In February of 2017, 18-year-old Janet Gibson went to meet a guy she met online and disappeared without a trace.

4 days later, she was found in the freezer of an abandoned roadside cafe.

She had frozen to death in a working unit inside the deenergized building.

All the evidence pointed to her new friend, but whether he actually lured the girl into the ice trap and why, you will find out in this video.

Enjoy.

Some names and details in this story have been changed for anonymity and confidentiality.

Not all photographs are from the actual scene.

On February 12th, 2017, the morning in Denver, Colorado was cloudy and windy.

18-year-old art college student Janet Gibson packed her backpack with a care that struck her mother as a bit excessive for a typical school trip.

Janet told her parents that she was planning to spend the day at Garden of the Gods Park, a place known for its Red Rocks, where she was supposed to draw sketches for a term paper.

Her father, who helped her load the heavy camera case into the trunk of her old Honda Civic, had no idea that the sketchbook was just a cover.

In fact, Janet was preparing for an event she had been looking forward to for over three months.

This trip was planned for the first real meeting with Peter Baker, a 20-year-old amateur photographer whom she met on a specialized online forum.

Their conversation, which began with a discussion of shutter speed and composition, quickly grew into an emotional attachment.

According to Janet’s friend, who later testified to the police, the girl was fascinated by his texts, although they never communicated via video, limiting themselves to audio messages and photos.

At 8 hours and 30 minutes in the morning, Janet’s car exited Interstate 25 and headed south.

Traffic surveillance cameras captured her car near the exit for Highway 24.

This was the last visual contact with the girl.

She was driving alone and judging by the footage did not look worried.

The key moment that would later become the center of the investigation came at exactly in the morning.

Janet sent a text message to her closest friend, the one who knew the real purpose of the trip.

The text was short and contained a strange change of plans.

He changed the place.

I’m going to the old diver.

It’s more atmospheric.

He says it’s better for filming.

The friend who was busy studying read the message only an hour later and sent a reply asking which place it was, but the message was never delivered.

Janet Gibson’s phone went offline at 4 minutes later.

It never came online again.

Anxiety began to build in the late afternoon.

The agreement with her parents was clear.

Janet was to return by in the evening for a family dinner.

When the clock crossed and his daughter’s phone remained silent, her father tried to call her again but only heard the answering machine.

At in the evening, after calling a friend who told her about the guy from the forum and the strange message about the dineer, the parents filed a missing person’s report with the Denver police.

Given the girl’s age and the circumstances, a trip to a stranger from the internet, the case was given priority status without the standard waiting period.

Detectives quickly identified Peter Baker.

The guy lived in a small town 30 mi from the place of the planned meeting.

The police contacted Baker in the dead of night.

According to the initial interview report, the 20-year-old was genuinely shocked by the officer’s call.

He claimed that he had arrived at the main entrance of the Garden of the Gods Park at 45 minutes in the morning and had been waiting for Janet for almost 3 hours.

According to him, he tried to call her dozens of times, but the connection was cut off and he thought she had simply changed her mind or was afraid of the meeting at the last minute.

However, the detectives immediately noticed a critical discrepancy in the testimony.

Janet wrote to a friend that it was Peter who changed the meeting place and directed her to the old diver.

Baker categorically denied this.

He insisted that he had not sent any messages about the change of location and did not know which establishment was involved.

He even showed his phone to the patrol officers who arrived at his house in the morning.

In his message history, the last text message was sent at in the morning with the words, “I’m almost there.

I’m waiting at the welcome center.

This discrepancy was the first warning sign.

Someone was lying.

Either the guy who was trying to create an alibi for himself or someone else who had interfered with their communication.

For the police, the situation looked like a classic kidnapping scheme.

The attacker lures the victim to a lonely place using trust.

The search operation began at dawn on February 13th.

Patrol crews moved along Highway 24, combing roadsides and off-ramps within a 15-mi radius of the suspected disappearance.

Officers were looking for a silver Honda or any sign of the girl.

The terrain was challenging.

Mountain roads, dense forests, and many abandoned or closed roadside service facilities for the winter.

The weather was deteriorating and snow was starting to fall, threatening to hide any traces Janet might have left on her way into the unknown.

4 days had passed since Janet Gibson’s phone went dead somewhere on the outskirts of Highway 24.

The hope of finding the girl alive melted away with each passing hour, giving way to cold despair that gripped not only the family, but also the hundreds of volunteers who joined the search operation.

