After learning the details about Sarah Zuber’s death, OPB journalists Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas are reluctant to engage in an investigation that slips into true crime tropes.

The pair attend True Crime 101 at Oregon State University and speak with Professor Justin St Germain, whose life has been shaped by violent crime. They learn who typically dictates a true crime story: the police, the community and the media.

Will those tools offer a way to better understand why the Zuber family doesn’t have answers six years after Sarah’s death?

Leah Sottile: I want to confess something to you. I don’t really like true crime.

I know, you’re like: “Wait, how can you not like true crime? Isn’t that what we’re listening to right now? A true crime podcast about a young girl’s mysterious death and the quest to get answers about what happened?”

In some ways, yes. But in a lot of ways, no.

Journalism about crime being labeled as true crime has always bugged me. True crime podcasts and movies can create entertainment out of other people’s loss, reveling in the bloodiest details. But journalism done correctly adheres to a code of ethics. We have rules around accuracy, verifying information and minimizing harm.

In the summer of 2024, producer Ryan Haas and I had reservations that by taking on the story of Sarah Zuber, we risked falling on the other side of that line. We wanted to write about this case. But we didn’t want to fall into true crime tropes, so we decided to get an education.

Justin St. Germain: Okay, let’s go ahead and get started then. A couple little housekeeping things…

Sottile: One afternoon, we took a drive to Corvallis, Oregon to attend “True Crime 101” at Oregon State University. About a hundred students sat in a big amphitheater-style classroom.

St. Germain: If you missed it, we watched the video about what is a protagonist? What does that mean to think about the protagonist of a story?

Sottile: The class is taught by a writer named Justin St. Germain. On the day we sat in on his class, he started by dimming the lights and cueing up a film. You’ve probably seen it, or at least heard of it – the famous Zapruder film.

St. Germain: You cannot show this on American television in 1963…

Sottile: It’s the 1963 footage of a presidential motorcade winding slowly through a parade in Dallas, Texas. People in suits and dresses line both sides of the street. In one of the cars is President John F. Kennedy, and First Lady, Jackie Kennedy wearing a pink dress and a matching hat. All of a sudden, there’s an explosion of blood and Kennedy slumps toward his wife. There’s no sound, but it’s clear he’s been shot. And it’s clear that Jackie Kennedy is screaming.

St. Germain: TV stations owned, bought a copy of it and they had it, but they didn’t show it and they didn’t show it because of the American attitude toward violence at the time.

Sottile: As St.Germain’s class watched, no one reacted when the bullet hit Kennedy.

St. Germain: Whereas, now a lot of you have seen this Zapruder film just sort of ambiently. You can see it on YouTube. There’s a hundred different versions of it. Pretty much everybody who grows up in America now sees it at some point in their lives.

Sottile: It’s a perfect video to play in a class about true crime. St. Germain talked about how the video shifted the way violence was portrayed in American media. Americans since then have become much more comfortable with seeing real violence. To really understand true crime, St. Germain said, you have to understand media in this particular era. And even more, you have to understand one specific book.

St. Germain: So today we’re talking about pages 30 through 100 of “In Cold Blood,” which gets us through the first part of the book.

Sottile: Truman Capote’s 1965 book, “In Cold Blood,” is what scholars often point to as the very first true crime book. It covers a horrific murder scene in rural Kansas. And with it, Capote created the framework for how true crime stories are typically told.

And, of course, if you know anything about “In Cold Blood,” you know Capote created a genre in which facts don’t really matter if they get in the way of a good story.

What happened to Sarah Zuber isn’t just a story, though. It’s painful and real and confusing. And yet, that hasn’t stopped many people over the years from creating their own stories about what happened. If we were going to face our own discomfort with this label of true crime and what it means for Sarah Zuber, we knew we had to collect all of those stories from all of those people and find out for sure what was fact and what was fiction.

From Oregon Public Broadcasting, this is Hush. I’m Leah Sottile. This is Episode 2: Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead.

Sottile: Truman Capote is a fascinating character. He was a queer novelist who grew up in Louisiana and Alabama, who made it big as a writer in New York City in the late 1950s.

“In Cold Blood” skyrocketed him to fame. The book is all about the 1959 murder of a family in a rural Kansas town, and Capote’s obsession with the case. In writing it, Capote created a new kind of book and capitalized on audiences’ voyeurism. People wanted to read about horrible things, and Capote knew that.

