[narrator] Kirsten Brueggeman disappeared on January 2, 2021.
[Lisa] I woke up at midnight, look at my phone.
I text Kirsten, "Are you okay?"
Her phone was turned off and she didn't show up to work.
- [dispatcher speaking on phone] - [Lisa speaking on phone]
[narrator] Her family is desperate for answers.
[Rex] So we decided to go out and find our daughter ourselves.
Nothing else matters until we get this solved.
We began walking along here.
I remember that sickening feeling that,
"What am I going to do if I look down and I see my daughter?"
[narrator] This episode of Disappeared retraces Kirsten's last known steps.
[Nicole] The video, it showed Kirsten
having a verbal argument out in the parking lot.
And right there, she's gone. She's not seen again.
[Lisa] Watching that video was very difficult.
Where is she? Where did she go?
I'm afraid. I'm very afraid.
[narrator] The more people who know Kirsten's story,
the greater the chance of bringing her home.
Share on social media. Get the word out.
Help find her.
Have you seen Kirsten Brueggeman?
[Lisa] I'm Lisa Brueggeman.
Kirsten Brueggeman is my daughter.
Kirsten is our only daughter.
It's January 1, 2021.
Kirsten is working a shift at a pizza restaurant.
I told her, "I'll pick you up tonight."
I said, "Just let me know about when." Because she was closing.
She came back with a text that said,
"I'm going to meet some friends."
So I texted back and said, "Be careful, you know, be good."
And she said, "I will."
I woke up around midnight,
look at my phone.
See there's nothing there from Kirsten.
I text her, "Are you okay?" I get no response.
I call her.
Her phone goes
directly to voicemail.
I'm laying in bed, but I'm certainly not sleeping.
I continue probably about every ten minutes
to call Kirsten, with no response.
At this point, I'm worried.
I just know something is wrong. Call it mother's intuition.
I know something bad is happening.
Kirsten will be 28 in just a couple of weeks.
She had always been very intelligent,
but she just kind of lost her way, I think, in high school.
Had issues with grades,
but she still graduated with honors.
Kirsten's lived with us for the last year.
She didn't have a car. I had to be taking her back and forth to work.
[Kirsten speaking]
[Lisa] She is a force.
Can be stubborn,
and I think I can say that from the very beginning,
because when I went into labor with her, she was actually sitting.
She didn't want to come out, and so I had to have a C-section.
She's not an angel, but she's our angel.
[Rex] I'm Rex Brueggeman, I'm Kirsten Brueggeman's father.
She was just an ordinary American girl.
She loved to have fun.
Kirsten is a very loving person that enjoyed life.
[Lisa] I did work for the Marion County Probation Department.
Rex was working for the Justice Department through Marion County.
He then later joined Probation.
We were married while we were both at the Probation Department.
We live in Indiana,
in a suburb called Lawrence.
It's a little incorporated town.
It does have some issues,
but the schools have a good reputation and it's a good place.
[Lisa] Saturday morning, Kirsten is still not home. Her phone is still off.
I decide to contact Eddie.
Kirsten is very secretive about her friends and who she's with.
So we did not know many of her actual friends other than Eddie.
[Eddie] I'm Eddie, Kirsten Brueggeman's ex-boyfriend,
and I was with Kirsten Brueggeman the night she disappeared.
Kirsten and I dated for about ten years off and on.
We weren't together anymore. We were just friends.
But we kind of have, like, still...
like once a week, we'd, like, go do something.
That night, Kirsten calls me. She says, "Hey, it's New Year's.
Let's go out and do something."
I get off of work around, I want to say, ten o'clock, 10:30,
and my plan was to actually meet Kirsten and some friends at a bar.
[Lisa] I message Eddie to ask if he knows where Kirsten is.
And I responded, "No. I expected her to be home."
So her mother says, "Well, she's not here."
[Lisa] He messages back that he was with her the night before
with some friends at a bar that previous evening,
and she took off and he didn't know where she had gone.
I tell him that her phone is off and I can't reach her
and that I'm really getting scared.
I didn't quite understand what had happened,
but I kind of figured that maybe they had an argument
and Kirsten went her way and they went their way.
