[water gurgling]
[Copelia] Christina would never have walked away from her family.
She knew she was loved.
[Eric] Whoever did this really knew what they were doing and did
not want her found.
[George] It seemed like during this entire process, we were
chasing her ghost.
The person responsible for what happened was calling
trick plays.
We just needed a few trick plays of our own.
And as soon as we saw that opening, we thought, man,
if we were going to get rid of a body, this would be
a great place.
[suspenseful music playing]
[dreary tones playing]
[Andrew] On January 12, 1995, at approximately 12:55
in the afternoon, the Cleveland Division of
Police got a missing person report from Jose Rivera.
Jose was reporting the disappearance
of his girlfriend, Christina Adkins.
She was 18 years old, about five months pregnant,
and lived with Jose.
He was 20 years old at the time.
Jose indicated that he was at work, and when he came home
that night, she was missing,
that nothing unusual had been happening at home,
that she had disappeared, and that was not something
she had done before.
[soft piano playing]
[Copelia] Christina was gentle.
She was almost angelic.
When she first told me that she was expecting,
she had a big smile on her face.
She was happy about it. She was looking forward to it.
So, when you don't see a person, like, for three days,
and you don't know what's going on, you don't hear anything,
I was really concerned and really worried.
Any missing persons case is, just on face value,
a traumatic and often potentially horrific scenario.
But when a young woman like Christina Adkins,
who happens to be five months pregnant, goes missing,
that sets off some serious alarm bells with police.
Jose and Christina lived approximately two blocks away
from Christina's family, so one of the first things we did was
go to her family and see if anybody had any information
where she might have gone.
[Eric] Police found out on the day she disappeared,
the family was preparing for another joyful milestone in
Christina's pregnancy.
They were making plans to go to the hospital and find out
the sex of her baby.
[Mark] But Christina's family told us Christina was fighting with
her boyfriend, Jose, recently, and was considering
breaking up with him.
[Andrew] We learned that she had a very tumultuous relationship.
He was extremely controlling.
[George] Her parents also told us, when Christina went missing
on that day, her and Jose were involved in
some type of altercation.
[Copelia] I know their relationship was not perfect, but she loved Jose
because she told me that she loved him.
I did tell her, "Christina, let me tell you something,
"if there's one thing that I believe in, is that a man
"should never mistreat a woman, so if you ever feel that he is
"mistreating you in any way, shape, or form, let me know.
Just don't put up with it."
What we learned about the relationship led us
to the conclusion,
there was much more to the story.
Jose was showing all the indicators of somebody
who was willing to commit violence against Christina.
[George] The only problem was, what if he did do something to
Christina, and where did he put her?
[Eric] Investigators also found out that night when Christina
disappeared, Christina had plans, in fact, to meet up with
a friend a block away to the home she shared
with her boyfriend.
[George] So we needed to see if Christina did, in fact, spend
the night at her friend's house.
There's the possibility maybe she was gonna lay low for
a couple days.
[Andrew] We talked to the friend and Christina was over at
her house that night.
[faint giggling]
The two were playing cards,
talking, watching TV.
Christina was planning on spending the night
at that house,
but she knew that Jose would expect her to be home.
So around 1:00, 1:30 in the morning,
she made the decision that she would walk just a few
houses up the street
back to the home that she shared with her boyfriend.
[Eric] As Christina was leaving, her friend did notice that
a car had pulled up,
and Christina was speaking with the driver.
The friend didn't make much of this, and nor did she see
Christina walk away from that car.
Nobody really knew if Christina had gotten into this car,
and if she did, where did she go?
[heavy stone scraping] [ominous tones]
[George] The investigation in the beginning took two avenues.
First of all, Jose wasn't too upfront about the argument that
they had had when he reported her missing, which sort of shed
a little bit of suspicion upon him.
And then second of all, is the mystery car that nobody
seemed to know anything about.
[Andrew] We needed to talk to Jose.
[Eric] Christina's boyfriend repeatedly told detectives that
he would never have hurt her.
Again, she was the mother of his unborn child.
He loved her.
[George] But based upon his lack of truthfulness about
the fighting, he was considered a main suspect, even though
there was no hard evidence.
So, as the investigation turned on, there was still
the question of that suspicious vehicle.
The focus was then directed to finding that vehicle.
There was door-to-door canvassing to see if anybody
had any recollection or any knowledge of
this suspicious car, or had seen anything that had happened
that night with Christina.
[Andrew] We interviewed a neighbor of Jose, named Elias Rivera.
