Part 1: Amber Belken’s Final Shift: Her Car Was Outside, But She Was Already Gone

A 25-year-old store manager drives to work the same way that she always does, the same route, the same time, the same routine that she has followed for three years. She unlocks the door, she steps inside, and she gets to work. At nine o' eight in the morning, she texts her boyfriend, three words, "I love you." And four minutes later, she turns off the store alarm, and then somewhere in the quiet hour before the store was supposed to open its doors to the public, something happened inside that building that no one saw, no one heard, and no one would fully understand for a very long time. This is Amber's Story. Deadly deep dies. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to my channel. And if you have never been here before, I am Kimberlya, and it's nice to finally meet you. Now, let me take you back to the morning in San Antonio, Texas. It's January 29th of 2007. Downtown Alamo has just opened its doors for the day. This is a place where a lot of tourists come, and they're already making their way to the river walk. They're boarding those little flat bottom boats that drift past the Cypress trees and the restaurants, and the old stone walls taking in, whatever's left, of the history, along that stretch of water. This is an ordinary morning in an ordinary city, and no one is paying particular attention to anything. A few miles north on San Pedro Avenue, a man named Mariano Rivera, is starting his shift. Mariano manages a video game store, and it's one of the EV games locations scattered across the north side of the city, and his morning follows the same rhythm it always does. He gets in around 9, he gets the tills organized, he pulls together the previous day's cash for a bank run, and as everything ready before the doors even open at 10, it's a routine that runs like clockwork. It runs the same every day in every way, at every EV games in this area. Today is no different. At another store not far away, the same routine is underway. Amber gets there right around 9, like she always does. She unlocks the front door, she steps inside, the lights come on, and there's a quiet over the store before anyone else gets there. And 9-8 that morning, she picks up her phone, and she sends a text to her boyfriend Fred. I love you. That's it. That's the whole message, just three words. Four minutes later, at 9-12, she turned off the store alarm. Her name is Amber Belkin. She was 25 years old, five foot two, with light brown hair. She's been managing the store for three years. She knew every corner of it, every system, every procedure. She knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing that Monday morning, and she did it without hesitation. But at some point, between 9-08 and 10am, her phone rang. It was another manager from a different location, and they were calling about something routine. They talked for a few minutes. But then Amber said she had to go, because it was someone at the door. Her voice was completely normal. There was no urgency, no alarm, nothing that made the other manager think twice. He just assumed she was going to check on whoever was there. People knock on stores before they open all the time. It happens. He assumed she would call back if there was anything else to say, but she didn't call back. And at 10 o'clock, that store didn't open. And before we get deeper into what happened on the Monday morning, before we talk about what was found and what was taken and what was left behind, you need to know who Amber Belkin was. Not just in the way that True Crime sometimes introduces a victim, a name, a job, a few adjectives, I mean actually get to know her. Because I believe the only way that anything that follows is going to me and what it's supposed to is if you understand who was in that store when the doors closed. So let's go back to the beginning. Amber Marie Belkin was born on December 6th of 1981 in San Antonio, Texas. She was the only child of Randy and Lee Belkin. And from the very first day, that fact shaped everything about how she grew up. Not in a spoiled way, not an overprotective way, but in the way that being someone's whole world tends to shape a person. Randy and Lee weren't just parents who showed up and provided for her. They were paying attention. They saw where their daughter was becoming and they were so proud to be her parents. They do it on her not by giving her everything, but by giving her themselves their time, their focus, their love consistently and fully from the very beginning. And what Amber did with that foundation was become someone who gave it right back. She grew into the kind of daughter that they quietly hoped they would have, but they rarely talked about out loud because it would sound like bragging. Amber stayed close to her parents, not out of habit or obligation, but because she wanted you, she genuinely wanted to be around them. And that is rare as children grow up. She chose them. If they needed something, she was there before they even had to ask. There was a protectiveness in Amber that ran deep. She watched out for the people in her life and it went well beyond good intentions. It was something she acted on, something she followed through with even when it was inconvenient for her, even when it would cost her something. That quality in her, that instinct to protect to step in, was one of the most defining things about Amber. And she didn't just do this with her family. She did it with strangers and with animals that she would just pass on the road. With anyone who needed it, Amber grew up in San Antonio, Texas and she attended Judson High School. She graduated in the year 2000 and people who knew her described her as energetic, driven, and confident in herself, like someone who knew what they wanted in life and where they were going. Even when the specifics were still trying to be figured out, there was a clarity to her in a sense of direction that most people spend their lives trying to figure out. Amber seemed to just be born with it already installed. And after high school, Amber went to work. She found a way into the retail industry, specifically video game industry. And it turned out to be a very good fit. And it went well beyond the paycheck alone because video games weren't just the product she was selling. They were something she actually loved. She played them on her own time. She talked about them because she cared about them. And she brought that genuine enthusiasm into the store with her every day. And it was the kind of thing that customers and co-workers picked up on immediately because it's impossible to fake something like that when it's real. It's real. And by the time Amber was 24 years old, she had actually