[laughs]
ELLY: I'm just recording her for no reason.
We joked around with stuff like this all the time.
I think she found it funny though.
It was just how we were with each other.
[Elly laughing]
STEPHANIE: Amber had a very caring heart.
She was a happy-go-lucky person.
JESSICA: I saw a lot of red flags,
but she wouldn't listen.
[Amber shouting]
I would tell her, I'd be like, "You better
call me, like, I got to hear your voice."
JAMES: The medical examiner, he indicated that this was
one of the worst she had ever seen.
[Amber talking, sobbing]
[officer talking]
STEPHANIE: I tried to talk her out of it,
but it all backfired on me.
[distant siren wailing]
ELLY: In October 2020,
me and my mom just got back from the store,
and then I decided to start recording on my phone.
He was in the kitchen.
He had a drink,
but that wasn't a surprise -- he drank every day.
Agh.
ELLY: I don't know why I started recording.
I just had, like, a gut feeling.
I had a lot of gut feelings whenever something was, like,
about to happen or like an argument was gonna happen,
and a lot of time, I was right.
He and my mom, Amber, they would often fight.
[Amber talking]
[John talking]
[Amber talking]
[John talking]
ELLY: He was gaslighting her -- he did it all the time,
saying that he didn't do it even though he did.
He would often say, "I never touched you," and he touched her
every time that she said he did.
[Amber talking]
[Elly shouts]
My mom said that I was gonna call the cops, because
I have said I would do that for her if she ever wanted.
[John talking]
[Amber shouting]
[Stephanie laughing]
NARRATOR: It's March 1998, in Toledo, Ohio.
[Amber talking]
NARRATOR: Stephanie Shelley videotapes a special moment
between her baby daughter, Samantha,
and her 11-year-old cousin, Amber.
[Amber talking]
STEPHANIE: This is my house in Toledo, Ohio.
Amber is helping my daughter, Samantha, walk.
Samantha was very wobbly.
She cannot actually stay up on her feet at all.
[LaDonna talking]
NARRATOR: Stephanie records her Aunt LaDonna,
Amber's mother, as she joins in the fun.
[laughter]
STEPHANIE: Amber was a lot like LaDonna when it comes to kids.
They both loved babies and loved being around them,
and they both had that motherly instinct.
Like mother, like daughter.
[laughter]
NARRATOR: LaDonna gave birth to Amber in 1987
when she was 18 years old.
Two other children quickly follow.
STEPHANIE: Amber was her oldest.
There's Amber, Brittney, and Eric.
NARRATOR: She raises her family as a single mother.
LaDonna and her three kids live
with her mother, Charlotte, in Sylvania, Ohio.
ERIC: Our mom had pretty bad health problems.
She had a quadruple bypass surgery at the age of 32,
and she was born with one kidney, three-quarters
of her uterus.
Um, she had pretty, pretty -- pretty bad health problems.
LaDonna's health issues were a major problem,
trying to raise three kids.
NARRATOR: LaDonna's friends and family step in to help her.
STEPHANIE: I would bring mainly Amber,
but sometimes Brittney and Eric over to my house, and they
would play with my kids, and I would feed them dinner,
and Amber would stay the night
many nights at my house and never
want to go home, because she loved hanging out at my house.
[Stephanie laughing] Yeah.
STEPHANIE: This was August 6th, 1998.
I'm recording it.
Come on. [laughing]
Amber's in the black and white shirt.
Somebody ugly walks up.
My house was always the happy, dancey, fun house.
That's LaDonna on the couch, and Amber was dancing the baby
next to her, and I think LaDonna told her to leave her alone.
ERIC: At that point in time,
I had no idea what my mom was really going through.
I don't think nobody realized how sick she really was.
STEPHANIE: I think hanging out at my house
helped LaDonna a lot, because it gave LaDonna
a way to get away from stress for a while.
[baby squealing]
I believe Amber saw my home as
a second home from almost the beginning,
because she kind of just welcomed herself
into my house and made herself at home.
NARRATOR: By January 1999...
[speaking indistinctly]
...Amber is spending most
of her time at cousin Stephanie's house.
[all singing]
This is my daughter Samantha's 2nd birthday party.
[all singing]
Well, it looks like when Samantha blows the candles out
that she's actually blowing them out.
But I'm actually the one blowing them out from the side.
[indistinct talking]
Amber makes the silly face.
[indistinct talking]
Amber spent several years
of her life at my house.
It was always a pop in, stay a few nights,
go home for a few nights type thing.
NARRATOR: In 2001, with her mother's health worsening,
Amber moves in with close family friend,
Jessica Cash, and her husband, Josh.