But what I couldn't understand is why Kirsten didn't contact us
to come get her, or why even Eddie didn't call us.
[Eddie] I immediately went out and started, like,
retracing anywhere and everywhere I thought she would be.
Everything from dumpster areas
to weird alleys,
and then asking anyone and everyone if they had seen her,
seen anything, heard anything.
[Lisa] So about an hour later, around 11:40 a.m.,
he messages back and says that he looked around and he could not find her.
I was almost sick to my stomach.
Something bad has... has really happened.
[Rex] My wife said, "Kirsten's still not home.
I'm having a bad feeling about this."
And I tell her, "Maybe she shut her phone off. Maybe she misplaced her phone.
Maybe the battery went dead.
You know, just give it a little more time."
[Lisa] At about 3:30, I called the pizza restaurant where she worked
because I knew that she was scheduled to work that afternoon.
I talked with the owner-manager,
who said Kirsten had not shown up
nor had there been any contact from her.
[Rex] Kirsten very rarely missed work
unless she had a very good reason.
Okay.
[Lisa] Kirsten has a dog, Tifa.
She is the sweetest dog.
Kirsten just loved her.
[Rex] Kirsten always loved animals.
That's one of the things that makes me believe
that she did not disappear
or go missing voluntarily.
She never would have left her dog.
[dispatcher speaking on phone]
[Lisa speaking on phone]
[Lisa] It was about 5:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, January 3,
when I called the Indianapolis Metro Police Department
to make a missing persons report.
[dispatcher speaking on phone]
-[Lisa speaking on phone] -[dispatcher on phone] Mmm-hmm.
[Lisa speaking on phone]
I think calling the police and making that report
made it extremely real.
It just seemed surrealistic to me that my wife
is actually on the phone calling the police
to report our daughter missing.
The feeling in the pit of your stomach
when you know something's happened to one of your children
and you don't know what, and there's nothing that you can do,
that helpless feeling, it... it made me sick, you know?
[dispatcher speaking on phone]
[Lisa speaking on phone]
[Lisa] The police took all that information
and indicated it would be assigned
to a detective the following day on Monday.
And that just... it seemed like the longest wait ever.
[Rex] So we decided to go out and find our daughter ourselves.
Nothing else matters until we get this solved.
[Lisa] On Monday, January 4, Rex and I decide to drive over
to the bar where she was last seen
and look around the surrounding area.
[Rex] You know, we began walking along here
just trying to see if there was anything at all that would be a clue
to what happened to her,
to see if we could find something that belonged to her
or her clothing.
This is the mattress I found when we were walking that day,
and I had this fear that I was going to find
something under there I didn't want to see,
but I picked it up, fortunately, there was nothing under there.
That's when one thing in particular caught my eye,
and that was like a drainage ditch.
This is a rather lengthy stretch of drainage ditch.
So we had a little bit of area to cover, and at one point we split.
I was over there on the north side
and Lisa was over here on the south side
and we're walking along, looking down into the water.
And immediately I remember thinking, "Oh, God, you know,
if somebody did something terrible to her,
that would probably, to me anyway,
would be a logical place to ditch a body."
This is basically what I did back then.
I just picked up stuff and moved it, turning things over.
I had a stick and I was poking around, looking in the water.
There was a really eerie feeling.
I was scared.
I was afraid that I was going to find something I didn't want to see.
I was hoping I could find something, and yet
I didn't want to find something.
I remember that sickening feeling that,
"What am I going to do if I look down and I see my daughter?"
So on Monday, January 4, my wife and I,
we spent quite a bit of time searching that drainage ditch.
[Lisa] We were hoping for any kind of clues
as to what happened to our daughter, Kirsten.
[Rex] I'm worried that she actually could have,
you know, either fallen into it, that or some...
she could have met with, someone that did her harm
and, you know, left her there.
Just thinking about that, it made me sick.
[Lisa] But we did not find anything.
It was frustrating and disappointing.
After we had looked around the drainage ditch,
Rex and I were heading to the car
and I see somebody on a bicycle coming our way.
As the bicycle gets closer, I realize it's Eddie.