Professor Justin St. Germain has written an entire book about “In Cold Blood,” and in his class, he wrote a few important points on the board.

St. Germain: How does the book approach violence? This is a book about a violent act.

Sottile: Capote took this murder and tried to impose a much bigger meaning on what it suggests about humanity, which is something true crime continues to do today.

St. Germain said Capote also wanted the book to unfold like a Greek tragedy, and he explained to the students which groups of people play a role in telling that tragedy.

The police, the media and the local community, or what St. Germain calls “The Greek chorus.”

St. Germain: In a lot of ways, the community just becomes obsessed with this crime and who did it. And it’s the thing, again, if you grew up in a small town, there’s always like one thing the town needs to be talking about, and it changes, and some things last one day, some things last a month. In this case, it’s a quadruple murder, so it lasts a long time and it really takes over this community.

Sottile: Part of what compels St. Germain about “In Cold Blood” is that it isn’t true. Capote fabricated entire sections of that book. And yet a whole genre of crime entertainment is built upon it, hiding behind that word “true.”

“In Cold Blood” made Capote rich, and the book laid the groundwork for all of true crime.

Movie trailer voiceover: In Cold Blood.

Sottile: Within a year of the book’s publication, Hollywood had made a movie out of it.

Voiceover: What is the reality behind the appearance? Richard Brooks, a director of great forcefulness, was determined to capture the reality with absolute honesty.

Sottile: After Capote sold the film rights, the Hollywood crew quickly moved to Kansas, where the Clutter family was murdered, and started recording in the real locations.

Voiceover: The crime depicted in “In Cold Blood” took place inside this house. It is reenacted inside this house so that the motion picture itself becomes a terrifyingly true story of our generation, a generation both repelled and attracted by violence.

Sottile: I, for one, am horrified by that. Going into a murder victim’s home and shooting a Hollywood movie that took liberties with a book that took liberties with reality? It is repelling. And yet people ate it up.

But we kept wondering, how different is true crime today from this origin point? St. Germain talked to us in his office about why teaching True Crime 101 is so personal for him.

St. Germain: I think part of this class kind of grew out of being somebody whose mother had been murdered and then just seeing true crime everywhere all the time.

Sottile: In September 2001, St. Germain’s mother was murdered. He wrote an amazing book all about what happened, called “Son of a Gun.”

St. Germain: One of the things that bothers me from my particular position, somebody who lost my mother to murder, to violent crime, is how rarely the story of the victims gets emphasized. Where it’s like, what does it actually mean to then have to deal with this? Not only the loss itself, but the media attention.

Sottile: His mother was killed before podcasts were around, before journalists and storytellers looked at every crime as a chance to produce the next “Serial.” But even back then, the way the media covered what happened was awful.

St. Germain: But it’s like, the Tucson News ran it as this kind of quirky, very, very short article, quirky kind of like, “Oh, murder mystery in Tombstone, Arizona. Old West murder mystery.” And I just lost it.

Sottile: We talked to St. Germain about our concerns, that reporting on Sarah Zuber’s case could come across as just another true crime podcast.

St. Germain: I feel like I understand both sides of that. And it’s like, if you’re a journalist, if you’re out reporting, you also have a right to tell a story, and…

Ryan Haas: I don’t know. Do you? I feel like that’s a tricky thing that I have gone over a few times with stories. It’s like, if the family of the victim does not want to participate or feels negative about it, is what we’re doing actually ethical?

St. Germain: Oh, yeah, but you as the creator have to stand up for the ethical questions, too, you know? And I don’t know. I think the only way I’ve ever seen to answer that is what we’re talking about. It’s like, why are you doing this? What positive thing might you be trying to accomplish?

Sottile: So many of these ethical quandaries with true crime, like turning a family tragedy into entertainment, come back to “In Cold Blood.” It’s a book that largely relies on the police narrative of what happened to that family, and little else.

Capote got access to the police files in that case by schmoozing with the lead investigator. In return, the investigator was portrayed as the hero.

A back-scratching deal, all under the guise of truth.

St. Germain: A lot of times we just talk about that. Why does a genre… Nobody says ”true memoir,” other nonfiction genres don’t say “true journalism.” Why do we have this giant “true” at the beginning of it? And what does that actually mean? Because in a lot of cases it’s not that true, and really, what it does is it convinces you that it’s true. It does things to convince you this is real.