become the store manager of EB Games located at 7,300 San Pedro Avenue in the north side of San Antonio, Texas. Amber was doing this at an age when a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to even show up on time. But it didn't surprise the people who knew her. They would tell you that as soon as you understand who Amber is, everything makes complete sense where she wasn't life and where she was going. She was someone who earned things because she worked hard for them. And the position she held at that store reflected that entirely. Her co-worker, Matt Pina, he worked alongside her at the San Pedro store. And he described her as a firecracker. And if you met her, you understand why. He said she was five foot two and a hundred pounds. And at first glance, in that environment behind the counter, some people might have clocked her as someone they could push around. That impression went out last though because Amber was comfortable speaking up. She was clear about what she expected. She didn't second guess herself. And she didn't seem like she was trying to prove anything. She just knew herself and Matt went even further. He said she was one of the kindest souls he had ever met. That she would let you know what she wanted. But never in a way that felt cruel or demeaning or like she was, you know, enjoying having authority over someone. She was firm because the job required it. Not because she liked the feeling of being in charge. And you know, there's a difference. You know that type of person that just wants the boss role to essentially boss people around. But the people who worked for a manager like Amber, they can tell immediately that she cared. They didn't dread showing up to their job. And Matt would even say years later, she helped him grow into a better person. Just being around her, seeing how she moved through the world made him better. Her best friend's Monica Pack and Ashley Flores knew that version of Amber as well. The one who held those things at once, the strength and the softness. They described her as fierce. But they said it was in a way where you would say it to about somebody you love. They weren't intimidating fears. They were just confident. They also knew something else about Amber. Retail stores, that was not a destination. It was a chapter because she had much bigger plans. Amber was going to go back to school. She wanted to become a vet. And if you knew Amber, you wouldn't be surprised at all because I told you she had a genuine love for animals. It's the kind where you're not just, you know, I don't know, liking photos of dogs online. It's something you're living out. Even if it meant you were sometimes reckless, she was once driving inside Turtle in the middle of the road, which traffic. She didn't keep going. She turned around. She went back. She got out of her car. Even with the other cars like Wizarding passed her, And she moved that hurdle to safety. And I love that I would do the same thing. And I'm sure a lot of you would too. I know a lot of you love animals. There was no version of Amber that could leave something vulnerable in danger like that and just continue her day. That wasn't how she was built. And the clearest example that I have of that is about her dog, Buddy. Buddy wasn't a planned pet. She didn't go out looking for a dog and buying her from a pet store or a breeder, anything like that. Amber was just driving one day. She spotted this little dog on the expressway. He was maddened, neglected, alone in heavy traffic, near a certain disaster if no one stepped in. And Amber didn't even hesitate. She stopped, she ran across traffic and she approached him very carefully. Someone that knew her said that it looked like something out of that old game frogger. If you remember, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. She was dodging vehicles to get across the road to get this little dog. And when she got to him, he was clearly in a lot of trouble. His fur was so matted down. It was obvious he had been out there on his own for quite a while. She picked him up, she brought him home, she gave him a name, and she gave him a life. And from that point on, Buddy was hers. And it's just a story that shows you who she was. And then there's something you should know about her role as a manager at EB Games in 2007, especially on the north side of San Antonio, and especially at this particular location. It wasn't just a title. It wasn't just a line on a resume or a bump in hourly pay. It came with a specific set of responsibilities, a specific routine and conditions that Amber carried with her every single day. At the store at 7300 San Pedro Avenue, the store she managed opened to customers at 10 o'clock in the morning. But the manager arrived one hour earlier at nine. That hour before the doors opened was where the real administrative work gets done. Amber would come in, go through all the receipts from the night before the previous day, make sure everything was balanced and prepare the deposit. Then she would actually leave the store briefly, take the cash to the bank nearby, and come back in time to start the day. If any of you have worked retail, this is gonna sound really familiar. I worked at Smoothie King. Let me know in the comments if you had a similar job, especially around this time. It could be different nowadays with all the card and the tap transactions, but this was a routine for Amber and she followed it consistently, reliably. Every time she worked an opening shift. The people who worked with her knew it, the company knew it, the district manager knew it. This was their system. In Amber was someone who followed systems because she understood that that kept things running. She was a stickler, and that's why she was good at her job. She also cared about her staff. She paid attention to them individually. She knew what each one of them were dealing with, not just in the store, but also in their life at home. She cared about her customers the same way. She was someone her team respected and a manager who by 24 had already demonstrated enough to be trusted at that location alone. And that word alone is where this part of the story gets complicated. Because for all of the pride that Amber took in her work, for all the confidence that she carried into that story of her morning, there was a reality underneath that that she could not fully shake. She worked alone, not every shift, not every day, but on opening shifts in that window before anyone else arrived. It was just Amber. And the store she managed was by any reasonable measure, not set up to protect her. Remember that because there were no security cameras inside that store, not one. And here's the thing. This wasn't just one store among many without cameras, all