He told us at the time, "Yeah, I saw her.
"She was crying, and she was upset, and she was saying that
she didn't want to go home."
[George] But he didn't remember or recall that suspicious
mystery car that Christina was seen talking to.
He had no knowledge of that vehicle.
[Andrew] It was super frustrating.
There was the fear of being defeated.
That is what keeps
me up at night.
[distant siren wailing]
[Eric] In a city as large as Cleveland, it's not out of
the question for cars to go unnoticed
or be difficult to find.
How do you go about looking for a single car in a city
like Cleveland?
[George] It was just, like, Christina had vanished off the planet.
It was sort of like watching a movie where, you know,
scenes disappear and, you know, there's a lot of like unknowns.
This was like one of those kinds of cases.
It was just a lot of missing parts.
But unfortunately, it's not a movie.
Christina was five and a half months pregnant at the time.
We were working tirelessly to try to find her,
but we were left with nothing, like we were chasing a ghost.
We were working hard to unravel
whatever mystery happened to her.
But it appeared that somebody had gone to great lengths to
make sure that Christina was never found, and just had some
type of joy in befuddling the police.
She looked like such an innocent person.
Things like that, they haunt you
when you're a policeman.
It's like some type of game, some type of sick game.
And there's a lot we didn't know at that time.
But we did know that we'd have to get into a mind of a killer.
[Eric] The night 18-year-old Christina Adkins went missing,
detectives didn't really have much information to go off of.
Christina Adkins just simply disappeared.
[distant dog barking] [low, pensive music playing]
[Andrew] Her family, told us Jose, Christina's boyfriend,
had put all of her belongings out on the curb,
ready to be disposed of in the garbage.
He couldn't have been more suspicious if he tried.
[Eric] Could you imagine to just carelessly toss her things out?
That was a very strange thing to do
when it's done by the victim's boyfriend, and the father of
this unborn child.
But on face value, that's not evidence of a crime that
doesn't necessarily point to any culpability on the part
of her boyfriend.
So the question becomes, you know, like,
was he trying to just erase her out of his life?
Was he not being forthcoming about what the type of
relationship that he really had with her?
Was he really the love of her life?
Did with Jose have something to do with her disappearance?
We didn't really know.
[Copelia] It was really sad when I heard on the news.
The family was really heartbroken.
Nobody knew exactly where Christina was, and we were
actually hanging up posters. We were looking for her.
[Eric] Then, in an incredibly bizarre turn of events, as the family
spent time putting up these flyers,
they were coming down right away.
They were being removed right away, almost as fast as
they were being put up.
The family would walk down West 25th Street, plastering these
flyers on streetlights and windows and walls.
And the next day, walk back down 25th again and those
flyers would all be gone.
It makes you wonder, was there someone in the community
who really didn't want Christina to be found?
You know, somebody went to great lengths to try to hide
the fact that Christina was missing, and to do things like
tearing down the posters.
That really complicated the investigation.
[Eric] As the '90s ticked into the 2000s,
into the 2010s.
2013, Christina had been missing
longer than she had been alive.
[George] After time goes on, you know, there's a pretty good
indication that, you know, Christina
was deceased.
And whoever was responsible for her abduction and murder was
going through great lengths to try to hide her body,
you know, from the police and give the family closure.
[Andrew] Christina's family during that time that she's missing,
they never lost hope that they would see Christina again,
that the case would be solved.
-Who do we want? -[crowd] Christina!
-When do we want her? -Now!
[news broadcast] Today, family and friends marched side by side
down Clark Avenue to the corner of West 25th and Kinkle Avenue,
the place where Christina Adkins was last seen.
[Andrew] We had always hoped, of course, to bring Christina home to
her family alive and unharmed, and unravel whatever mystery
happened to her, and it's a very difficult thing to do as
an investigator after years and years
of not finding somebody.
It is very easy to start thinking,
well, we'll never find her.
After so many years you have no choice but to think the worst.
We all had hopes that Christina was gonna be found,
but it was hard.
[birds chirping]
May 6, 2013 is a very important date in the recent history of
Cleveland and certainly in the story of Christina Adkins.
It was a day that changed me forever.
[Mark] There was an incident where neighbors heard screaming
coming from an address on Seymour Avenue in Cleveland.
One neighbor discovered a girl that was trying to kick
and punch her way out of a door of the house.
The neighbors helped her pull the door open, and she ran
across the street to get away from the house and ask somebody
for a phone or to call 911.