Sottile: The hard part of writing about a crime as a journalist is that true crime pitfalls are everywhere. Tropes and cliches and stereotypes just waiting to grab you. The bereft family. The hard-nosed detective. The big reveal in the second-to-last episode. The pondering ending that makes the listener think about what it all really means.

It’s kind of a farce. A performance. Even now, you know that I know things that you don’t know in this story.

But going to True Crime 101 was helpful, because it gave us a different way to think about our work. Sarah’s death was a true crime story that had been told by several different groups – the police, the community, and the media. Maybe we could separate these different stories and see where things actually went wrong, and why the Zubers still don’t have answers.

We started with the police files, the most common source of information in a true crime story.

There has been a lot of back and forth between the Zubers and law enforcement over these files. I won’t bore you with it, but the investigation into Sarah’s death has been closed at times and open at other times. Then closed again for no obvious reason. Then open.

The point is, eventually, the Zubers got a lot of the case files during those closed times and shared them with us. And then we requested more until we had everything.

One day at the OPB office, after reading all those files, we cleared off a whiteboard and wrote down everything we knew about the Zuber case.

Haas: No serious new leads have been developed. No arrests have been made. No explanation for Sarah’s injuries have even been given.

Sottile: And the case is open and closed, then open and closed. Open and closed and, yeah…

Haas: Then the question is, what does that say about this place where everybody knows everybody? There are no secrets, allegedly, and yet there’s no answers about what happened to this girl 400 feet from her door. And if it’s up to the police or the community chorus or the media to get answers in a true crime story, none of them have delivered here.

Sottile: So, why are we doing it, then? So we can just document the failure of everything? Because that’s the thing. That’s where I think we come back to, so we are just a true crime podcast. We are no different than anybody else because we don’t have the investigative mechanisms to move the needle forward.

Haas: Well, it’s too late. I mean, what are you going to do at this point? What evidence is there? I mean, you’ve been through the fucking police file. It’s so lacking in leads or anything. They’re essentially waiting for someone to come forward and confess.

Sottile: Do you sense our frustration?

The files had a complete lack of leads. We were looking for true things to hold onto but there were so few.

Columbia County’s population is about 54,000 people, so it isn’t that big of a place, and yet no one seemed to know anything that proved to be of use to the investigation. It was weird.

It’s important you understand this place, so let me give you the lay of the land.

Columbia County, like most of Oregon, is vast and rural. As the crow flies, it isn’t far from Portland, the state’s most populous city. You can be in the center of downtown Portland and get to the edge of Columbia County in about 30 minutes. But in many ways it’s a world away.

The county hugs the Columbia River, and Highway 30 strings each of its major towns together like beads on a necklace. There’s Scappoose, a small suburb. There’s St Helens, where the county government is based.

And then there’s Rainier. It’s a tiny port town where big ships cruise through the fog down the Columbia from the Pacific Ocean. On sunny days, clear views of two snow-capped volcanoes – Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier – can be seen across the river.

Rainier is pinned between the river on one side and forest on the other. This county is a timber hub, and so the banks of both sides of the Columbia are piled high with logs. If this is all sounding very “Twin Peaks”, those comparisons aren’t lost on me.

It’s a small town. There are a few stores, a weed shop. There are a couple places to eat, and a surprising number of taverns. And then there’s Grocery Outlet, where Sarah worked. It was one of the first places police looked when they investigated Sarah’s death.

Eleanor Mason: Everybody knows everybody. That’s one thing.

Sottile: Eleanor Mason moved to Rainier as a kid, and in her early 20s, she worked with Sarah at Grocery Outlet.

Mason: There’s pros and cons to that. It’s just tight-knit. Everyone knows everyone. There’s a very big sense of church and family and closeness.

Sottile: Eleanor thought Sarah was sweet and goofy.

Mason: We hid her in this giant box in the warehouse, like this massive box. I made another coworker help me lift, attempt to lift it off the ground. and I was like, “I don’t know why it’s so heavy.” And the other coworker was like, “What the hell is in this?” and opened it, and Sarah jumped out and scared the crap out of her. It was fantastic. It was perfectly planned. It was a good time.

Sottile: Eleanor heard the news of what happened to Sarah like a lot of other people: She read about it the next morning on Facebook.

Mason: About 11 a.m., an article popped up on some Rainier page. There’s Concerned Citizens and a bunch of pages on Facebook, and it popped up on one of those, and it said, ”Young girl’s body found.”