He says he's there to look for Kirsten.
I was upset.
I wondered if Eddie had anything to do with Kirsten's disappearance.
So I'm talking to Eddie, and I want to know more details
as to what actually happened that evening.
So he kind of laid it out for me.
They were all in the bar and they were drinking.
I believe they were fighting.
And he was getting a little perturbed.
They offered to take her home, but she did not want any part of that.
I am upset that he left her there.
Kirsten and Eddie have been together off and on for about ten years.
Their relationship, I think, has always been
a little tumultuous.
They seem to get along well and do things together,
but then something will happen and one of them blows up
at the other and then it's off to the races again.
I try to tell them that I thought that
their relationship had been worn out,
but Kirsten believed she really loved Eddie
and she just wasn't going to let go.
[Eddie] Kirsten's mum was more emotional than Rex was.
Rex was just more or less stern.
At this point, I'm not really concerned about
how they're looking at me.
I just kind of went into just frantic mode.
I'm like, "Where's Kirsten? Let's just find Kirsten."
I love her dearly.
The only hope we could hold on to
was that the police could get this solved.
[Nicole] I'm Detective Nicole Bockting with IMPD Missing Persons Unit,
and I was assigned to investigate the Kirsten Brueggeman case.
When I first read Kirsten's report,
I immediately felt that there was something wrong.
Her phone was turned off. That was a big red flag.
But even more so, it was the fact that she didn't show up to work.
Learning that Kirsten would never leave her dog behind
leads me to believe that she did not leave on purpose.
I learned that Kirsten was with four other people that night
and I was able to track down who they were.
Kirsten and Eddie and her friends, they were all drinking
and she had a little too much to drink.
[Lisa] Kirsten did have an issue with alcohol.
Both her dad and I, we were concerned about her drinking.
We talked with her numerous times, uh,
but she would just say, "I don't want to talk about it,"
and she'd walk out.
And that was always frustrating for her dad and I.
She got angry quickly.
She would almost explode.
It was particularly hard for me because,
um, I am a recovered alcoholic
and to see my daughter go through
the same struggles that I had.
I told her, "You've seen what alcohol did to your father.
You know, why would you want to take that chance
and, you know, suffer through all that?"
But her usual response was, "Dad, just because everybody drinks,
it doesn't make 'em an alcoholic."
She just would not admit that she had any kind of a problem.
Well, finally, we seek professional advice
and get her in to see a psychiatrist.
That did help, but ultimately, she did not want to go anymore.
But just before she disappeared,
she seemed to be putting her life back together again.
We were really hopeful that things were going to get a little bit better.
[Eddie] I don't know why Kirsten was drinking that night,
but she got drunk.
So we were like, "Hey, we gotta get you home and everything.
Hey, can I get you an Uber? Let me call your mom or whatever."
The bar was closing anyhow, so they left around 12:15.
So out in the parking lot, for some reason,
Kirsten became angry and at one point
a verbal argument ensues.
All four friends drove off,
leaving Kirsten in the parking lot.
[Eddie] I assumed, "Hey, maybe she got an Uber
or maybe she finally called her mom."
But she never made it home.
[Nicole] The first thing I wonder is,
"Are there any cameras in the area?"
And just went down the line and started calling them, asking for a possible video.
And I got three videos.
The first video, I was extremely excited to view the video,
because I wanted to know what happened to Kirsten.
The video, it showed Kirsten having a verbal argument out in the parking lot
and then the car driving away.
The video confirmed everything that was told to me by the four people,
and it was determined that
none of them were a person of interest.
Viewing the video, I found that there weren't any cars
in the parking lot that she got into.
She didn't meet with anybody. She didn't walk off with anybody.
It just shows her walking off.
After Kirsten leaves the bar, the second video
shows Kirsten walking on Shortridge around 12:40 a.m.
The last video is of Kirsten walking in the YMCA parking lot.
And here's Kirsten right now, she's walking along the sidewalk
and she'll go into this niche,
follow this fence line right through here.
If you notice right here, it says 1:59.
So we know at 1:59, Kirsten is still alive.