At the time, the FBI was involved in the investigation.
The two missing persons, Amanda Berry,
and another missing Cleveland teenager, Gina DeJesus.
When I responded to Seymour Avenue that day,
the ambulance was still there.
I immediately recognized the missing teenage girls,
Amanda and Gina, and there was another adult woman there.
There's a picture circulating right now, a picture of
Amanda and a young girl.
That girl was in the house with her, but as of yet,
we don't know who that girl is.
You know, outside of the news media frenzy,
alarm bells were going off, and one of the things that
family and police were thinking was, could this third woman be
Christina Adkins?
[news broadcast] Three missing women, gone since they were girls, found alive
together a decade later.
[Mark] The rescued victims from that house were Gina DeJesus
and Amanda Berry.
The name of the third female inside the house was not
immediately released to the media.
After all these years of waiting and hoping and praying,
here was some sort of break and a chance to
finally get some news.
Christina's family hightailed it over to the hospital to
hopefully find some information, to hopefully
encounter Christina there,
just waiting for some information about who was
in the hospital.
Could this third woman be Christina Adkins?
As the night wore on, the third woman was identified
as Michelle Knight,
who had been missing for the last 10 years.
And while Christina's family were incredibly thankful for
that young woman being safe,
they were also heartbroken that this one slim chance had been
taken away, that it was not Christina.
Even though we learned the identity of the third woman
was not Christina Adkins,
we still thought her disappearance
was connected.
[Eric] Detectives find out the man named Ariel Castro was
responsible for kidnapping and holding those three women
in his home for years.
[George] When the girls were abducted, witnesses would say that
they were talking to somebody in a car.
If we go back, the last time anybody saw Christina alive,
she was talking to somebody in a car.
So, same MO.
This is all the same neighborhood that we're talking
about, this near West Side neighborhood.
Everything involved here is within a square mile of itself.
So Ariel Castro's house and Christina's
disappearance, everything,
it's all just right there.
And the timeline was right.
Could Castro have done something with her in 1995
and then reset, and started doing it again in
the early 2000s?
[Copelia] Ariel Castro was somebody that we all actually, in a way,
grew up with, because we grew up in a close area where
the Castros were. We knew that he was scary.
I mean, he was creepy looking.
He would, like, look at you, and you could see it
in his eyes.
You could see the creepiness in him.
I mean, he just wasn't right.
[heavy stone scraping]
[distant, busy chatter]
[Andrew] I don't think I went home for days after May 6th.
We spent nights and weekends in the office poring over every
piece of evidence that we collected.
We thought of dozens of different theories that would
have involved Ariel Castro and Christina's disappearance.
We executed 19 or 20 separate search warrants at his house.
There was not a stone unturned in that house or on
that property.
You know, we looked in every corner.
We searched that house with multiple teams of
forensic experts.
[news broadcast] In addition to DNA, firearms, and fingerprint testing,
we're told BCI is also looking at other evidence to determine
if there are any additional victims.
[Andrew] But there was no evidence in that house that
Christina Adkins had ever been there.
[keys clicking] [distant office chatter]
[Andrew] But then we learned that Christina's boyfriend,
Jose, knew Ariel Castro.
[George] So there was that thought that maybe Ariel Castro, in company
with Jose Rivera, were responsible for what
happened to Christina Adkins.
[Andrew] We said, Jose has been a suspect in this case
for 18 years.
Jose was still living in the same house.
He was living there with his mother.
[George] We went back, grabbed Jose one more time,
and was brought in for questioning in Christina's
disappearance once again.
[Mark] He was asked a lot of questions about his connection to
Ariel Castro.
He was very uncomfortable, sweating,
I mean, there was a lot of signs that showed,
like, you know, he pretty much looks like he could be
responsible for this.
He was denying all allegations that we were thrown at him with
his involvement with Christina's disappearance.
[Andrew] We felt that Jose was not telling the truth.
And so we executed searches of his house and we brought
cadaver dogs in.
We thought that whatever happened to Christina
was well-planned out.
We all thought for sure that he had buried
her in the backyard.
We figured that would explain why her body had not
been recovered.
[Eric] What better place to hide a body than a backyard?
That way,
no one's gonna see someone carting a body out of the house
and being taken elsewhere.
[Andrew] It was not a light touch. We dug the backyard.
You know, we looked in every corner,
but we found nothing. That was beyond frustrating.
Without a body, we didn't even have a crime.
