Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 2:53 in the morning on December 3, 2016, a Neptune Township police officer pulled up behind a car on the Route 35 bridge in Belmar, New Jersey.
The bridge crosses the Shark River where it opens into the Atlantic. At that hour it was dark and almost empty. The car, an Oldsmobile, was sitting on the shoulder with nobody in it.
The officer’s dashboard camera recorded him walking up to it and shining his flashlight through the windows. The keys were still inside. He called in the plates.
The car was connected to a 19-year-old from nearby Neptune City named Sarah Stern.
“The castle looks so pretty”
Sarah had graduated from Neptune High School in 2015. She loved art and photography, made YouTube videos, and talked about traveling. She had already lost her mother, and she lived in the family home in Neptune City.
That week, her father, Michael Stern, was on a trip to Walt Disney World. On the morning of December 1, he texted her photos from the park. Sarah wrote back: “Wow! The castle looks so pretty!”
It was the last message he ever got from her.
The next day, his own mother called. She could not reach Sarah. Michael texted his daughter: “Sarah where are you?” There was no answer.
Then came the message about her car on the bridge. Michael started driving home to New Jersey right away.
An empty car on a bridge
To the people looking for her, the scene seemed to tell its own story. A grieving young woman. An empty car on a high bridge in the middle of the night. Keys left in it.
Dive teams went into the Shark River. Officers from six law enforcement agencies joined the search.
Then the community came out. On one Saturday in December, hundreds of volunteers searched around Belmar and Neptune City for more than 11 hours in near-freezing weather.
Two of the people out there that day had known Sarah almost all her life.
Preston Taylor had been her date to the junior prom. Liam McAtasney had been her friend since childhood. All three had gone to Neptune High School together.
McAtasney’s name is on the search volunteers’ sign-in sheet.
“She’s been trying to get away”
Only hours after the car was found on the bridge, police officers knocked on Liam McAtasney’s door to ask what he knew.
Their body cameras were running. McAtasney said he didn’t know where Sarah was. Then he offered an idea.
“I just know she’s been trying to get away,” he told them. “Been telling me she’s moving to Canada.”
He also suggested she might have jumped. To anyone listening, the pieces fit together: a girl who wanted to disappear, and a car left on a bridge.
Prosecutors would later say that was exactly the point.
The secret he couldn’t keep
Weeks went by. The river gave up nothing. Sarah’s father kept looking.
Then, in January 2017, a young man named Anthony Curry went to the authorities.
Curry was an aspiring horror filmmaker and a friend of Liam McAtasney. He told investigators that around Thanksgiving, before Sarah vanished, McAtasney had come to him with a plan: kill Sarah Stern and take the money she had inherited after her mother died.
Curry said that at first it had sounded like the plot for one of his movies. Now Sarah was gone.
Investigators asked him for help. They wanted him to meet McAtasney again, in person, and get him talking. And they fitted Curry’s car with a hidden camera.
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