of the EV game locations in San Antonio had cameras. This was the only one that didn't. Every other store in the area had some level of surveillance, but not this one. Whether that is a budget decision, an oversight, a district level call, then no one pushed back on hard enough, I can't say. What's clear though, is that it was known. The people who worked there clearly knew it. Management knew it. And Amber, who was responsible for that store, and every time she showed up for the opening shift, she knew it because it started to weigh on her. She actually raised the issue with her supervisors. She said that she felt uneasy opening the store by herself, especially around the holidays, when foot traffic was unpredictable, and tensions in the retail environment tends to run higher. She set it out loud so the people who were supposed to be responsible for her safety, but the store stayed as it was. But then there's what happened in 2004. Amber was working her shift when the store was robbed. It was an armed robbery, not a smashing grab, not someone swiping merchandise and running. This was a robbery and she was there. And she came out physically unharmed luckily. But that kind of thing, it leaves fear behind with it, but she kept going back to work. And her dad even said, his daughter was not a quitter. Amber didn't step back from things because they got hard or because they got scary. She proceeded, but the fear didn't go away. And then there was Christmas Eve, when yet another EB Games location was robbed, while she was on shift. Now this wasn't her store, but close enough, and real enough that it changed how she felt being there alone. And after that, her dad said being in that store by herself during those quiet pre-opening hours made her nervous in a way that it hadn't before. It was getting worse. She wasn't paranoid. She was just aware how alone she was. And it was somewhere in that period, and those conversations between Amber, her coworkers, what it actually meant to be alone in that store. They sold high-value merchandise. They kept cash on the premises overnight, and they have no cameras. And that's when something came up between the staff. This was kind of an informal agreement that they had. Some people called it a death pact. Sounds kind of dramatic. But what it really was was a group of young people working a job that made them feel uncomfortable. And they were trying to do something with that feeling. So the agreement was this. If something happened to me, whether that was a robbery or something worse, whatever it was, whoever was there would make sure the others knew. They would pass along a final message to that person's family. I know it sounds morbid, but this is what they had to do. And Amber's message to her parents was simple. She wanted them to know three words. I love you. That was it. But that happened to be the same three words. She sent her boyfriend Fred Campbell in a text at 908 on the morning of January 29th of 2007. That was the last message anyone would receive from Amber. Now, whether she thought about that pact when she typed it or whether it was just how she was feeling when she picked up her phone that morning, there's no way to know. What's true is that those were the last words she sent into the world. And they were the same words that she had chosen sometime before as what she wanted the people that she loved to have if it ever came to that. Randy and Lee Belkin knew their daughter was uncomfortable about the job. They knew she had already experienced a robbery. And they knew she was opening that store alone. And they also knew that if they tried to tell Amber to quit or to find another job, it wasn't a conversation that was gonna go their way. She wasn't gonna leave her staff or her customers or a job she was good at. And proud of just because the conditions weren't perfect. On the evening of January 28th, the Sunday night before everything changed, Amber was at home. She had brought a new video game back with her from the store and she and her dad Randy sat down and played it together. It was the kind of thing they did all the time. Video games had become this shared language between them, this space where they could just be together without needing to say anything or make it into anything dramatic. Amber had brought home a pink controller from the store at some point as well. And that became hers for these games that they played together. That Sunday night, they sat in the same room, they played, and it was just an ordinary, uncomfortable night. The kind of evening that doesn't even feel significant when it's happening. Next morning, on January 29th, Amber got up and went to work like she always did. And I told you, she texted her boyfriend, Fred, and 908 AM. I love you. She turned off the alarm at the store and she got to work. She was doing exactly what she always did. But when 10 o'clock came around, that EV games stayed dark. And for a little while, that might not have registered as anything more than maybe a minor inconvenience stores sometimes open late. Employees run into traffic, their keys get forgotten. It doesn't always go as planned and it can be annoying, but not exactly alarming. People who might have walked past the store front that morning and noticed the lights were off and the door was still locked, probably didn't think much of it. They would just come back later or they just moved on with their day. That's what you do. But for the people inside that company, the people who knew Amber and knew the routine who understood what her mornings looked like, that closed store meant something else. Amber never opened late. Amber didn't leave things undone. then. Amber didn't go quiet. That wasn't who she was. And the people who worked alongside her knew that. And when the district manager registered that the location still had no bend, and no one was answering the phone, the absence of a simple explanation became its own kind of problem. He then reached out to Mariana Rivera. Mariano managed one of the other eb game stores in a sister location, same company, same-wording routine, and he also knew Amber. He knew what a normal Monday looked like at her store because his Mondays were exactly the same. So when the district manager asked, "Can you please swing by her store and check on things?" Mariano said he would. He pulled into the parking lot. The first thing he saw is her white car. He recognizes it immediately. It's Amber's. So if her car was there, where was she? She had to be there. She had to have driven into work and gone out of the car and gone inside. So why wasn't the store open? Mariano walked up to the front of the building, looked through the glass. He's trying to see pass the displays and the racks of products and