[Andrew] At this point, there was no way to connect her boyfriend,
Jose Rivera, with Christina Adkins' disappearance.
I keep telling everybody, "I'm an innocent man.
"I'm not a killer.
That's my girlfriend, that's my everything."
I wish she was right here right now.
The way I feel right now, I lost everything.
We know now, of course, that no evidence pointed to Christina's
boyfriend as being involved here.
And so detectives questioned, Was law enforcement even
looking in the right direction?
Ariel Castro was still on the radar of investigators.
Did Ariel Castro have some sort of involvement with Christina
Adkins' disappearance?
Whoever did this was diabolical,
a criminal mastermind.
But in a case like this, there are a lot of
unanswered questions.
All of our investigative focus and attention was still on
Ariel Castro.
So we focused on Christina's case with a completely
fresh perspective.
That was the first time that we said, "What are we missing?"
Law enforcement very quickly began interviewing neighbors,
trying to figure out who Ariel Castro was.
One of those neighbors was a man named Elias Acevedo.
And in speaking with Elias, law enforcement described him
as generally nervous and fidgety, even.
He appeared very uneasy.
That stood out to investigators.
Then you start looking, OK, well, who is Elias Acevedo?
And we start looking at his history,
and his history was shocking.
We found a report from 2004 where he was involved in
the abduction and sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl.
And that that assault had occurred at his home.
We found that it had been pled to a felony of the third
degree, and that he had served a very light sentence
on the case.
[Mark] Elias Acevedo lived a few streets away from Christina
Adkins, was a sex offender.
So that became a major red flag for us.
[George] I just had the feeling that there had to be something here.
I just had a feeling that they were somehow connected.
[Andrew] We start looking at Christina's report again, and one of
the things that jumped off the page was the original
investigators interviewed a neighbor named Elias Rivera,
and he told police at the time, "Yeah, I saw Christina on
the night she disappeared, and I saw her, she was crying."
But he didn't know what happened to her.
At the time, there was no reason to connect him with
Christina Adkins' disappearance, but by comparing
photos now, we discovered that was actually Elias Acevedo.
Back in 1995, he very intentionally gave
police a false identity. Why would you do that?
Those are the things that make you say, now we actually have
the right guy.
We had a new suspect to investigate.
We learned through interviews with multiple members of
his own family that Elias Acevedo, he was committing
these atrocities in his own home.
He was preying on his own children.
He was tormenting, torturing, sexually assaulting
his own family on a daily basis and exerting just
an unbelievable amount of control and power over his wife
at the time, and each of these kids.
So the stuff he did, it's just like,
it's -- it was mind blowing.
It took a lot of courage for Acevedo's family to
come forward.
They had been victimized, they had been beaten to a pulp
by this guy, and in so many ways they lived in fear.
He was a brutal guy.
[Andrew] When you finally click into the right track in
an investigation, it feels right.
And after 18 years, this finally felt right.
We had a feeling, we knew, I guess it was instincts,
that we were close to the end to knowing what had taken place
with Christina.
[George] We all believed the key to the crack in this case was
Elias' family and the cooperation,
given what he did to them.
And then as time went on, you know, Elias' wife was
willing to speak on what she knew.
[Andrew] She sat down and talked to us for a couple of hours.
One of the things that made it so remarkable is that
her memory was so clear.
She told us that she vividly recalled the day of
January 10, 1995.
When Christina disappeared, she remembered Christina Adkins
coming to her house.
Then Elias left to go to a bar.
She told us that he didn't come home until early that morning.
He went into the bathroom, and he smoked a cigarette,
and she braced herself for the assault that she knew
she was gonna get,
And it didn't happen.
And that stood out to her.
[water gurgling]
After talking to Elias' wife and poring over the timeline,
we believe that this is when he killed Christina.
One of our original theories was that he must have committed
this crime inside his house.
It was cold outside. It was dark.
So we wanted to search that.
We noticed there was an entrance and exit through
a trap door to the outside.
So you could have got in and out of that house without
going through a front door.
His wife would not have heard anything.
[Mark] There was a spot in the basement that kind of
opened up a gate.
And you accessed, like, an area under the porch that
was all dirt.
I describe Elias' house as a haunted house that didn't
charge for admission.
[Andrew] As soon as we saw that opening in the basement,
we thought, man, if we were going to get rid of a body,
this would be a great place.
We tore the house up pretty good,
but we didn't find anything.
[Andrew] It did not deter us in any way in our belief that we were
finally on the right track.