Sottile: Not long after reading that post, Eleanor’s phone rang. It was another co-worker at the grocery store.

Mason: She gave me a call and said… Her only words were, “Ellie, it’s Sarah,” and instantly I knew what that meant.

Sottile: Eleanor didn’t have a lot of useful information for police when they came to talk to her, despite seeing Sarah at Grocery Outlet the night she died. Eleanor said Sarah looked calm and relaxed that night.

She did tell the police one thing that she saw: a green bubble next to Sarah’s name on Facebook Messenger around 11 p.m., meaning she was probably online at that point.

It all seemed so normal, innocuous as far as a police investigation went.

In a lot of true crime stories that take place in small towns, these types of boring details often get played up in a quest to turn the story into something bigger and more universal. The place itself is often portrayed as idyllic, where nothing bad could ever happen. And that adds to the fear and intrigue. If something like this – a mysterious death like this – could happen here, where everyone knows everyone, then it could really happen anywhere, couldn’t it?

Well, Columbia County doesn’t fit that trope, if you ask the people who live there.

Sottile: From what you’re saying, it sounds like such a tight-knit community. Did it feel like the kind of thing that was like, that doesn’t happen here in Rainier?

Mason: No, actually. Weirdly, when I moved here, I heard all sort of stories of people going missing and stuff in town, and I don’t have any sources, but I can say I heard this one story of this lady who disappeared from the Rainier High School bus garage, and they never found her, apparently. And they just assumed she was dead based on how much blood loss there was at the scene in the bus garage. And apparently you hear it all from all sides of, like the older people in town, there’s always spooky stories like that. I’m sure there’s plenty of secrets Rainier has.

Sottile: In newspaper archives, I found stories about this case she was referring to. In 1976, a school bus driver from Rainier named Vicki Brown went missing. Inside her bus, investigators found blood. But to this day, she’s never been found.

And speaking of true crime: Ann Rule, the famous true crime writer, wrote a chapter in one of her books all about this strange case.

This sense that Columbia County is maybe more dangerous than it appears came up when we first sat down with Sarah Zuber’s parents, too.

Randy Zuber: There’s an old saying: If you want to murder someone, you go to Columbia County and do it.

Rebecca Zuber: That’s a true thing.

Sottile: Okay, so here is where the facts do get in the way of a good story. The numbers don’t exactly back up this idea that Columbia County is dangerous. There are some disturbing deaths. Like in 2016, the body of a 24-year-old woman was found dumped off a rural road. Later, three people went to prison for killing her.

But since 2018, there have been five homicides in the county – many of them vehicle crashes along Highway 30 – which means people aren’t being killed at an alarmingly high rate here.

Still, the perception of Columbia County as a dangerous place influences how the Zubers and others think of Sarah’s death.

I asked the detectives investigating Sarah’s death if the county was different from anywhere else in terms of women being found dead in ditches or the woods.

Det. Dave Peabody: As far as there’s a lot of women found in the ditches, I would have to disagree with that because I think we would know about that. You correct me if I’m wrong, Lieutenant.

Lt. Steve Salle: I can’t conjure up a memory of a dead woman in a ditch other than Zuber.

Sottile: It wasn’t the last time they’d tell us people’s perception of this case departs from what they see as the facts.

Sottile: The police account is often the most valued in a true crime story. After all, it’s the official written account. The words that are preserved in reports and affidavits.

Truman Capote also kind of set a standard here for all the crime writers after him. He relied heavily on records and reports that detectives fed him. He convinced the lead investigator on the case to let him have diary entries from a victim that were in police evidence. It shaped what readers would think about both the killers and the victims in that story.

If you listen to many true crime podcasts, you know not a lot has changed since Capote’s book. The police narrative is still essential and is mostly seen as the correct narrative.

This idea that the police are always right is one of those tropes you almost can’t avoid, even for us. The police files were the first place we looked for information.

When Abbi Zuber’s 911 call came in, and the call from the neighbor who found Kati screaming, the police quickly called out on their radios.

Salle: I think I heard first.

Sottile: That’s Lieutenant Steve Salle. He’s been in law enforcement since the late 1970s. A jeans-and-workshirts kind of cop who’s more comfortable knocking on doors than doing computer work. He was one of the first officers on the scene.

Salle: I was here, and one of our deputies arrived on the scene and reported that there had been a body found alongside the road. So I got in my car immediately and went that way and notified CCOM to do a major crime scene call out.