Amber is struggling at school, and Jessica helps
her get on track with attendance and homework.
JESSICA: Amber was around 14 years old
when she came to stay with me.
Josh and I were, um, a lot
like adopted slash foster parents to Amber.
Amber needed some stability in her life.
NARRATOR: In the Fall of 2003,
16-year-old Amber meets 25-year-old John Eichner.
I think John swept her off her feet and had
this promise of a wonderful life with him.
NARRATOR: John also impresses Amber's
12-year-old brother, Eric.
ERIC: I looked up to John.
He taught me stuff about working
on engines and taught me stuff about cars and mowers
and business.
John was a very, very smart individual.
NARRATOR: John has three children from a past
relationship and runs a successful computer
repair business.
He really took care of Amber when they got together.
Like, really took care of Amber.
NARRATOR: Early in 2004,
Amber moves into John's home in Toledo.
ERIC: It was fast.
My mom probably figured, hey, she's almost 18.
He seems like an all right guy.
He seems nice, you know, because he really did.
She always just wanted that stable family, and I think
that's kind of what drew her to him.
He was an older person and could rescue her,
be her knight in shining armor.
I was very worried.
One minute she's telling me she's met this guy.
Then she's moving in with him.
I saw a lot of red flags and tried to warn her,
but she looked past some of the warning signs.
JESSICA: Amber and John had their first daughter, Elly,
three years into the relationship almost.
ERIC: When Elly was born, they were doing stuff as a family.
John was cooking dinners and cleaning,
like, doing stuff with Amber.
NARRATOR: Amber and John marry in secret
two months after Elly's birth.
I actually found out later,
after they got married, from Amber's mom.
I was pretty devastated.
NARRATOR: Six months later,
after a lifetime of health problems,
Amber's mom, LaDonna, dies of a heart attack, age 39.
JESSICA: It was a devastating time for everybody.
She had just become a grandma and was so excited.
STEPHANIE: She was one of my favorite aunts,
and I was completely devastated.
NARRATOR: By now, Stephanie lives in Tennessee,
but she's determined to support her cousin, Amber.
At that point, Amber and I decided that
we were going to stay connected no matter what.
NARRATOR: Amber gives birth to her and John's second daughter,
Tori, in 2010.
Stephanie and her family make the 510-mile journey
from their home in Tennessee to visit Amber in Ohio.
[laughter]
We were visiting Brittney's house,
and we were standing on the porch.
STEPHANIE: And that is Amber
in the background in the white shirt.
I wanna come play now!
NARRATOR: Amber is pregnant with her third child.
The reason she kept having kids is
because she was trying to have a boy.
[Elly laughing]
Hi!
NARRATOR: Amber's oldest girl, four-year-old
Elly, entertains everyone in the living room.
[Elly making noises]
[Elly laughing]
[man speaking]
I don't remember any of this.
I was too little.
I was a very energetic child.
NARRATOR: Amber gives birth to Kailee in 2012.
A fourth girl, Sascha, arrives a year later.
Soon after, Amber confides in Stephanie
that her and John's relationship is troubled.
John would not provide them food, and he would disappear
for days on end
and would not provide her transportation to go to
the grocery store.
As the years went by,
he would isolate her more and more into the house,
and then she found messages,
hidden messages, between John and a woman
that she thought he was having an affair.
I was very worried.
NARRATOR: In October 2017, Stephanie drives her
family to Toledo to visit Amber.
[Stephanie laughing]
STEPHANIE: The shock on her face just to see us
standing there was the shock
I wanted to see.
That was a meaningful hug.
When she let go of me and right after she, I think, wiped
the tears or wiped her face,
she said he did sleep with her.
NARRATOR: That evening,
Amber reveals to Stephanie that John
abuses her, both mentally and physically.
STEPHANIE: The verbal abuse, calling her the names,
convincing her of mental illness when she wasn't ill,
the physical abuse, the hitting, the choking.
He would leave a vehicle but take the kids' car seats
so she couldn't drive anywhere.
At that point, she was already talking to me
and telling me about this abuse, nonstop,
over all of these years.
NARRATOR: Amber had given birth to her first daughter, Elly,
10 years earlier.
A closer look at a photograph from that time
reveals what appears to be a bruise on Amber's neck.
I would question her about it -- if it was a bruise,
she would always try to cover it up or say that she hit
a door.
Always some kind of excuse as to where any marks came from.
After that point, I was very worried about her safety,
and that's when I started
trying to work on getting her out.
But John used to tap their home phone,
so it was really hard for us to communicate.
ERIC: John keylogged Amber's cellphone.