Not finding human remains did not mean that we didn't have
the right guy.
[suspenseful tones building]
[Mark] Everything was pointing towards Elias.
He must have thought of every possible way to dispose of
her and then pick the perfect place.
We just needed a little bit more time and a few trick plays
of our own.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Andrew] The job for any investigator is to move the ball down
the field, and we set out very early in this investigation to
move this ball, even if it's inch by inch, day by day.
And we knew that if we could just keep getting first downs,
we were going to solve the case.
It was at that point that we made a decision to make
our move, to talk to Elias Acevedo himself.
[Tim] Acevedo raped his family daily, intimidated everybody,
threatened to kill other family members if they ratted him out.
We knew he would be hard to break.
[Mark] We took him to the Cleveland FBI headquarters
and really sat down with him.
In the beginning, Elias did not want to talk with us.
He didn't feel comfortable with us, and he was denying all
allegations that we were throwing at him with
his involvement with Christina.
When we gave Elias the opportunity to take
a polygraph, he accepted.
And there's only one reason that somebody in his position
would do that. He thought he could beat us.
When he was confronted with his failures on those two
facts, I think really that's the straw that broke
the camel's back and convinced him that he wasn't gonna get
out of it this time.
[Tim] We told Acevedo that we were gonna give him
a limited opportunity to admit to us that he killed Christina.
And if he did it, then we would not seek the death penalty.
We called it a "blue light special," that the deal ends
when the light goes off.
[Mark] But he was hesitating.
[suspenseful music playing]
And still wasn't 100% sure he was going to confess
and tell us what we wanted to know.
Elias finally broke.
He confessed to murdering Christina Adkins.
Yeah, I choked her.
[heavy metal scraping]
We don't solve every case with a confession, but the ones that
we do are special. But we needed proof.
We needed to bring Christina Adkins' body home
to her family.
So we asked Acevedo to take us to her.
And he agreed.
So we leg shackled him and belly chained him and put
him in the car, and he took us turn by turn.
And he said, "Pull over here."
[Andrew] And he said, "Just on the other side of this Jersey barrier,
you'll go down a hill, and there'll be a sewer drain."
And I put her in the sewer drain.
So we walked down this hill,
and we came to the sewer drain.
And we lifted this top up and looked down in there.
[heavy metal scraping]
And I mean, I was shocked.
As clear as day, there were her remains
at the bottom of this hole.
18 years later, and I could see them by standing at the top of
this hole and just looking down.
It was unreal.
[siren wailing]
[Andrew] And when we exhumed Christina's body from the bottom of
the hole, we found an ID card with her name on it.
[Copelia] When they said that they found Christina's body, I remember
breaking down, crying, and my mother, too.
You know, all of us, we were emotional.
You know, we didn't expect for her to go through that,
especially the way she was taken.
It was...
and to throw her in a sewer, and a baby?
I mean, what kind of monster does that?
He's a monster.
He's Satan.
It was like a game of cat and mouse, where the mouse was
running law enforcement in circles.
Elias Acevedo thought he was clever.
He hid Christina's body in a place that was almost in --
in plain sight.
And, in fact, had used new construction and highway
infrastructure to hide Christina's body.
I mean, it was a absolutely diabolical
thing to do.
And then to have 18 years pass by,
it's astonishing to think about.
The odds of solving this case was like the kid who walks
up to his baseball coach and says, "Coach I'm gonna hit
a grand slam today."
You say, "Good, kid, first you got to set up
"the bases, you got to load the bases, right, then
you got to have the power to hit it over that fence."
And Agent Burke did both, he set up the bases and he hit
that ball right over the fence for the grand slam.
It was a heck of a day.
[Andrew] And we were able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that
Elias Acevedo and Elias Acevedo alone was responsible for
the murder of Christina Adkins.
[Tim] On December 30, 2013,
Acevedo was sentenced to prison for life on over 100
counts, without possibility of parole,
with an additional 445 years to serve.
He took my life, my love, my pride, my wife, my child.
But you know what? There's a guy up there,
and she's in good hands.
[Copelia] I hope Elias thinks about what he's done for the rest
of his life.
I hope he's tormented every day, every moment,
every second.
It's not only by what he did to Christina and that baby,
but also, you know, the grief that he caused.
I hope he's tormented.
I hope that he doesn't live in peace.
It really was a needle in a haystack.
Had the teens gone off the road
and they were stranded somewhere?
Why would someone do that to two teenagers?
It unleashed something we never even fathomed.