On February 16th, 2017, the weather in the Woodland Park area remained harsh.

Low gray clouds touched the tops of the pine trees and icy winds cut through the clothes of the searchers who combed the forest along the road meter by meter.

One of the groups of volunteers moving along a certain square came to an old dilapidated building that stood farther from the road, partially hidden by shrubbery and young spruce trees.

It was the former Pine Ridge Diner, a roadside cafe that, according to official records, had ceased operations in 2015.

Since then, the building had been empty.

The windows were boarded up with plywood.

The sign was leaning, and the parking lot in front of the entrance had long been overgrown with weeds that now stuck out from under a thin layer of snow.

The place looked dead, a part of the state’s forgotten history, rarely visited even by the homeless.

However, the volunteers attention was drawn to a detail that stood out from the overall picture of desolation.

The back technical door, which is usually welded or tightly boarded up in such facilities, was barely a jar.

The black gap, several inches wide, looked like an invitation to darkness.

According to one of the group members who later testified to the police, the snow at the threshold was crushed, although the wind had already smoothed out the clear outlines of the footprints.

When the volunteers went inside, they were greeted by the musty smell of old grease, dust, and dampness, a typical aroma of a room that had not been ventilated for years.

The beams of the flashlights snatched upside down chairs, remnants of kitchen equipment and cobwebs hanging from the ceiling in dirty garlands out of the darkness.

Inside there was absolute ringing silence broken only by the creaking of the floor under the searcher’s feet.

But as they moved deeper toward the kitchen and utility rooms, one of the men raised his hand, calling for everyone to stop.

Amid the dead silence of the abandoned cafe, a sound that shouldn’t have been there could be heard.

It was a low, monotonous electric hum, the sound of a running motor.

It came from the far corner of the back room.

The source of the sound was a massive oldstyle industrial freezer.

It was standing against the wall, and the indicator on its panel was glowing with a dim but distinct red light.

The very fact that a powerful appliance was operating in a building that had been officially disconnected from the power grid 2 years ago gave the audience chills.

This meant that someone had been here recently and had made efforts to bring power to the building.

The volunteers did not dare to open the cell door on their own and immediately called the search coordinators and the police.

The officers who arrived 20 minutes later entered the room with their weapons drawn.

The police officer who first pulled the heavy metal handle of the freezer later recalled in his report that the mechanism gave way surprisingly easily.

The hinges were lubricated and did not make a single squeak.

The inside was filled with thick, sterile cold that instantly mixed with the musty air of the kitchen.

In the light of the police lights, a human figure was seen on the metal floor of the cell.

It was Janet Gibson.

She was sitting in the corner, knees drawn up to her chest and arms wrapped around it in a fetal position, the way humans instinctively huddled together to keep the last bit of warmth.

She was wearing the same winter jacket she had worn when she left home, and the recognizable yellow knitted scarf that appeared in all the APBs stood out as a bright spot around her neck.

Her eyes were closed, her head was tilted to the side, and frost was frozen on her eyelashes.

She looked as if she had just fallen asleep from fatigue.

A visual inspection of the body at the scene showed no obvious signs of a struggle.

Her clothes were not torn and there were no bruises or abrasions on her face.

It seemed that she had just walked in and stayed there forever.

However, the door of this type of freezer cannot be opened from the inside.

It is locked with a heavy external bolt.

Someone had locked her in there knowing that she would have no chance of survival atus20°.

For the investigation, this discovery was a turning point that instantly changed the qualification of the case from disappearance to aggravated murder.

The working freezer became the main material evidence.

Technicians examining the connection found that the power cable had been skillfully connected to an illegal tie-in to a power line that ran behind the back wall of the cafe.

The work had been done carefully, expertly, and disguised so that a casual passerby would not notice the wires.

This indicated that the crime was not spontaneous.

It was a trap that had been prepared in advance, counting on such an outcome.

The detectives immediately paid attention to the geography of the crime.

The Pine Ridge Diner was located just 15 miles from the home of Peter Baker, the boyfriend Janet was on her way to see.

It was his message, according to her friend, that directed her to the old diner.

The coincidence was too precise to be accidental.

It looked like a brutal, cold-blooded date murder.

The guy lured a gullible victim to a prepared location, took her life in a manner that left no bloody trace, and left her to freeze in the darkness of an abandoned building that he thought no one would check.

Janet’s body was taken away by coroners, and the area around the cafe was cordoned off with yellow tape.