Peabody: That’s where I come in.

Sottile: And that’s Detective Dave Peabody. He’s a polo-shirt kind of cop, and when a major crime happens anywhere in the county, he gets the call.

Peabody: As you quickly assess a scene, you basically start forming ideas of how something happened, right? The who, what, where, when, why. And I think I went in – well, I know I went into this case thinking that this was likely a hit-and-run of some nature. That was my initial, so you treat that as a homicide.

Sottile: Immediately treating this case like a homicide meant officers had to fan out and start collecting evidence. By the way, there’s a difference in the law between a murder and a homicide. A homicide means someone has been killed by another person. Murder means someone meant to kill that person.

Since it was a homicide investigation, Columbia County’s major crimes team brought together officers from five different agencies to help.

All these officers from nearby towns inside the county and the Oregon State Police were soon on scene. They walked the woods along the shoulder, and kept people from driving up the road. Salle and Peabody started to piece together what they thought happened.

Peabody: That is a typical rural county road, away from the highway a distance. It is sporadic houses or residences along the way. It is an asphalt road, little to no shoulder.

Salle: It was fairly steep, actually.

Peabody: Yeah. So I mean, a bad spot. Little to no shoulder and a curve, so it’s blind to people coming from either direction.

Sottile: Do people go fast on that road? I mean, is that…

Peabody: Yes.

Sottile: Okay. If you know that road and you drive it a lot, you might…

Peabody: Yes. The people that know the road and are comfortable with the road and know every turn, yeah, they can tend to drive a little fast.

Sottile: Peabody and Salle say there are details of the Zuber case that even they will never know.

Peabody: There’s many possibilities for why she ended up on the side of the road. Did a car come around the corner and she simply tried to hop off the side of the road, which was wet, muddy, slippery, and stumble and fall? Or was she really hit and knocked into the ditch? Same difference, she’s in the ditch, right?

Sottile: I’ve seen photos of Sarah’s body when police found it. It’s in their files, too. And I just want to clarify that ditch is a strong description. The shoulder along this road in 2019 was basically flat. There was a small embankment around this corner, and that’s where Sarah was found, a few feet from the road edge. It’s not a steep ditch.

In 2019, the police were in a race to collect as much information as they could from the area in those first 24 hours. One officer from the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office started going door-to-door to the houses on Sarah Zuber’s road, trying to learn if anyone had seen what happened.

Deputy Cody Pesio: Hello, I’m Deputy Pesio with the sheriff’s office. How are you today? The reason I’m up here today is, we’re just trying to wrap our heads around what’s going on because there’s still a lot of unknowns. Were you out and about at all last night?

Individual #1: No, I was in the house.

Pesio: Oh, okay. From about 11 o’clock last night to noon today, you were at home the whole time?

Individual #1: Yeah, damn it.

Pesio: Alright, no problem, I appreciate the help.

Individual #1: Yeah, does it look like somebody got hit by a car?

Pesio: I can’t say anything right now, I’m sorry. Take care, ma’am.

Sottile: Several people told the officer they drove by the spot where Sarah’s body was found. But none of them saw her laying there.

Individual #2: No, I didn’t notice anything. I was just kind of inside most of the day. I left for work this morning. So I would have driven by there sometime between 6:30 and 6:40, and I didn’t notice anything.

Pesio: 6:30 and 6:40? So you drove down from your house about 6:30 this morning? Down and went through by…

Individual #2: Just down to Highway 30.

Pesio: And never seen anything in the…

Individual #2: No, I didn’t see any people. Nothing.

Pesio: OK.

Sottile: The police set up a tip line.

Dispatcher: Dispatch.

Individual #3: Hi, I would like to talk to somebody about some information about the Sarah, the Zuber death.

Dispatcher: OK, what are you reporting?

Individual #3: OK, I know how you go ‘he said/she said’ and stuff like that, but you know social media…

Sottile: And detectives started following up on tips.

Peabody: You know, sometimes DAs step in over what I think.

Individual #4: What the hell’s going on today?

Peabody: OK, so basically I’m here. We’re investigating the death of Sarah Zuber, and you said something on the CB radio a while back.

Individual #4: About her walking the road all the time?

Peabody: I’m just gonna ask, how do you get to work?

Individual #4: My red pickup over there. And I come down the hill every morning. That’s why I was surprised. I told these guys, I said, “Man, if she was on the side of the road, seems like I would have seen her.” Because I come down at 3:30 in the morning, 4:30 in the morning.