the dim interior. He's scanning the floor of the counter, even trying to look to the back of the store as far as he could see from where he was standing. And there was nothing. No movement and no sign of anyone. So then from the outside, he's calling out her name. He's standing there. He's waiting to hear her voice or her footsteps. Some sign that she was just in the back and she heard him. There was nothing. He called the store from outside. He's listening to it ringing through the glass, counting the rings, waiting for someone to pick up. Nobody does. Mariano stood in that parking lot for a moment, thinking about everything and it didn't make sense. But it also didn't confirm that anything was wrong, not yet. There was still explanations that didn't require anything serious to have happened. Maybe she felt sick and someone had come to pick her up. Maybe there had been some kind of family emergency and she left quickly and she didn't have enough time to sort everything out, including her car. Maybe something completely ordinary and forgettable happened and this whole situation would resolve itself with a phone call. Mariano drove back to his own store. But the hours passed. The morning is now early afternoon and her store location is still closed. And Amber still has not reached back out. And whatever explanations had felt plausible a few hours earlier, we're starting to feel a lot less likely. The District Manager calls Mariano again, tells him you got to go back. Not just to look through the window this time, but actually figure out what's going on. Mariano returns in this time. He looks through the front glass. And the store's not even empty. There's actually someone standing right behind the counter. It's Brandon Veal. Brandon is Amber's assistant manager. And there he is, right near the register area in a store that has been closed for hours and looked nothing like it should have looked. Mariano knocks on the glass, Brandon walks over, unlocks the door, lets him in. Mariano steps inside and he asks Brandon, have you seen Amber? Brandon says no. At which point Mariano starts to look at the store around him. And that's when he started to wonder what was really going on. There was money on the floor. There was a loose change scattered across the area near the register. There were DVDs and video games and knocked over. Things completely out of place. The kind of disorder that doesn't come from just a busy day or even a rushed closing shift. It was different. This was a look of something that had happened something bad. Mariano's eyes are moving across the floor, across the counter, across the disturbed state of everything in his line of sight. And his mind immediately goes to the obvious, a robbery. But none of it fully added up either. Because Brandon was there. Brandon had presumably come into the store, seen the money on the floor, seen the register open, seen the games scattered around, seen what was obviously not a normal morning and was just standing at the counter like it was a normal day. He's not frantic. He's not calling for help. He wasn't in the back checking on Amber who's car is still sitting right out front of the park and not. He's just standing there. Going through the opening procedures and Mariano was like, what are you doing? Brandon acted like the answer was obvious, but he explained, I'm here for my shift. I saw the disarray. And his first thought was that the person who closed the night before just didn't do their job. That that mess was a closing problem. Not a morning one and not his. He had arrived a little late that day. So he was in a hurry to get the store open. He didn't have time to ask questions about the mess, but here's the thing. Mariano could not make sense of that explanation. Not when Amber's car was sitting outside. Didn't Brandon wonder where she was? If you walked into a place to look like this, would someone's car still in the lot? The first thing you would probably think of is, where is that person you need to find them? You would probably make sure they were okay. You wouldn't just start checking the register and going about normal business. So Mariano moved towards the back of the store. There was only one other room, which was their back office. And that's where the safe was, where Amber would have been working through the morning's receipts and preparing the cash deposit. Mariano walked towards it and when he reaches the doorway, he looks inside and every question that he'd been carrying for the past several hours collapsed into a single, devastating answer. Because Amber was inside, but she was on the floor. She was faced down. Her right hand was resting at her side, her left hand behind her on her lower back and wrapped tightly around her head, twisted at the back of her neck, was a plastic bag. Mariano understood immediately what he was looking at. He didn't even need to be told. There was no version of this. There was anything other than what it was. And in that space of a single moment, everything he had been trying to explain away, the closed store, the silence, the car and the lot, it resolved into something he would never be able to erase from his memory. He stepped back and he immediately called 911. He said that moment felt like a million emotions hitting him at once. None of them with anywhere to go. He said it was hard to put into words that you have all these things running through you and you don't know what to do with them. But he looked at Brandon still in the store and these emotions got even more complicated. Now he didn't say anything out loud. He didn't accuse anyone of anything. But the thought was there, immediate and unavoidable. And you know what he's thinking. Could he have been involved? He had found her and that was going to stay with him. While police were on their way and the crime scene was beginning to take shape around what had just been an ordinary video game store on an ordinary Monday morning. The news was already starting to move through the city. Not the full story, of course, because no one had the full story yet, but just fragments. Something happened at an eb games and some one had been found dead, but there was no name, no confirmation of anything beyond the location. But it was in a city where people knew which store it was, who managed that store and that was enough to start some kind of alarm moving through certain people with that information, especially Amber's mom and dad. Amber's dad, Randy heard the report and he knew exactly which store they were talking about. He knew it was Amber's store. So he jumps into his truck. He starts driving their his mind, already going through all the possibilities. He calls a friend. That's a defense attorney and asked him, "What can you find