Now, it was a crime scene where every speck of dust could be a clue.

But the main question that hung in the frosty air that evening was not how she died, but how horrible it was to die in complete darkness and cold.

While outside, just a few walls away, the world went on with its life.

The results of the forensic examination, which arrived at the desk of the Teller County senior detective 48 hours after the body was discovered, finally dashed the hope that the tragedy in the abandoned cafe was an accident.

The pathologist provided a conclusion that shocked even experienced investigators.

The cause of Janet Gibson’s death was not just deep hypothermia.

A critical concentration of powerful sedatives, which are commonly used to treat severe sleep disorders, was found in her blood.

This meant that the girl had no chance to escape or call for help.

She was slowly falling asleep while the cold took her life.

The most horrifying detail of the report was the time of death.

Experts concluded that Janet’s heart stopped not on the day she disappeared, but almost a day after she left home.

She was alive when her parents called the police.

Alive when the first patrol cruise hit the highway and probably still breathing when her picture was first shown on the evening news.

She died slowly in complete darkness and loneliness, locked in a metal box.

For the police, this fact became a signal for immediate action.

The case was reclassified as a premeditated murder with particular cruelty.

All suspicions instantly focused on one person, Peter Baker.

He was the one the victim was traveling to see, and it was his digital footprints that led to the crime scene.

Officers obtained an arrest warrant and detained the 20-year-old at his home as he tried to explain to his mother why the police were interested in him again.

During the interrogations, the transcripts of which would later become part of a high-profile trial, Peter appeared confused and frightened.

He insisted on his innocence, claiming that he had never been to the Pine Ridge Diner and did not know about the existence of a working freezer.

However, there was a wall of evidence against him that seemed to the investigation and prosecutors to be absolutely impenetrable.

The first and most compelling piece of evidence was the fateful text message about the change of meeting place.

Cyber security experts analyzed the log files of the social network server and confirmed that the message with the text he changed his location I’m going to the old diver was triggered by an incoming message from Peter Baker’s account.

Technical data showed that the message was sent using his credentials.

For the investigation, this was direct evidence that it was Peter who deliberately lured the girl into a trap by changing the safe location of the park into a deserted ruin.

The second nail in the defense line was CCTV footage.

Although the crime scene itself was not visible on the cameras, the traffic monitoring system on Highway 24 recorded a car that matched the description of the suspect’s car.

A dark sedan identical to the one Peter owned drove in the direction of Woodland Park on the morning of Janet’s disappearance, just in the time frame when investigators believe the killer would have been preparing the freezer or waiting for the victim.

Although the license plates in the recording were blurred due to the bad weather and distance, the prosecutor used this fact to confirm that Baker was at the crime scene.

The third piece of evidence was deeply emotional and finally convinced the jury of the connection between the victim and the suspect.

During the examination of Janet’s personal belongings found in the pockets of her winter jacket, forensic scientists discovered a neatly folded piece of paper.

It was a photo of Peter Baker printed on a color printer, the same photo he had sent her during their online affair.

She took it with her to recognize her lover when she met him.

This piece of paper became a symbol of her trust, which according to the prosecution was cynically used by the killer.

Peter’s defense tried to build a strategy on the absence of direct biological traces.

Forensic scientists carefully processed every inch of the freezer surface, the victim’s clothes, and the cafe’s door handles, but found no fingerprints or DNA samples from Baker.

However, the prosecutor’s office skillfully turned this fact against the defendant.

The absence of traces was explained by the careful preparation of the crime.

The killer acted with gloves on, leaving no chance for identification.

The fact that the freezer had been connected to the power grid in advance only confirmed the version of a planned action rather than a spontaneous attack where the criminal could have made a mistake.

Peter Baker continued to insist that he had been set up, that someone else had accessed his account and written those messages.

But his words sounded like a desperate attempt to avoid responsibility.

He could not name anyone who would have had a motive to treat him so cruy, and he could not provide any evidence of hacking his page.

To the jury, he looked like a classic predator who used the internet to manipulate and then destroyed in cold blood the witness to his perverted fantasies.

The trial was revealing and quick.

The public demanded justice for a young girl who died such a horrible death.

The image of Janet freezing in the darkness haunted everyone.

The prosecutor portrayed Baker as a sociopath who had planned the perfect murder, but slipped up on the digital trail.

The defense’s arguments about an invisible hacker were dismissed as unfounded fabrications.

The jury’s verdict was unanimous.