Once Kirsten rounds this corner,
this particular camera does not pick her up.
Another camera, however, picks her up right here at this corner.
She's walking along the fence line.
She picks up something off the ground and she continues to walk.
Right here, it says 2:00 a.m.
And as we watch the video, she continues to walk
and she continues to stay along with the fence line.
What's problematic about the video is that there's a glitch.
There's going to be a jump in time here shortly
where it shows that the camera is not working.
Right here you see it's 2:00 a.m. and now it's 2:30 a.m.
And right there, she's gone. She's not seen again.
It's a very big disappointment.
This time jump from 2:00 to 2:30 a.m. concerns me
because we don't know what happened, we don't know where she went.
No one could figure out why, but for some reason,
the camera just cut out for that half hour.
It was just an unfortunate glitch.
Did she leave the parking lot on foot this direction?
Did a car come in, pick her up and take her back out?
I just don't know.
[Lisa] Detective Bockting asked us to review the video
to see if that was Kirsten.
[Rex] There is no doubt it was Kirsten
just by the way she was walking,
plus the white backpack that she was carrying,
that stood out like a sore thumb.
[Lisa] Watching that video was very difficult.
You know, I'm wondering, "That's the last we're going to see her."
All I can do is wonder, "Where is she? Where did she go?"
I'm afraid. I'm very afraid.
[Nicole] The area that Kirsten went missing in,
which is in the 800 block of Shortridge,
is a high violent crime area.
Within a week or two after her missing,
there was a rape, a homicide.
And the homicide involved a bank robber.
[Rex] If she was trying to get home,
she should have been going the other direction.
But maybe she's totally mixed up
and thinks she's going to the apartment complex
where Eddie was living with his mom,
which is a couple of blocks north of there,
but we may never know.
There's three different buildings
in between my apartment and the Y.
If Kirsten was coming to see me,
she would be going the wrong way.
But anything is possible. She could have just been lost.
[Nicole] I decided to go to the location
where Kirsten was last seen on the cameras.
This yellow pole is to where she got,
and then she makes a left-hand turn here
and she goes out of view of the camera
for a short time period, enough time period for her
to get down to where this big black pole is.
Because over here, we now have another camera.
This other camera shows the east end of the Abbey apartment complex.
So she comes back into view.
She's still walking along the same line and she continues this way.
She just continues around over there.
Now she's going to be walking southbound towards the apartment complex.
She makes this turn right here, and that's it.
With the camera shorting out, we can't see if she ever walks out of the parking lot
and we can't see if a car drives into the parking lot
and she gets into a car,
and we can't see if she ever climbs over the fence.
I mean, she vanished.
I noticed that there's a lot of activity at the Abbey apartments.
So we wanted to knock on doors over there.
So we've got a group of us together, the Missing Person Unit,
and we started knocking on doors and talking to people.
We have Kirsten's poster with us.
We show the poster to the people.
Hopefully, maybe somebody there might have seen something.
But due to the high crime area,
somebody in the Abbey apartment complex may know something,
but they're just too scared to come forward
and tell the police about what they know.
A couple of weeks into the investigation,
I sit down with Kirsten's parents
to update them on the investigation.
[Rex] As I'm sitting in Detective Bockting's office,
I'm thinking now that, you know, something bad has happened.
You know, she has met with foul play, but we had no proof.
[Lisa] I'm even more scared as time goes on.
This is not going to have a good ending,
but I have a lot of good friends and family who keep saying,
"Try to keep the hope up," and so I am.
My good friend, who also works within
the law enforcement community,
had arranged for there to be a search.
On Saturday, January 16, around the area
where Kirsten went missing, there was a... a grid search conducted.
Rex and I are there.
It was difficult watching people go out.
It was difficult watching them come back,
especially because there...
there was nothing that was actually found.
I do want to find an answer.
I...
am also afraid of that answer.
[Nicole] We want closure for the family.
We all care deeply because we put ourselves in their position.
And it's just heartbreaking when your head is pounding up against the wall
and you're not getting anywhere.
At this point, our leads, they're running out.
We've done everything that we could do.
We used our mounted unit
and drone to search for Kirsten.