out? Find anything you can and call me back?" Randy was almost at the store when the call came in. His friend told him, "It wasn't Amber that walked in and found something wrong. She was the one they were talking about. Amber was the body that was found. Just imagine for a second. What do you do with that kind of information?" For Randy, it took him to his knees. Right there in the parking lot, he said his whole world died in that moment. Not just that he had lost something, not just that he was grieving, that everything, the whole structure of what he understood his life to be was gone. Right there next to his daughter's car, that she had driven there that morning, with her cell phone sitting on the driver's seat and a low's tote bag on the passenger's side, exactly where she left them. Amber's mom, Lee, arrived not too long after this. And she hadn't been told anything yet. She came running after her husband. Before he had the chance to figure out what he was going to say and how he was going to say it, she was asking where Amber was. She asked what happened. Her face was already searching for something reassuring, but you couldn't give her that. They locked eyes. She kept asking what happened and Randy finally had to tell her. Lees and ease went out too. She said everything that came after that moment blurred together. There was just a before and after in that parking lot, a line that she had to cross without choosing it. Nothing on the other side of that would ever look the same way ever again. Amber's friends arrived. They sit down on the curb and they're right outside the store and they're crying. They would describe it the same way Lee did. Has something that didn't feel real. They're mine. just kept trying to push it away. They're standing in a new version of their reality without Amber. Now, Detective Raymond Roberts was getting to work and he was told that he needed to be at the store. He heads over there. Now, he's been in the San Antonio Police Department for a long time. He knows exactly what he robbery looks like. He had walked into enough robberies to recognize the signs. Usually, registers open. Money is gone. Shelf is disrupted. Staff shaken but alive. But when he walks into that eb games on the afternoon of January 29th, the shape of a robbery was absolutely what was in front of him at first. The signs were there. It matched robbery. The front of the store was a mess in that specific way that a robbery leaves in a mess. It's not random, not accidental, but directional. Like, things had been moved through. The register was open until it was exposed. Loose change was scattered across the counter and on the floor. DVDs and videos were on the ground throughout the store, knocked from their shelves or grabbed and dropped. The kind of disorder that comes from someone quickly moving through the space and trying to take whatever they could carry and they had to leave things behind that they couldn't take. The safe in the back office was open and emptied. And when investigators checked with the bank, they confirmed what the empty safe already suggested. Amber had never made it there that morning. The deposit that she would have been preparing when she arrived at the store had never been dropped off. So the cash that should have been left at the store at some point between 9 and 10 was gone. And that was the first key to establishing a motive and a timeline. Gone along with the cash was an Xbox, several PlayStation consoles, and somewhere between 40 and 50 DVDs and video games from the shelves. The total value of everything taken, the cash and the merchandise together came to somewhere just under $6,000. So very significant amount of money. Detective Roberts moved the store carefully. He's taking in every detail. He's building a picture and then he moves to the back office. And that's when the picture changed. As I said, a most robbery staff members are confronted with their left alive. But not here. Amber is there, faced on the floor. Exactly as Mariano had found her. Detective Roberts looks at her with her golden brown hair, her small frame, and that plastic bag wrapped tightly around her head and twisted at the back of her neck. And he said that he felt something moved through him. And he would carry it for a very long time. She reminded him of his own daughter, the same build, the same hair color. And his daughter was at home and this woman was in front of him on the floor deceased. This was someone else's daughter. She was dead. And none of that professional distance that he had spent years building was going to fully hold. He could feel it already breaking. It was hard to look. But that was his job. Her family is counting on him to figure out who did this. So we had to look. And he looked more closely. There were marks on Amber's wrist consisting with having been bound. The kind of marks that duct tape leaves behind. A specific kind of compression and abrasion that tells its own story. But there was no tape on a wrist now. It was gone. There was a small cut near her wrists. A precise deliberate cut. The kind that comes from a knife rather than a struggle. And the working theory that formed around that detail was uncomfortable and what it implied. Someone had taken the time after Amber was no longer a threat to anyone to remove the tape from her wrists with a knife and take it with them. Because duct tape holds fingerprints. The sticky side? Yeah. So whoever had been in that room must have known that. It's like they planned for it. They cleaned up behind themselves before they left as well. This was not an impulse move. This was someone thinking clearly under pressure. And next, Detective Roberts looked at how Amber had been killed. Suffocation with a plastic bag? The method. The time it would have taken. Most robberies don't end like that. Because most people who walk into a store to take money and merchandise, they don't hurt people. They want to get out. They get what they came for and killing someone only complicates everything. Killing someone is a thing that turns a robbery charge into something much bigger and way harder to run from. And people who are doing this for the money understand that. At least enough to want to avoid it. A plastic bag over someone's head. That's not a weapon of convenience. It's not something you grab when you're panicking because you ran out of options. It requires you to stay there and hold on tightly while a person is struggling and fighting with everything they have when they're deprived of air. It takes by Robert's estimation somewhere between four and five minutes. That's not a moment of violence. That's a sustained act, a commitment. And when I read that, I started to think about what five minutes looks like. That's a long