Guilty.

Peter Baker was convicted of kidnapping, resulting in death and manslaughter.

The judge, reading out the verdict, noted the particular cynicism of the crime and sentenced him to a long term in a maximum security colony.

The young man was taken out of the courtroom in handcuffs under the flashes of cameras and curses from the victim’s relatives.

Officially, the case was closed.

The files with documents were sent to the archive, and the detectives received gratitude for the prompt solving of the high-profile crime.

Justice, as everyone thought, had been served.

The murderer was behind bars and no one even imagined that the real author of this horrific scenario was still at large watching the end of his game.

The year 2021 began for the Baker family in the same way as the previous four years with trips to the penitentiary and endless attempts to find a legal loophole in the monolithic court verdict.

Peter Baker was serving his sentence in a maximum security colony, and with each rejected appeal, the hope of his return became more and more illusory.

The justice system considered the case closed, and the evidence was irrefutable.

However, Peter’s parents, having exhausted all resources for state lawyers, decided to take the last step of desperation.

They turned to a Denver-based private investigator, Mark Sloan.

Sloan had a reputation for taking on dead cases where the official investigation had already given up.

A former homicide investigator, he knew the system from the inside and understood its main flaw.

When the police find the perfect suspect, they often stop looking for alternative leads.

After reviewing the case file, Sloan immediately noticed that the prosecution’s case was too smooth.

All the evidence was digital or indirect.

Not a single witness who had seen Peter on the spot, not a single physical trace of his presence in the cafe.

It looked like a perfectly put together jigsaw puzzle, but it was missing the main element, reality.

In March of 2021, Mark Sloan went to the place where it all began and ended, the abandoned Pineriidge Diner.

In the four years since the tragedy, the building has turned into a real ruin.

Nature and vandals ruthlessly destroyed what remained of the once popular establishment.

The plywood on the windows had rotted away.

The roof had collapsed in places under the weight of snow, and the area around it was overgrown with dense shrubbery that hid traces of the former police tape.

When the detective crossed the threshold through the back door, which had been broken down by someone, he was greeted by the smell of damp wood and mold.

It was dark and quiet inside.

The beam of a powerful tactical flashlight snatched from the darkness overturned tables, broken dishes, and inscriptions left by teenagers on the walls.

But Sloan was not interested in the visitors room.

He moved purposefully toward the back room, guided by the old building plans he had included in his file.

The industrial freezer was still in its place.

It looked like a massive metal sarcophagus, tarnished with time and covered with a layer of dirt.

After the investigation was completed in 2017, the police had disconnected the illegal power supply and left the unit as a piece of furniture that no one needed.

The detective slowly opened the heavy door.

The hinges, which had worked silently 4 years ago, now made a shrill, rusty, grinding noise that echoed through the empty building.

The atmosphere inside the cell was oppressive.

Sloan knew that it was here on this metal floor that Janet’s body had been found.

He tried to reconstruct the events of that night, looking at the space not as a place of death, but as a place of action.

If Peter did not kill, then the real criminal must have had unique knowledge of this location.

He knew how to connect the electricity.

He knew that the camera was working, and he was sure that no one would come in.

This required not just a visit, but careful preparation.

Sloan knelt down and began to methodically inspect every inch of the camera’s interior.

Forensic scientists in 2017 were focused on the victim’s body and looking for prints at human height.

They were looking for what was obvious.

Sloan, on the other hand, was looking for what might be hidden or lost.

He moved the flashlight beam along the joints of the metal sheets that formed the walls and floor of the unit.

In the far corner, where the wall paneling met the floor, he noticed a slight deformation.

The metal sheet had pulled away slightly, forming a narrow, barely visible gap, clogged with age-old dust and debris.

It was a design defect that no one had noticed four years ago because it was in the deep shadows behind the victim’s back.

The detective pulled a thin folding knife from his pocket and gently ran the blade inside the gap.

The metal made a dull sound.

Sloan tried to pry the edge of the sheetrock.

The metal corroded underneath gave way reluctantly, revealing a dark space between the inner chamber and the insulating layer.

Shining a flashlight into it, he saw something that was not part of the refrigerator’s design.

Deep in the crevice among the cobwebs and dust, a small rectangular object shown dimly.

Sloan used tweezers to carefully pull out the object, being careful not to damage it.

In the detective’s palm was a translucent plastic case for SD memory cards.

It was covered with a layer of sticky dirt, but retained its shape.