So any text message,
any voicemail or phone call or anything
that came into Amber's cellphone
went to another cellphone that John had.
Everything was monitored.
Cars were GPSed.
Like, any movement she made was monitored.
It was like she was in prison.
NARRATOR: In June 2019,
a house near to Stephanie in
Tennessee goes on the rental market.
STEPHANIE: I knew I couldn't get her away from him
with her in Ohio.
So I messaged the landlord, and he agreed
to let Amber and her four girls move in.
It takes between an 11- to 12-hour drive
to get from Toledo, Ohio, to Dunlap, Tennessee,
and Amber and just the girls were supposed to come.
Moving up there was gonna be our new life.
It was going to be our fresh start.
STEPHANIE: At the very last moment,
John came with them, which was not the plan.
It all backfired on me,
but there was nothing I could do.
I figured getting Amber to Tennessee
was one step closer
to where I can help her to get away from John.
I think Amber was pretty settled.
She said it felt like home.
She had a vehicle to rely on and a job at a factory
in Dunlap.
John ended up being a stay-at-home dad,
and he did the cooking and the cleaning
and made it look like things would be different.
This is just a bunch of friends and family,
all lined up so we can watch
the little fireworks go off.
Amber in the black and white shirt,
and then next to her is John.
And he really laid it on thick
and made it look like he had changed.
People like that don't change.
He shows one thing on the outside,
and behind the doors, shows something completely different.
NARRATOR: Away from the camera,
John snoops on Amber during her breaks at work.
He would leave the girls at home at night and drive down
and sit in the parking lot and watch her during her breaks
to make sure she wasn't talking to anybody
she wasn't supposed to be.
NARRATOR: A year later,
Stephanie undergoes emergency surgery at the local hospital.
STEPHANIE: I spent four days in the hospital.
When I got home on that Sunday,
she came in and told me they were leaving,
and I started crying, and I begged her to
reconsider, and I told her it was a mistake.
Amber went to Genoa, 30 miles outside of Toledo.
We moved back, because John wanted to control her more.
He wanted the power he had before we moved there.
STEPHANIE: Amber and I still talked every day.
Within a couple of days,
she sent me a message that said, "You were right.
"I made a mistake.
He will never change."
ELLY: I don't know why I started recording.
Agh.
ELLY: I just had, like, a gut feeling,
like an argument was gonna happen.
NARRATOR: Elly's phone captures Amber and John in the kitchen.
My mom would take pills for, like, stuff that John said
she needed, because John made her think that she --
she had a lot wrong with her,
um, even though she was normal,
and she didn't have anything wrong with her.
[John talking]
[Amber talking]
STEPHANIE: Amber used to tell me that the medication
made her feel weird, and I used to tell her all the time,
then stop taking the medication.
You don't need it.
Well, she was diagnosed with
these illnesses because of John,
and she was worried that if they got divorced,
John would get the girls because of
these mental illnesses.
NARRATOR: Later that month,
Elly records another exchange between her parents.
I was downstairs sleeping on the couch, and it was
in the middle of the night, and then they started arguing.
So I pulled my phone out and started recording.
[Amber talking]
[John talking]
He grabbed her arm at one point.
[Amber talking]
JOHN: I didn't touch you.
[Amber talking]
[John talking]
[Amber shouting]
After that, he went up to his room,
locked her out, actually, and just slept.
NARRATOR: Amber confides in her friend, Josh Cash.
When she was a teen, Amber had briefly
lived with Josh and his now ex-wife, Jessica.
Amber had reached out to Josh, and she would go there
sometimes after work, or if she felt scared,
she would go and stay with Josh.
MATT: On March 14th,
there was -- there was a call for
domestic violence that occurred at John
and Amber's house.
Amber was gone overnight,
and when she had shown back up to the house,
John came out of the house,
upset and angry that she was gone overnight and wanted to
get her phone.
[Amber talking]
[officer talking]
[Amber talking]
[officer talking]
[Amber talking]
[officer talking]
[Amber talking]
There were no marks on her neck or on her body
that would have indicated a struggle.
And when the police talked to John, he explained that Amber
was a drug addict and had mental health issues
and essentially said that her word was not credible.
[officer talking]
[Amber talking]
[officer talking]
MATT: Five days later, on March 19th,
the Genoa Police Department received another call of
a domestic incident that
happened at John and Amber Eichner's house.
[officer talking]
[Amber talking]
[officer speaking]
[Amber talking]
[officer speaking]
John said, similar to the first incident, that Amber
has mental health issues and had taken drugs
and had been drinking.
OFFICER: Okay, so that's...