time. Don't do it now, but sometime after you watch this video, try to remember to do something for five minutes and really think about how long it is. And now imagine someone doing what they did to Amber for five minutes. Roberts noted all of this. And since I'm already talking about how Amber died, I'm going to stop here for a moment and tell you what the Bear County Medical Examiner would later confirm. Amber's cause of death was exphyxia. A full autopsy was performed. An SA kit was completed, it was processed. And what the examination produced beyond the official ruling was a picture of what had actually happened inside that back office during the minutes that no one had witnessed except the killer and Amber alone. Classic bag exphyxiation leaves behind very little visible evidence of what it actually was. This is unlike strangulation, which leaves ligature marks and bruising and particular eye in a pattern that tells the examiner almost immediately what they're looking at. A plastic bag suffocation in the clinical sense is subtle. And what that means is that the bag itself still on Amber, still twisted at the back of her neck exactly where it was left was one of the most important pieces of evidence that room. Its presence is what made the cause unambiguous because the body wouldn't have shown at the same signs. What I'm trying to point out is if the killer would have taken the bag, it would have been a lot harder to determine how Amber died. And nothing came back that directly linked a suspect to this crime. So detective Roberts turned his attention to the physical evidence that had been collected from the scene. It was sparse as well. There were no useful fingerprints, nothing clear enough anyway, nothing placed well enough to run against any database and get a result. There were no surveillance cameras, we already know that, which Robert already knew, but it hit differently now that he's standing there with an act of homicide scene going on, trying to piece together what had happened. There was no visual record of any of it whatsoever. He asked about videos from the strip mall and other businesses, the parking lot, and any exterior cameras that might have captured something useful that there were none. The entire strip mall had no surveillance coverage. I'm thinking, wow, really? I mean, yes, it was 2007, but you would think, especially in a retail space, however, the Starbucks next door had a camera. So Roberts asked about it immediately, but the Starbucks camera, it was in a position to face their own front entrance and only their front entrance. It didn't capture the parking lot, it didn't capture the storefront of the eb games, it didn't capture the alley behind the building. It showed who walked into the Starbucks that morning and nothing else. It was completely useless. No officers canvassed this entire area around the businesses, a strip mall, and the residents nearby. In anyone who might have been in that area between 9 and 10 that morning, they questioned. They went door to door, they asked questions, they listened, and what they got back was more nothing. No one had noticed anything suspicious or unusual, no one from their faces, no sounds or movements that were out of place. The entire window, during which Amber was killed, had just gone on without leaving a single witness behind. And it's hard because if you're someone that's not specifically looking for something that morning, you're in a busy location, that's normal not to remember things. I'm sure if we talked about what we did this morning, you're rushing around, it's your own day, your own agenda, you're not going to catch things. An detective Roberts walked to the back of the store, he looks in the alley and it runs behind the entire strip mall. It was exactly the kind of place that someone who needed to move without being seen would use. It's narrow, it's not visible from the street, there's low traffic, and now he has a working theory. Whoever had been in that store had to come in or left or both through that alleyway. It would have been easy, no need to hurry, nobody back there to notice you, you can move in and out to whatever you want, but a theory about an alley and no cameras to confirm it, no witnesses to robbery, that's still just a theory. No answers, but instead a question. And it was a simple question. Who knew? Who knew that this specific store out of all the eB game locations in San Antonio had no security cameras? Who knew that on a Monday morning before the store opened at 10, there would be a woman there, all alone? Who knew she would be handling a deposit? Who knew the layout of the back office where the safe was? How the learning routine ran? This wasn't information that you could get by walking past the store on the street. This wasn't something a random person would know. This was inside information, operational information. The kind of thing that only made sense if you worked there, or worked somewhere close enough that the details had reached you. An detective Robert started to think, started to think differently about what he was looking at. Not a crime of opportunity, not someone who walked past and made a split-second decision in that moment to rob the place, someone who knew. Someone who had chosen this store on this morning and this woman because they understood exactly what the conditions were and exactly what they would allow. A robbery gone wrong? That's not how it looked on the surface, yes, but the longer Robert sat with the specifics. The harder it was to accept that framing as the story. Whoever had been in that store with Amber that morning had wanted to go there with the intention of more than just robbing it. From the very first moment, he stepped inside that store. Before anything had been confirmed, there was a name that kept coming up. Brandon Biel, remember him? He was the worker that was inside just acting like it was a normal day. Brandon was 23. He was Amber's assistant manager, which meant he was the person who worked most closely with her, the person most familiar with the store's operations, the person who knew the routines, the layout of the back office where the safe was. And he was the person that Maryanna Rivera had found standing behind the counter when he came back out second time in a store that had been closed for hours. With money on the floor, games knocked around and he's just standing there. And the more investigators and the people close to Amber started talking, the more complicated the picture around Brandon became. The working relationship between Amber and Brandon was not a smooth one. And it hadn't been for a while. Multiple co-workers confirmed that the tension between them was something that people noticed and they talked about. Matt, who