Such an object could easily have fallen out of the pocket during a struggle, a sudden movement, or when someone was bending down to put the body down.

Its size was so small that if it fell into a crevice, it would be invisible to the naked eye.

It was the very detail that the police missed, blinded by the obviousness of Peter Baker’s guilt.

The case could not have been there by accident.

It belonged to either the victim or the killer.

Given that Janet’s personal belongings had been described to the last detail, and no camera or storage media had been found among them, the discovery sent the detective into a wave of professional adrenaline.

If this was the killer’s item, it had been here for 4 years, holding perhaps the only clue to the truth.

Mark Sloan carefully placed the case in the evidence bag.

He realized that he was holding a potential explosive device for the entire case.

Staying in the cold, dry environment of the freezer could preserve the contents of the case, saving it from the damaging effects of moisture and temperature extremes that had destroyed everything else in the building.

As Sloan left the cafe, he looked back at the rusted freezer door.

The place that had become Janet’s tomb and Peter’s prison had finally given up its secret.

The silence of the abandoned dive no longer seemed dead.

Now it was filled with expectation.

The detective got into the car realizing that the most difficult part of the job was ahead to make this little piece of plastic talk and tell the story that they had tried so hard to hide four years ago.

Mark Sloan realized that the plastic case found in the freezer was the only physical evidence that did not appear in the case file from 4 years ago.

He did not risk going to police laboratories where the bureaucratic machine could destroy the fragile chance of a reversal.

Instead, the detective took the discovery to a private digital forensics lab in Denver whose experts specialized in recovering data from damaged media.

The senior technical expert accepting the evidence did not give any guarantees.

According to him, four years in an environment with temperature and humidity fluctuations could have irreversibly oxidized the copper contacts and destroyed the internal structure of the memory chip.

A visual inspection under a microscope confirmed the presence of micro cracks on the card body where condensation could have gotten in.

The repair process took time.

The top layer of plastic had to be removed and soldered directly to the memory chip, bypassing the damaged controller.

The wait lasted 72 hours.

When Sloan’s phone finally rang, the expert’s voice sounded reserved, but he was professionally satisfied.

They managed to extract the so-called raw image of the data.

The file system was partially destroyed.

Many sectors were unreadable, but the array of photos was preserved.

Sloan arrived at the lab 40 minutes later.

The expert expanded the recovered files on a large monitor.

The detective expected to see anything.

Crime scene photos, pictures of Janet Gibson, maybe even the killer’s face that accidentally got into the frame.

But what appeared on the screen was confusing because of its mundanity.

There was not a single image of Janet on the card.

It was a personal digital archive of a completely different person.

The series of pictures dated from August to October of 2016, a few months before the tragedy.

On the screen, there were selfies of a young girl with dark hair taken in a bathroom mirror, photos of a red cat on a window sill, landscapes of an autumn park, and several blurry shots from a party where it was difficult to make out faces in the semi darkness.

It looked like the contents of a memory card from an ordinary amateur DSLR camera used to capture everyday moments.

These images seemed to have nothing to do with the dead body in the freezer.

However, the expert drew Sloan’s attention to another aspect, invisible to the eye, but critical to the investigation.

He opened the properties of one of the files and highlighted the line with the so-called XIF data, the technical information that the camera automatically records in each image.

The camera owner field, which users often fill in when they first set up the device and then forget about it, had a short but clear name, S.

Evans.

Mark Sloan asked for a printout of the report with metadata and to copy the recovered photos to a secure medium.

The name Evans seemed familiar to him, as if he had seen it in a glimpse while flipping through thousands of pages of court records in the Peter Baker case.

Returning to his office, the detective pulled out the boxes containing the case file from 2017.

It took him almost 2 hours to find the document he needed in the third volume, which contained materials on the interview of witnesses and the suspect’s entourage.

In the list of Peter’s contacts compiled by the police in the first days of the investigation, Sarah Evans was listed at number 24.

Sloan pulled out a thin folder with the minutes of her interrogation.

Sarah Evans, 19 years old at the time of the incident, Peter Baker’s ex-girlfriend.

According to the case file, they broke up in the fall of 2016, which is exactly the period that the last photos on the found flash drive are dated.

The breakup occurred 3 months before the deceased Janet appeared in Peter’s life.

Sloan carefully read the text of the protocol dated February 18, 2017.

The detectives interviewed Sarah not as a suspect, but as a witness who could shed light on Peter’s identity.