[Amber talking]
[officer talking]
[Amber talking]
[officer talking]
[Amber talking]
[officer talking]
The police told her that something she could explore
or go do is go file for a protection order,
and the court would have made John move out
and stay away from her. I don't believe that she did.
OFFICER: Okay.
[Amber talking]
ELLY: John said that we had COVID,
because we were all super sick.
The test did come back negative,
and my mom said, "The test came back negative.
What are you talking about?" He's like, "No, no, no,
we have COVID, the tests are wrong."
I knew it wasn't COVID. It was to keep her
inside the house for longer.
STEPHANIE: I think the quarantine made the abuse
that much more,
because she wasn't even allowed to go to work anymore.
She was getting more desperate to get out of the house.
We discussed on a regular basis, almost daily,
about finalizing the plans to her coming to Tennessee.
I think he knew her and I were talking
more serious about it, and the violence was getting worse.
ELLY: On April 15th, we were still very sick.
ELLY: Me and my mom talked that day.
[Elly talking]
We're just seeing how each other felt now.
My mom was feeling sick that day, too.
ELLY: And we said goodnight and I love you,
and then we went to bed.
[cellphone alerts]
I received a message on Amber's Facebook account
stating that she fell
and dropped her phone and broke it
and that Snapchat was not working anymore.
Her only way of communicating was on Facebook.
ELLY: The next morning I woke up,
and I was like, "Where is mom?"
John said that she was out with Josh.
Then I talked to my sister a little bit.
I was like, "So what did y'all do last night?"
They were like, "Oh, we were listening to their argument."
I was like, "Oh, well that's not good."
John said she'd be back, like, a day or two later.
NARRATOR: But five days later,
and with Amber still not home,
Elly receives a text message from her mom's phone.
ELLY: I got a message saying we're moving back to Tennessee
today and to pack your stuff.
I was in the middle of packing,
and John says, "We're leaving right now."
I got in the car.
We started driving
and driving.
We reached our destination.
He grabbed our stuff, we opened the door,
and he said to be quiet, just sit around the table.
STEPHANIE: I was driving home.
I pull into my driveway and get out,
and I walk into my door into my kitchen, and...
the girls are sitting around
my kitchen table, just sitting there.
There's no toys, no toothbrushes,
just six garbage bags full of clothes,
and John told them not to say
anything and not to move, and he left.
Elly thinks they are moving here and Amber
is gonna drive down later to meet us.
I got a message on the night of April 21st from
Amber's Facebook account
that the Suburban was loaded and she was gonna head
to Tennessee.
Amber was supposed to arrive in
Tennessee by the morning of April 22nd,
but she never did.
Over the next couple of days,
I tried calling and messaging Amber several times.
I was extremely worried,
because I knew that there is
no way Amber would go that long
without contacting her girls.
NARRATOR: Back in Ohio,
Amber's family calls the police.
MATT: Earlier in the morning on April 23rd,
the Genoa Police Department received
a call regarding a missing person.
It was Amber Eichner.
Genoa Police Chief Matt Herrig responded to the home,
didn't get any answer at the house.
He eventually made contact with the landlord,
who ultimately let him in the house.
There was no obvious signs of struggle,
no obvious signs that something had happened in the house.
[officer speaking]
JAMES: When Chief Herrig was on scene,
he did speak to a local resident
and discovered that John had last been seen at
the residence,
initially leaving on April 20th
and then returning the following day.
He had a fire in the backyard and was burning paper,
uh, and what appeared to the resident to be photographs.
By the time April 23rd had rolled around,
no one knew his actual whereabouts
or what he was doing.
ERIC: So the whole family, we all came together.
We made flyers with multiple pictures
of John and Amber on one flyer.
It was all over Facebook.
We called the news.
We really made sure we put
the work in that was necessary to find Amber.
NARRATOR: It's now 11 days since Amber
was last seen by her girls.
A witness reads the flyer and calls
investigators to report new information about John.
[officer speaking]
Taylor described that John was having an affair with her.
Taylor Pontin had indicated that John had contacted her
and asked if he could bury a dead dog in her backyard.
She noticed that John was pretty deep in the hole,
she said, and thought to take a picture just because it was
weird how deep in the hole he was,
because all you could see was the top of his head
and a little bit of a shovel.
NARRATOR: Later, on April 26th, officers begin
the painstaking excavation of the backyard.
In my heart, I hoped that we would find a dog.
At approximately six feet to seven feet down
is where a portion of a black duffel bag became apparent.
It was clear immediately that we had discovered
human remains.
We saw a human leg covered in what
appeared to be fleece pajama-style pants.
It was known that Amber did have
a set of pajamas that matched that.