worked at that store and knew both of them, was direct about it. They had never really learned to work together. Brandon did not bring the same attitude or work ethic or the same engagement that the rest of the team did. And that created friction. Amber had actually written them up multiple times. But she tried to address it through the proper channels and she did it more than once and nothing changed. She had told her mother where things stood. Lee knew about the situation with Brandon because Amber had talked to her more than once about it. She had told Lee that Brandon was on his last chance. That she could not keep overlooking the same mistakes again and again in the same patterns, the same refusal to meet the standards that she was trying to maintain. And on the morning of January 29th, the morning she went to work and never came home, Amber had been planning to submit another negative work report on Brandon. This wasn't a warning or a conversation. It was a formal report. It was a kind of document that would move things towards a conclusion. I think you know what that is. Brandon also had a temper. That was the word that came up. Not that he had ever done anything specific and not that there had ever been a confrontation or an incident that anyone could actually point to, but just that the temper was there. That it was something that people were aware of. And then added a layer of tension to what already existed between him and Amber. All of this information is landing directly on the desk of detective Roberts. He's looking for someone inside who has knowledge of the store. Someone who would have known the cameras routine that deposit the layout. He was looking for a motive that went beyond the simple robbery. And then there's the nature of how Amber died. The time, the delibereness of it, it kept suggesting something more personal underneath it. And here was this person who worked in the store who had ongoing conflicts with Amber who had been found standing in the middle of a crime scene without an apparent explanation for why he hadn't done anything or even gone to look for his manager. So of course Brandon is brought in for questioning and Brandon has a story prepared. And from the moment Robert started listening to it, it didn't sit right with him. Brandon sat here right for his shift in the mid afternoon. He told the investigators the door was locked when he got there that he had gone inside and locked up behind him once he was in because he had a key as well. He said he saw the money on the floor and he noticed the store was a mess. And he did see Amber's car in the parking lot. But he said even with all of that in front of him, he went about opening the store doing all the procedures because he already explained. He assumed someone closing didn't do their job and he was going to make sure he did his which was get the store set up and the door is opened. He said it never occurred to him that something might have happened that there could have been a robbery that Amber could be somewhere in the back. He said no, I didn't think of anything. And Robert's just sat there listening to that. And he just kept thinking about what it meant. The store was small. The back office was not far at all. It would have taken no effort to just go back there and check. And like, hey, Amber, are you there? She was supposed to be working with him. So wouldn't he have at least one or like, oh, where is she? Especially if you see your colleague's car, but no sign of them inside? I mean, I just feel like it's a natural human impulse to go find that person. Brandon hadn't done that. So it wasn't making sense. It didn't even make sense to Mariano who had been there, who was actually going there twice to find her. And he walks to the back. But I also want to play devil's advocate. Not everyone's built the same way. Maybe Brandon just figured she would get in trouble this time. He would focus on his job duties and let Amber fend for herself. Detective Robert saw things differently. He saw guilt. So he brought it to his colleague and that colleague went to speak to Brandon. Now this was a detective specifically known within their department for her interviewing skills. She was someone that was very practiced at the kind of conversation where what's being said and what's actually happening underneath can be differentiated. She's good at getting things out of people. She sits down with Brandon and she's with him for up to an hour. She's done. She calls Roberts and she's like, yeah, something's off with him. I don't know what it is. Not something specific. It's just the way he's answering the questions. There's gaps. And that was enough to keep things moving in Brandon's direction. So Roberts gets search warrant for Brandon's apartment and his car and investigators went through both thoroughly, completely looking for to stolen merchandise, any game consoles, any physical thread between Brandon and the crime scene and they found nothing. Not a single item, no games, consoles, cash, evidence of any kind connecting Brandon to what happened at that store. And I kept thinking, well, what if he didn't bring it to his house or his car? But let's keep going. Then they chucked his alibi. Brandon said that morning on the 29th, he was home. He got up. He let his dog out and then he went to his fiance's parents' house to help them move a very large kitchen island. This is a piece of furniture that was heavy and awkward enough that it needed several people. His fiance confirmed it. Her mother confirmed it. Her father confirmed it. Three separate people who would have had every opportunity to coordinate a false story if they wanted to. All placing Brandon well away from the store that morning. Can you really trust your fiance's parents and your fiance? But then Roberts pulls Brandon's cell phone records. If he had any doubt, this was dispelt. There was a cell tower, all the information. There was one located a mile from this store. If Brandon had been in or near that store during the murder window, his phone would have actively been pinging at that tower. Roberts looked through the records carefully. He crossed reference timestamps against the geography and during the entire window, the investigators to establish for Amber's death between 9 and 10 a.m. and that morning, Brandon's phone was not connected to that tower. His records placed him miles away, exactly where he said he was. I mean, he could have just not taken his phone because more than ever back then, people were not relying on their phones as much as now. But Brandon also agreed to take a polygraph. And he passed it. But for weeks, Detective Roberts kept working the Brandon angle anyway. He kept looking and checking. He kept leaving that door