Her testimony then became one of the cornerstones of the prosecution.

According to Sarah’s words recorded by the police officer, Peter Baker was pathologically jealous and prone to total control.

She said that during their relationship, he allegedly demanded reports on her every move, checked her phone, and staged scenes of aggression if she did not answer her calls immediately.

Sarah claimed that she was afraid of him after the breakup and even changed the locks in her apartment.

Although she did not file an official report with the police, her description fit perfectly into the prosecutor’s narrative.

Peter is a hidden aggressor whose obsession with control led to Janet’s murder when she tried to act differently from his script.

The jury believed these words because they came from a girl who had allegedly barely escaped this monster herself.

But now there was a small piece of plastic on the table in front of Sloan that turned everything upside down.

The memory card belonging to Sarah Evans, or at least used in her cell, judging by the metadata and personal selfies, was found in the most inaccessible place of the murder scene, in a crack under the freezer.

This raised questions that no one had asked four years ago.

How did a personal item of a scared ex who allegedly did not communicate with Peter and had nothing to do with his new acquaintances end up in an abandoned cafe 15 mi from the city? Why was this card lying exactly where Janet’s body was buried? And most importantly, could the description Sarah had given Peter be not just the testimony of a hurt girl, but part of a well-thoughtout plan to shift the blame? Sloan laid out the photographs of Sarah from the recovered archive on the table next to the photograph of Janet Gibson.

Two young girls, one is dead, the other sent her ex to jail with a mere signature on a report.

A digital ghost from the past materializing in the form of a forgotten flash drive provided the investigation with a physical link to the crime scene for the first time in 4 years.

And this person had a motive that investigators did not even know about.

Blinded by the perfection of their main suspect, the discovery in the freezer turned Sarah Evans from a secondary witness into a person of direct operational interest.

However, the mere presence of her memory card at the crime scene, although a strong argument, remained circumstantial evidence.

She could claim that she had lost it there years earlier when the cafe was still open or that someone had stolen her belongings.

Mark Sloan understood that to overturn Peter Baker’s conviction, he needed to not only place Sarah at the scene of the murder, but to prove that she was the one who pulled the strings that led to Janet Gibson’s death.

The detective returned to the key element of the prosecution, the message that changed the victim’s route.

He’s changed his destination, going to the old diner.

In 2017, the investigation was satisfied with the superficial fact that the message came from Peter’s account.

No one asked what device was used to log in.

For the police, the logic was simple.

Peter’s account means Peter wrote.

But Sloan knew that in the digital world, account identity and user identity are different things.

He turned to an independent network traffic expert, providing him with copies of the provers’s logs, which had miraculously survived in the security company’s electronic archives as unused material.

Data analysis technologies have made a step forward in four years, allowing sessions to be reconstructed to the nearest second.

The result of the inspection received 2 days later was stunning.

The expert pointed out a detail that had been ignored by state forensic scientists.

At the time of the fatal text message exactly at in the morning on February 12th, Peter Baker’s cell phone was in an active connection with his home Wi-Fi router.

Technical logs showed that the device was downloading software updates in the background.

This meant that the phone was physically in Peter’s home.

However, the message about changing the meeting place was sent not through the mobile app, but through the web version of the social network.

And most importantly, it came from a different IP address.

Sloan received the coordinates of this address.

It did not belong to Peter, his neighbors, or the mobile network.

It was a static address registered to a municipal office in a neighboring town away from Peter’s home.

The access point belonged to the Teller County Public Library.

This changed the picture completely.

Someone had logged into Peter’s account through the library computer at a time when he was, in his own words, already waiting for Janet in a park where the mobile internet was intermittent.

The investigation of 2017 did not even check the library, being sure of the boyfriend’s guilt.

Mark Sloan immediately went to the library.

It was an old brick building where time seemed to have frozen.

The detective realized that the digital records of public computer usage for 4 years had most likely been destroyed or overwritten, but he was counting on bureaucracy.

In government agencies, paper log books often outlast any electronic databases.

The conversation with the administrator was difficult.

The woman did not agree to provide access to the archive for a long time without an official request from the police, but a private detective’s license and a mention of the possibility of exoneration of an innocent person did the trick.

She said that the old visitor registration logs are stored in the basement of the city hall where all paperwork is taken after being written off.

The basement of the city hall smelled of dust and old paper.

Sloan had to spend almost 4 hours sorting through boxes labeled 2017.