Peabody: But it’s a lot of people who didn’t see her, so...

Individual #4: I’m very shocked. I’m very shocked. I mean, yeah. Scary.

Sottile: We’ll spare you all of the details, but the summary is that all of the investigating didn’t bring clarity. So when we sat down with Detective Dave Peabody and Lieutenant Steve Salle at the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office, we wanted to know what was happening with Sarah Zuber’s case today. The district attorney said the investigation was closed years ago, but it didn’t seem like anyone really believed that.

Even Detective Peabody.

Sottile: Why don’t we talk about what the status of this case is?

Peabody: Well, the current status of the case is we’re actively working another lead that has come in within the last two weeks, three weeks since I last talked to Ryan.

Sottile: So it’s an open investigation.

Peabody: It’s always been open, and that’s the important piece to remember is, no matter what the district attorney says, here, from an investigative standpoint, a case is never closed.

Sottile: Back in March 2019, Peabody was in the room with Dr. Rebecca Millius when she performed Sarah’s autopsy. It was one area that seemed like a potential place for hard facts. So we asked him about what he remembered. But, he seemed resistant to talk about it.

Peabody: The autopsy is something that is not our place to speak to. I was present for the autopsy, but what came out of the reports, that is something that the medical examiner’s office would have to answer to.

Sottile: OK, does the autopsy factor into your investigation?

Peabody: Always.

Sottile: OK.

Peabody: Always. But if you have an autopsy that changes opinion multiple times, it factors in, but not in a good way.

Sottile: Detective Peabody is talking about the fact that Dr. Millius changed the conclusion of the autopsy. Initially, she said that the cause of Sarah’s death was undetermined, but then later, she said she died from alcohol and hypothermia.

Haas: Well, OK. So, what do you feel comfortable saying about that autopsy change? Is that unusual for an autopsy to change?

Peabody: Yes.

Sottile: Lieutenant Salle, who has been working in law enforcement in Columbia County for almost 50 years, chimed in.

Salle: That’s the only one I’ve ever heard of.

Haas: Really?

Sottile: Salle said the autopsy of Sarah Zuber is the only one in his career he’s ever seen change.

Peabody: The role of the medical examiner is to simply look at the deceased and give us the scientific facts. Did they die of a heart attack? Was it a gunshot? If it was, what did it hit? If it was a stabbing, what did it hit? Why did this person die?

And in that process, they’re also ruling out what they didn’t die of. If they were shot, but they’re still going to look at the heart, for example, and determine that it wasn’t a coronary event, or it wasn’t this, or it wasn’t the kidney or whatever. The autopsy isn’t about just what is, it’s also about what is not. But it’s just a scientific fact. The role of the medical examiner, in my opinion, is not to determine how it happened. It’s just what happened to that person. It’s our job for those outside factors to figure out how that occurred. Was it a car crash? Was it a shooting, whatever. That’s the role of law enforcement. And in this one, it didn’t quite work that way.

Haas: So do you feel like the medical examiner in this case was coming to a conclusion about how this happened?

Peabody: Yes. A conclusion which changed multiple, you know, more than once. So that, in and of itself, again, we get back to, say this active lead we’re working now and if that went somewhere, I would almost guarantee that that autopsy report, that will come back to haunt us

Sottile: He told us he was in the room when the autopsy was done. And he said he was beyond impressed with how thorough Dr. Millius was. And yet he said that when Millius changed her report from an undetermined cause of death to alcohol and hypothermia, it basically closed the door on a homicide investigation, making it harder to bring charges. In his mind, there really is still a possibility that this could be a homicide.

Peabody said his job is to figure out the circumstances leading up to her death, not the medical examiner. And on that front, he still isn’t certain. So in this one area where we thought there would be hard facts ‒ the autopsy ‒ the police and the medical examiner seem to have disagreements.

We also asked about the alcohol that was so critical to the medical examiner’s conclusions.

Sottile: How did that much alcohol get into her? I mean, do you have a sense of, I mean, it didn’t look like there were other bottles or cans or anything found?

Peabody: No. Well, no, there weren’t. But who is there to say when she was drinking?

Sottile: Right.

Peabody: Did she consume some of that before she left the house, and then more as she’s out on a walk? Or did she have a bottle of vodka in her hand and pitched it out somewhere prior to being found in the ditch? These are the things you cannot know.