We went and canvased the area.
We put her face on social media. We put her in the news.
We put her face on billboards on the interstate.
There's not much left for us to do
other than to wait for somebody to call and say,
"Hey, I saw her here, I saw her there."
Every day seems like the last one
because nothing is happening
as far as finding our daughter.
[Lisa] If there is someone out there that knows something,
please put yourself in her dad's and my shoes.
This has been agony for us.
We just want to know what happened.
[narrator] Kirsten Brueggeman was last seen January 2, 2021.
If you have any information, please contact
IMPD Missing Persons Unit
at 317-327-6160.
[birds chirping]
It's been about six weeks since Kirsten was missing,
and I saw a posting
on a Facebook site
that an unidentified female had been found.
The general description fit Kirsten.
The same weight, approximately 114, 115 pounds.
The height was within an inch or two of Kirsten and hair color was the same.
And my wife and I had kind of convinced ourselves
that this body that was found,
which had not been identified, was our daughter.
We were almost at the point of grieving.
But the one thing that was stood out
was that this body had a tattoo
of a spider on her arm.
Kirsten did not have a tattoo that I was aware of,
but because the description so closely fit her,
I contacted Detective Bockting
and the coroner's office to ask more about this.
[Rex] And then the weeks we were waiting to hear from the coroner's office,
that was a pretty trying time.
In one respect, we wanted it to be her so we could have some closure.
But on the other hand, we didn't want it to be her
so that we'd still have hope that she was still alive.
[Nicole] When DNA is returned, it's confirmed that it was not Kirsten.
So there is still hope that she is still alive.
I'm happy at the time,
but then I'm also feeling like we're back to square one.
In March of 2021, I bring up the...
the possibility of a private investigator to Rex.
By hiring a private investigator,
we'll have somebody who can...
can devote the whole time to her case.
[Nicole] When Lisa and Rex told me,
I was extremely happy, because for me,
I don't care who solves the case, I just want her to come home.
My name is Crystal. I am a private investigator.
The Brueggeman family contacted me early March of 2021
to help find Kirsten.
I've been in law enforcement for approximately 11 years.
My specialty is missing persons and criminal investigations.
I have about a 90% success rate in finding individuals.
So when I first met with Lisa and Rex Brueggeman,
they were definitely desperate for answers
and they just wanted to know what happened to Kirsten.
My first few days were actually spent just canvasing the area,
talking to people that would have offered insight as to what happened.
I had to actually backtrack and look at surveillance video
from the night she went missing.
What I did notice is there's a fence line
that encloses the YMCA lot off
and then there is an apartment community on the south end of the YMCA.
That's the Abbey Meadow Apartments.
The next thing is, is that, you know,
an understanding that there are four different angles
on these surveillance videos.
It's just running through them numerous times for weeks on end,
just to see if there's any new evidence
that we can uncover that we had not seen before.
And then one thing that I did observe was a...
an SUV and about 2:38,
you see it come out of the Abbey Meadow Apartments.
It proceeds north on Shortridge.
And then approximately 3:15 a.m.,
you see the same SUV traveling north on Shortridge
and then proceeds back down Shortridge.
The behavior of that vehicle was definitely suspicious.
At that point, I'm thinking that this person may have picked her up.
Something could have happened.
We actually did continue surveillance to see
if that vehicle had any association to the Abbey Apartments
and if they lived there.
But we didn't see the vehicle show up at the Abbey Meadows Apartments again.
The picture of the SUV is out to the public
in addition to fliers of Kirsten's story,
and we're hoping to get answers.
Once Crystal began with her investigation,
she was able to get to obtain a couple of videos
that showed this car, we believed was an SUV,
that had left the Abbey Apartments,
seem to be just driving around, would stop and start.
You could see the brake lights come on and go off.
The thought was perhaps that that SUV was somehow involved
with Kirsten's disappearance.
[Nicole] So this could be a very big break.
I need to find out who owns this vehicle, who was driving the vehicle.
This means that we could have a suspect.
About two weeks later, there's nothing. No leads.
There was nothing useful revealed.
But we are partners with the FBI,
and they knew that Kirsten had went missing.