He was looking for a specific date, February 12th.

He wanted to know if Peter Baker was in the library that morning.

If his name was there, his theory of innocence would fall apart.

If not, he needed to look for another name.

When he finally found the battered bluecovered journal, his hands shook with tension.

He turned the page to the date he needed.

The list of visitors was short.

Sunday mornings were not popular.

The detective ran his finger down the column of names.

Peter Baker was not on the list.

Not a single entry resembling his name or signature.

But at the bottom of the page, in a column not intended for readers, but for staff and volunteers, Sloan saw a familiar handwriting.

A name was written in clear, rounded letters.

Sarah Evans.

Next to it was the arrival time 15 minutes in the morning.

Departure time 30 minutes.

Sloan took a picture of the log page.

He remembered a detail from her profile in the case file that he hadn’t noticed before.

Sarah Evans had volunteered at the local library while attending college, helping the elderly learn to use computers.

This gave her unlimited and most importantly uncontrolled access to the terminals.

She was there at the same time as the fatal message was sent from her ex-boyfriend’s account.

She had access, had the opportunity, and apparently knew Peter’s passwords, which he, in his naivity, might not have changed after the breakup.

The paper trail in the basement of City Hall was the link that connected the found flash drive to the digital crime.

Now, Sloan had not just a hunch, but a documented fact.

Sarah Evans was at the computer that sent Janet to her death and had been hiding it for four years.

The story of the aggressive ex was beginning to look like a carefully planned performance, where the main villain had been hiding behind the mask of a victim all along.

After discovering an entry in a library journal that destroyed Sarah Evans alibi, Detective Mark Sloan realized that he was dealing with a calculating strategist who did not leave any accidental traces.

However, digital evidence alone was not enough to overturn the verdict.

He needed to physically place Sarah at the scene of the crime or prove that she was there at the critical moment.

Sloan again turned to the array of video archives seized by the police in 2017.

Back then, the detectives were only looking for Peter Baker’s dark sedan, and having found a similar car, stopped their work.

Terabytes of video from surveillance cameras at gas stations and motel along Route 24 remained unwatched digital garbage.

Mark had spent almost a day pouring over the grainy black and white footage, but now he was looking for another target.

An old blue Ford Focus registered to Sarah Evans.

His luck had changed when he caught a glimpse of a security camera from a Shell gas station in the town of Divide, just 7 miles from the abandoned cafe.

In the video dated February 12th, at 40 minutes in the morning, less than an hour after the fatal message was sent from the library, the right car pulled up to the pump.

The license plate was partially covered with mud, but the last letters matched Sarah’s registration.

The driver’s door opened and a figure stepped out of the car.

Sloan pressed pause and zoomed in on the image.

What he saw made him hold his breath.

It was a woman driving, but her clothes looked completely unnatural.

On Sarah’s frail figure hung a huge baggy men’s dark-colored parka.

It was obviously several sizes too big.

The sleeves covered her palms and the hem reached almost her knees.

The deep hood was pulled over his eyes, although the weather did not require such protection.

This jacket looked familiar to Sloan.

He began to look through the photo archive of Peter Baker provided by his family.

In one of the photos taken a month before his arrest, Peter posed in the same oversized parka with a distinctive reflective stripe on his right shoulder.

The detective returned to the video.

Despite the poor quality, the same stripe was clearly visible on the Ford driver’s shoulder at maximum contrast.

Sloan instantly recalled a detail from Peter’s first interrogation reports that the investigators had perceived as a clumsy lie.

The boy claimed that in January 2017, his favorite winter jacket was stolen from the sports locker room.

He even tried to file a report, but the police refused because of the low value of the property.

Now it was obvious the jacket was not lost.

It was stolen by Sarah Evans to be used as a prop.

It was a thorough preparation.

By wearing Peter’s recognizable item, she created a visual illusion.

If someone had seen her outside the cafe that day, a witness would have described a male figure wearing a jacket that belonged to Baker.

It was a cold-blooded disguise for the main suspect.

But another question remained.

How did Sarah get inside the cafe without breaking in? The back door showed no signs of damage, and the lock was old, but secure.

Sloan turned to the Teller County Land Records to check the ownership history of the Pineriidge Diner building.

The last owner of the closed establishment was Arthur Miller.

The name didn’t mean anything to the detectives four years ago, but Sarah Evans family history checks yielded a startling result.

Arthur Miller was Sarah’s maternal uncle.