Sottile: If there was a bottle of vodka pitched into the woods, no one ever found it, despite police looking. And we know her sister Kati saw her sober right before Sarah left for her walk. I just don’t buy this idea that we cannot know what happened to Sarah Zuber. It seems a little hard to believe.

And I think it’s important to point out that there is an established history of women being blamed for bad things that happened to them because they were intoxicated, especially in true crime stories.

So many of law enforcement’s conclusions about this case come down to a spare few pieces of evidence. There are those two text messages. Her blood alcohol content. The water bottle.

Sottile: Do you think that Sarah laid down in a ditch, and just died?

Peabody: No.

Sottile: Did you ever think that?

Peabody: No.

Sottile: Do you have any ideas of how she died?

Peabody: Yes.

Sottile: Do you care to share any?

Peabody: No.

Haas: OK

Peabody: Do I think she just laid down in the ditch? No, I don’t.

Sottile: Peabody doesn’t think Sarah just laid down in the ditch and died there. He gave the impression that he thinks it’s still possible she was hit by a car. And as for the alcohol, if he has any idea how she got as drunk as she was, he wasn’t going to tell us.

Haas: Do you think we can definitively say in this case that alcohol was a factor here? Or do you think this is just kind of an unknown or it’s present, but we don’t know necessarily?

Peabody: I think it’s a factor. But what factor? That’s what we can’t answer.

Salle: I think it’s a reasonable conclusion that it’s some factor. But how much of a factor, we don’t know.

Sottile: Peabody and Salle said all police could rely on, in terms of Sarah’s drinking habits, was what her friends and family told them. And Peabody said he’s not even sure that’s reliable information because people tend to avoid speaking ill of their deceased loved ones.

Still, Peabody believes there is an answer in all this, somewhere.

Sottile: Why do you think that this is such a mystery?

Peabody: What do you mean, mystery?

Sottile: Well, I’m – that’s for you to interpret, I guess. I mean, I always wonder, is a mystery even real? Are mysteries real in your work?

Peabody: I don’t look at it as a mystery.

Sottile: Talk about why you don’t like that word.

Peabody: Mystery? I dunno, this sounds too much like something a writer would use or, uh. This isn’t Nancy Drew.

Salle: Our work tends to be fairly realistic, and down to earth.

Peabody: And yeah, I don’t know. The word just doesn’t strike me right. It’s OK in the book/movie world, but here where we’re looking for facts, I just don’t look at it as a mystery. I just look at it as waiting for that next lead or waiting for that thing takes us to that truth.

Salle: We haven’t talked to the right person yet.

Sottile: Well, that’s what we have considered. Is a mystery even real? Or is it that the person or persons who may know something just haven’t said anything.

Peabody: Mystery sounds fictional.

Sottile: Right.

Peabody: And I don’t work in fiction.

Sottile: Neither do we. Calling this a mystery felt wrong. Like a disservice to Sarah. Stopping at the label of mystery implies the truth can’t be known. It would leave Sarah’s death as a true crime story. It would leave us as no different than the newspaper reporters who wrote up the murder of Justin St. Germain’s mother under the headline of “Old West murder mystery.”

It seemed like the only people who would be served by calling this a mystery was us.

We came away from our interview with Peabody and Salle with only a little more clarity about what happened. We know the investigation into Sarah’s death is open now. But with the absence of any new leads, it’s just sitting there. Stuck for now, waiting for some clarifying fact to come out of the blue.

The community ‒ or what St. Germain would call the Greek chorus ‒ isn’t waiting for those facts. They’ve long been interested in Sarah Zuber’s case. And unlike in Capote’s time, they have social media.

In mid-November 2022, three years after Sarah Zuber’s death, a new Facebook group popped up in Columbia County called, “Justice for Sarah Zuber.”

This group wasn’t waiting for the police to tell them what happened to Sarah Zuber. And the Zuber family put their trust into that group. It seemed like, if they were going to get any answers, those answers might be found by their neighbors.

Next time, we dive into the story of the Greek chorus in Columbia County, and its leader.

Jennifer Massey: I remember putting my hand on top of it just like, “Alright, here we go.” I didn’t even open that box for three or four days. I took it, I put it in the safe and I thought, “Holy shit, what did I get myself into?”

Listen to all episodes of the “Hush” podcast here.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/15/hush-podcast-episode-two-true-crime-police-sarah-zuber-season-two/