The FBI agents saw the video that we retrieved from the business
across from the Abbey apartment complex
and was able to say, "I know who owns that vehicle."
I found out that it was actually linked to a homicide
that had occurred over in that apartment complex.
Working with the FBI, I was able to identify the SUV.
Crime lab was called to do testing on the vehicle,
and they were able to eliminate totally
that Kirsten was inside that vehicle.
[Crystal] September of 2021, the case was, in fact, getting pretty cold.
So we talked about hosting a vigil for Kirsten.
There had been no leads at this point in Kirsten's disappearance.
It was frustrating and disappointing.
We held a vigil for Kirsten on Saturday, September 18.
We were hoping to draw a lot of people from the neighborhood
who would possibly come forward with some information.
The private investigator contacted us and said that
possibly we can get some media attention,
get her name out there some more.
That meant a great deal to Lisa and I.
It really buoyed our, uh, emotions.
[Crystal] So we did get quite a few leads
that came immediately after we hosted the vigil.
But those were all exhausted and didn't lead anywhere.
[Rex] At this time, no one has come forward,
and that's what's been very discouraging about this.
It's nothing.
For my wife and I, it's been a roller coaster of emotions.
One of the biggest fears is that we may never know what happened to her.
[Nicole] It were to the point where now we have to sit and wait
for somebody to come to us and tell us, "Hey, we saw something."
[telephone ringing]
[Crystal] March of 2022, a lead came in out of Franklin, Indiana,
at a bar, and, uh,
the patron actually called local law enforcement
and just advised that they believed that
a female in the bar that was accompanied by a male
was possibly Kirsten.
I'm thinking "This... this is great.
Finally, we've got a break in the case."
Through a series of efforts and phone calls,
we got a hold of the video
and we watched that video.
And it does look like her.
It was a good quality video, although you couldn't
really get a good direct on look at her.
[Lisa] And as we were watching,
I had to keep telling myself,
"Does this really look like her
or am I wanting it so much that I'm thinking it looks like her?"
But then we noticed something on the video
that looked a little odd.
This woman is acting rather strange in this video.
Just kind of bent over.
Her affect is very weird.
She's not showing any emotion.
When she walks, it's like she's almost like a robot.
So that part of it I was alarmed by.
My initial thought is, "If this is her, she's been brainwashed,"
because the way this woman was in the video
was not Kirsten, was not her personality.
[Crystal] I believe that someone knows something.
I feel very hopeful that we can find out what happened to Kirsten
and find some answers for the family.
[Rex] I believe that someone saw something
that evening or early morning when Kirsten went missing.
I just can't believe that no one saw anything.
There were points in time
during all of this
where I wondered if Eddie had anything to do
with Kirsten's disappearance.
They had a volatile relationship.
However, I do not think that Eddie had anything to do with it.
[Rex] This thought that Eddie might be responsible just popped into my head,
I guess, because of their on-again, off-again relationship,
all the problems that they had had.
It was just a thought, a passing thought.
I am 99.9% sure
he had nothing to do with Kirsten's disappearance.
[birds chirping]
My relationship with Kirsten, it was a good relationship
and I have good memories, I have sad ones.
With her being gone, I don't know how to feel anymore.
And I've went through every range of emotion about this,
but now I'm emotionally numb about it.
You can only do so much to take care of people
and some things aren't within your control.
Oh, I know.
Keeping my hope up has been difficult.
Both Rex and I have...
I mean, we've just been existing for this year-plus now.
We've had to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
[Rex] When this happened, it just felt like the life was sucked out of me.
Things just stopped.
I've lost loved ones.
Everyone has lost loved ones, family, friends.
But when someone's gone missing and you think
something terrible has happened,
um, you don't know what to do with your grief, mourning.
I mean, am I grieving or mourning for nothing?
Is she out there?
It's a different kind of pain.
I don't know how people that have had missing
loved ones for years and years go on.
I really don't.
I just hope I can get that strength to do it.
You know, I would just say to anyone that may know
something about our daughter's disappearance
to please come forward.
That's the only plea I can make.
And for God's sake, please come forward and give us some information.