FBI Chicago.

- Chyenne Kircher was missing 14 year old girl

from East Dubuque, Illinois which is on the other side

of Illinois from Chicago.

That happened in October of 2011.

And the local police department had started to investigate it.

I helped out a little bit initially on the case.

Family had found a note inside of the car.

What was her home life like?

- So there was Chyenne who lived in the house,

her younger brother, her older brother.

There was Terry Abbas, who was her stepdad,

and then Laura Lyons was her mom

and Steve Staver was Laura's boyfriend.

Was the family dynamic.

- Right, so wait a minute. Let me get this straight.

The husband and she has a boyfriend at the same time?

- Yes, correct. - And they know each other.

They all live together. - They're all living together.

- Interesting. - Very interesting.

- Complicated. - Nontraditional.

Nontraditional, okay, okay.

- When I first got this call to go over and help East Dubuque,

and when the uniform officer and I go up to the house

to ask some questions and just try to get some information,

the smell was so overbearing.

And it was a situation where I could see where a young child

like Chyenne would maybe want to take off.

- Want to run away. - Yeah.

- What did you guys do with the note? Did we examine it?

Did the FBI examine that?

- No, actually East Dubuque sent that down

to the state police lab and they examined it.

The note read, Mom and Dad,

you haven't done nothing wrong,

but by the time you get this letter, I will be gone.

Don't worry about me. I will always love you.

You won't find me because I don't want to be found.

So at last I say goodbye. Love, Chy.

- And they determined it was her handwriting?

Yes, they did.

- That was written not under duress.

Correct. Not under duress.

- Somebody who's so outgoing and so creative

and wants to be friends with everybody,

I just don't understand what would push a child

to run away and tell their parents,

"I love you, you did nothing wrong."

- We have dozens of these types of cases throughout the year

where children run away.

Dubuque, Iowa is a large city across the river

from East Dubuque.

So they thought maybe she just went over there with a friend,

you know, went to hang out, get away from whatever problem

she might be facing.

And so over at the sheriff's office we reached out

a few times to check on, you guys need any help?

They were confident in what they were doing.

They were following up on some leads.

But over the next 18 months, it went cold.

And so my chief deputy

formed this team to go a little bit deeper.

It was called the Critical Incident Response Team.

He invited the FBI.

He invited state police,

other local law enforcement agencies to join it.

I'm going to be real honest,

our relationship with the Rockford FBI office

over the years wasn't the best.

And so I wasn't 100% sure what Wayne was bringing to the table.

Being in a small RA.

To me, a lot of what we do is help our local partners,

more so than making a ton of big cases on our own.

A lot of times a small department,

a small sheriff's department has limited resources,

but if we partner up, we can accomplish something greater

together than working separately.

- We initially started to investigate it

by re-examining all of East Dubuque's reports.

We went up to her school. We interviewed the superintendent.

We cleared out her locker, we took all of her textbooks,

all of her notebooks and everything.

We turned over these to the East Dubuque police department

for them to go through everything

to find out if there's any notes in there,

if there's any writings where she might be passwords.

I mean, anything we could find.

We turned them over to them and said please

just look through em and see what you can find.

- Interviewed friends, people in the general neighborhood

just to see if anybody had seen her

around the time she went missing,

just to see if anybody knew something we didn't.

- Wayne called me up and asked if I could assist him.

- So did you think she was a runaway?

- I thought there was a possibility

that she was a runaway, but I definitely thought

someone else was involved.

She had been missing for about a year and a half at that point.

The question was how could a 14 year old

sustain themselves for that long?

Where would they go

and how would they be able to live?

She had not left with her cell phone.

She didn't have shoes. She didn't have her coat.

She didn't have any money.

Reviewing the police reports

and kind of following up on some of those interviews,

Chyenne didn't have a strong support system.

She was a kid that was bullied at school, made fun of.

She really craved attention.

She was a gamer and had a very strong social media presence.

- Okay everybody. I'm on Xbox 360 right now.

Mainly she was on Facebook.

She was also posting videos on YouTube

and she was on another site,

one that we got interested in called Chat Tango,

where she was conversing with some people online

through that app as well.

- I'm kind of like going back and forth between the Xbox 360

because I'm supposed to be video connecting with a friend.

And I am kind of like going back and forth here to here.

So if I don't reply to you in no time, then okay!

So today is midnight hour.

You can't send!

- So the theory was that she had met up with someone

and was living with them.

- So, Wayne, what does the FBI then offer in the way of help?

- Mainly in the way of electronics.

Things need to be forensically examined,

somebody needed to go through and get the contents

of her cell phone or her computer to see

who she might have been communicating with.