The medical examiner was able to tell us
that morning that the cause of death was strangulation.
The teeth were missing.
The fingerprints and footprints had been removed
by burning
to essentially prevent us, as law enforcement,
the ability to identify whose body this was.
The medical examiner indicated that she had done
thousands of autopsies throughout the course of
her career
and that this was one of the worst she had ever seen.
MATT: We started to dive into John himself.
When we were looking through his financial records,
we found that he had been using his bank card and was
spending money at local stores.
We had video surveillance of John at the Home Depot store
in Rossford, Ohio,
where he had purchased a large pack of Sawzall blades
and a large roll of plastic sheeting.
We also had him on video at an army surplus store
purchasing a black duffel bag
that was an identical match to the black duffel bag that
Amber's body was discovered in.
During this time, John was still out in the wind.
We weren't sure where John was.
We got a tip from one of John's friends' girlfriend,
and she told us that John had borrowed a car
from her boyfriend.
So the friend had given a timeframe when
John was supposed to bring the car back.
So now we had a smaller window
on where we could try to find John.
And that's where we set up surveillance.
NARRATOR: When John returns the car to his friend,
the police close in.
MATT: John was arrested. I do not believe that he,
at that point, thought the police were on to him.
So when they arrested him,
I think they somewhat took him by surprise.
NARRATOR: Deputies transport John to the Ottawa County
Sheriff's Office.
They interview him about Amber's disappearance.
The detective sergeant used a strategy on just
seeing what information he would give up
without knowing that we knew.
She didn't give him any insight that we
had any of the evidence that we had taken.
[detective talking]
[John talking]
NARRATOR: John tells detectives that Amber told him
that she planned to stay with her cousin, Stephanie,
in Tennessee for two weeks.
John says that the number of clothes Amber packed
indicated that she intended to leave him for good.
[John talking]
[detective talking]
JAMES: At a certain point in the interview,
our detective changed the tone and let him in on what we knew.
[detective talking]
[John talking]
[detective talking]
[John talking]
[detective talking]
[John talking]
[detective talking]
[John talking]
[detective talking]
[John talking]
[detective talking]
JAMES: He was cornered.
There was damning evidence that corroborates and places
him at the scene of the murder,
at the scene where the body is discovered, and also purchasing
everything that was used in covering the crime up.
We actually charged John with the murder of Amber before
we even had the DNA results
from the body that we discovered in the hole.
MATT: Eventually, we were able to confirm
100 percent that it was Amber through DNA.
I had to figure out a way to tell four girls
that their mom was dead, and their dad killed them.
[Elly talking]
When I found out,
I was very upset.
Distraught, just very -- just depressed.
I was drained mentally, and I was just very tired.
NARRATOR: Investigators piece together the events
that led to Amber's death.
JAMES: We were fairly certain of what happened,
that John had been abusive to Amber
for a significant period of their relationship.
He controlled most of the aspects of Amber's life,
one of which was monitoring
and supervising access to her phones.
[Amber talking]
Amber felt trapped by John, she felt
controlled by John, and didn't see a way out.
[Amber talking]
Ultimately, though, it's our belief that Amber had finally
had enough
and was intending to leave John and move to Tennessee
with the children.
He discovered the fact that Amber was leaving for good.
He finally snapped and choked Amber to death.
At that point, he began to cover up what he had done.
He started by lying to his children,
saying mom left to go with a friend.
He then cleaned up after himself in the bedroom.
Then he buried her, continuing to utilize
Amber's phone and talk to her friends via text,
pretending to be Amber, eventually dropping the kids
off in Tennessee.
His plans and his story fell apart literally within days.
Once the family realized that
Amber was, in fact, missing,
everything came crashing down really quickly.
NARRATOR: John Eichner's trial is set for July 13th, 2021.
On June 12th, a county jail guard finds
John dead in his cell.
JAMES: One of our corrections officers
discovered that John had hung himself.
NARRATOR: He leaves behind a suicide note.
STEPHANIE: I was speechless.
I was angry that he took the easy way out.
He's not gonna have to answer for anything.
He's not gonna have to pay.
I am the legal guardian of Amber's daughters.
[laughing]
I've got an amazing support system, and I'm gonna give them
the best I can give, and Amber's gonna support me from
up above -- that's all I can do.
[Elly talking]
My mom would be happy to hear that I'm
living with Stephanie in Tennessee and that I'm happy.
She'd be happy.
-Yeah! -[baby squealing]
STEPHANIE: I remember Amber as a loving,
caring person, and I miss her every day.
You're here?
STEPHANIE: I miss that smile and that laugh,
and I would do anything to give her a hug again.