open in case something else surfaced. Amber's mom Lee, she was calling the detectives multiple times a day, two or three times. Brandon, Brandon, she was absolutely certain it was him who murdered her daughter. The way Lee saw it, everything pointed at Brandon, and every day that passed without arresting him felt like a failure. Like the investigation was moving way too slowly, like something was being missed. Maybe this guy was a good liar. Maybe the person holographic results are wrong. After all, they're not in exact science. So much so, they're not admissible in a court of law. Detective Roberts listened to Lee. Any understood where she was coming from? Any kept looking? Meanwhile, everyone that loved Amber was about to say goodbye. There were over 600 people at Amber's funeral. The services were held at Chapel Hill funeral home, and the burial that followed was at Chapel Hill Memorial Park. The turnout was extraordinary. Not everyone could even be inside. It overflowed to the outside, and that just showed you the kind of impact that Amber had on the lives of the people around her. It was a large gathering full of grief and her poor mother. She moved through that crowd carrying everything. She had been carrying since that Monday afternoon when she found out that her daughter was dead. And in that moment, with everything you know she's going through, she sees Brandon walk in. He makes his way over to her. He offers his condolences, and her knees went weak just from being near him. The certainty that she felt about what he had done was physical. It was more than it got feeling. At some point during that service, we watched Brandon as he approached her daughter's casket. And I think that most mothers would have just lost it. And she almost did. Because of what she saw him do. Something she said was so unnerving. He reached inside. And there was something in this man's hand, and she could see it. And he put something inside Amber's coffin. And Lee ran over there immediately, right after Brandon stepped away. She looks inside and picks up what looks like. And EB Games ID tackled her. The plastic sleeve that employees kept their work, identification in. She takes it out, of course. She wraps it into shoe and she puts it in her back. And she later said that whatever it was, whatever it meant, the last thing she wanted was anything connected to Brandon being buried with her daughter. She wondered afterward whether it was evidence, whether he had put something in the casket that he wanted in the ground and out of reach. But what's interesting is Brandon was confronted about this. And he said it was the most absurd claim. He had ever heard in his entire life. He said it was the very first funeral he ever attended. And he was there to pay his respects. And he never even got close to the casket. He definitely hadn't put anything inside of it. Or anywhere near it. Two people with two completely different accounts at the same moment. What is confirmed is what the investigation revealed. Brandon's alibi held up. His phone records placed him elsewhere. Nothing from his home or his car was connected to the crime. And after weeks of pressure, weeks of scrutiny and weeks of checking every available avenue. And detective Roberts had to face the conclusion that everything was not pointing toward Brandon Veal as being Amber's killer. And the person who did this was still out there. And there's a particular kind of stillness that settles over a case when all the leads run out. It's just a gradual accumulation of phone calls that go nowhere, searches that come back empty. And tips that don't pan out. Days pass without anything new landing on his desk. And in the weeks and months that followed Brandon's clearance, that is exactly what happened in this investigation. Roberts went back to the beginning. He visited the stolen merchandise again, revisited the items, the serial numbers. The things that get stolen have to go somewhere. They get sold, they get traded. Or they get moved through the kind of informal channels that stolen electronics tend to move through. Pond shops, street corners, avengers. And Roberts started tracking serial numbers and looking into resell avenues. He checked Craigslist listings, remember that back then. And he watched for anything that matched what had been taken. And nothing came up. It was like the items just vanished. And the case slowed down even further. It didn't close, Roberts said he never let it close. And he wouldn't. But it slowed to a pace that felt. Like the reality of it was, they weren't going to find out who did this. And meanwhile, the people who loved Amber were sitting in this version of time that had no forward momentum at all because they wanted to close this case. Their daughter was gone. Answers weren't going to change that, but it felt like no justice was served. Randy and Lee had built their lives around Amber. She had been the center of that family. It was the reason the house felt the way that it did the person who made everything that came before her seemed like a waiting period. And what they wanted was finally there. She was their only child. She was gone. Everything about someone's world, when someone like Amber is the center of it, doesn't exist anymore. Through teens are gone, your priorities change, your place in the world changes. And instead, there's just grief. Least stopped working. She tried to have a normal life, but the grief was too hard. And eventually, she just had to stop working. She even tried counseling. She tried to process her thoughts in the loss differently. But all she could do is spend long hours in that room quietly, just looking at an aquarium in their house that Amber had given her. It was filled with little frogs. It had been one of Amber's gestures of love. It was specific and thoughtful in the way that Amber's gestures always were. She chose it because it was something that Lee would appreciate and enjoy. The frogs moving in their tank, oblivious to everything, and Lee sitting and watching them for hours at a time. Because it was the one thing in that house that still felt like it had a connection to Amber. Randy tried to keep working, and he held onto the routine of it. But over time, the weight became too much for him as well. He couldn't focus, he couldn't be present, and he couldn't do what his job required. And it just eroded. He left his job too. And he said there were periods of time where he just lost the will to live. The absence of his daughter and the absence of any answers and the absence of justice created a darkness. And this part made me really sad. I was debating whether to include it 'cause some people don't like getting too emotional and things like that. But he wondered if he's still a father.