At 9 p.m. on a Saturday night, Veronica Kasprzak went to check on her 15-year-old daughter Annie, and discovered she was missing from her room. In a panic, her stepdad, James, took a second look through Annie’s bedroom and found something odd: a note from Annie informing her parents that she was running away from home and not to bother looking for her.
Frantic, Veronica called 911. After police in the small suburb of Draper, Utah, put out an APB (all points bulletin) and began to track Annie’s cell phone, Veronica and James were stunned to learn that, according to the GPS tracker, Annie wasn’t very far away from home. Annie’s parents watched as the cell signal suddenly sped up and then disappeared. Veronica dialed Annie’s cell phone again and again – but never got an answer.
While officers headed toward Annie’s last known location, her mom and stepdad were left waiting for Annie to walk through the door. At only 15 years old, Annie was intent on appearing older and had been acting out. Her mom knew Annie had been having sex and that she had made it clear that she wanted to be a mother. Veronica had taken Annie for counseling and had put her on birth control, but Annie seemed determined to have a child. As Veronica waited for word from the police, she focused on her daughter’s note, which mentions that she was not “P.” Veronica knew that the “P” stood for pregnant.
Just 15 hours after Annie was reported missing, a jogger in the town of Draper, Utah, spotted what looked like a pool of blood under a pedestrian bridge. The jogger believed that the blood came from an animal, but when Draper Police Detective Dereck Johnson responded to the scene, he found a red shoe under the bridge.
At the crime scene, investigators didn’t have much to go on. There was little evidence: no murder weapon, no sign of Annie’s cell phone. A team of searchers were called in to dredge the Jordan River, and it was not long before police confirmed that the body of a young female had been found. At first, the body appeared to be that of an Asian woman in her mid-twenties. But after the individual was brought to the morgue, police believed it was Annie Kasprzak.
When Detective Johnson contacted Annie’s mom, she had the horrible and unthinkable task of identifying her daughter through a photograph. Veronica insisted that Annie had no enemies, and couldn’t believe anyone would want to hurt her little girl. It was not long before the media in Salt Lake City got wind of what was happening in the suburb of Draper, and leads began to pour in to the Draper PD.
But who would have wanted to kill this 15-year-old-girl? Had she been hiding something?
It took years of intense police work, of sifting through false leads and roads to nowhere, before a rookie female detective, Jacklyn Moore, untangled a web of secrets and lies. Exactly what had Annie Kasprzak been caught up in? And just how did this rookie investigator finally expose and capture a killer? Tune into True Crime With Aphrodite Jones tonight at 9/8c on Investigation Discovery to find out.