Sloan contacted the former manager of the cafe who confirmed that after the bankruptcy, the keys to all the doors, including the service entrance and back rooms, were kept by the owner’s family.

He also recalled that Arthur’s niece Sarah often helped out at the cafe during the holidays.

She knew the layout, the location of the electrical panel, and most importantly, she had easy access to the key set in her uncle’s house.

The circle was complete.

Sarah Evans had everything she needed to commit the perfect crime.

The keys to the murder scene, which allowed her to prepare the freezer in advance, Peter’s clothes to disguise herself as him on camera, and access to his accounts to control the victim.

After gathering this evidence, a journal from the library, a video recording in a stolen jacket, and a family connection to the cafe owners, Mark Sloan realized he held the key to freeing an innocent man.

He compiled a detailed report for his lawyer, preparing to demand a review of the case in which the real killer was hiding behind the mask of a victim of circumstance.

On November 23, 2021, Sarah Evans was arrested at her workplace in the Teller County Library.

The operation went quietly.

Two plain Clothes officers led her out the front door without attracting too much attention from patrons.

She did not resist, maintaining the same expression of calm indifference she had displayed for the past four years.

However, in the interrogation room, when Detective Mark Sloan placed a sealed bag with a plastic memory card case and a copy of the library log for February 12, 2017 on the metal table.

Her protective wall came crashing down.

According to the investigator who kept the record, the moment of confession was not an emotional outburst or remorse.

It was a cold, rational explanation of the actions of a person who thought her plan was flawless and was irritated that she had been exposed for a trifle.

Sarah Evans began to speak, and her story turned the murder case into a chronicle of a carefully planned double revenge that had been months in the making.

She admitted that her main goal had never been Janet Gibson’s death in and of itself.

The real target was Peter Baker.

Sarah explained that after their breakup, she felt not just resentment, but a deep overwhelming need to destroy his life in the same way she felt he had destroyed her self-esteem.

She wanted a fate worse than physical death for him.

According to her testimony, the murder of Peter’s new girlfriend was a tool, a way to send him to prison for the rest of his life, branded as a monster, knowing that he was completely innocent.

Every step she took from stealing his jacket to choosing a diver that belonged to her family was calculated to make sure that the police would come to him.

Sarah had a different, more personal hatred for Janet.

During the interrogation, she called the deceased arrogant.

Sarah was furious that some stranger from the internet had dared to interfere in her and Peter’s, as she saw it, incomplete life.

She confessed to details that shocked even experienced detectives.

Janet Gibson did not die on the day she disappeared.

Sarah kept her in the soundproofed basement of her house for 4 days.

The girl was under the constant influence of strong sedatives which Sarah put in her water.

This kept the victim in a state of semiconsciousness preventing her from resisting.

However, the worst part was the psychological torture.

Sarah said that when the effects of the drugs wore off and Janet came too, she would sit down next to her and read aloud old messages from her correspondence with Peter.

She would force the victim to listen to their love story, trying to prove that Janet was not needed here, that she was just an obstacle that needed to be removed.

The decision to move the victim to the freezer was made spontaneously when Sarah realized that the police were expanding the search area.

She was afraid that volunteers might start checking houses in the neighborhood.

On February 16th at night, she transported the half-living drugged girl to an abandoned cafe to which she had had the keys since childhood.

There she locked her in a pre-wired cell, knowing that the cold would finish the job and all the evidence would point to Peter.

After receiving a full confession and verification of the facts, the Colorado State Attorney’s Office immediately initiated a review of Peter Baker’s sentence.

The process of release took several weeks.

In December of 2021, the court officially dismissed all charges, found Peter not guilty, and ordered his immediate release from custody.

He was released from prison in the winter, 4 years after his life had been destroyed.

But it was not a triumphant return.

According to his lawyer, Peter looked broken.

Four years in a maximum security prison, the loss of his reputation and a youth spent in a cell for a crime he did not commit had left a mark on him that could not be erased by a court order.

A week after his release, Peter Baker went to a cemetery in Denver.

He found the grave of Janet Gibson, a girl he had been talking to for 3 months, with whom he was in love but whom he had never seen in person.

He stood in front of the tombstone, realizing the terrible irony of their story.

Janet had died because she had responded to his messages, becoming an accidental tool in someone else’s painful revenge.

He was free, but the burden of guilt that it was his past that killed her remained with him forever.

The story ended where it began, in the silence of a winter day that took two people, one physically and the other morally.