the local police. We don’t have access to that recording, but according to TV interviews that ran in the following week, they told Mr. Spanos to check local hospitals and call around to Zoe’s friends and their parents. They told him that Zoe had probably spent the night at a friend’s house, and perhaps her phone battery had died. They told him to do his due diligence, but to try not to worry. Zoe wasn’t a minor. She was responsible and bright. What the police suggested was a perfectly plausible scenario. The most likely scenario. It made sense. But it was wrong.
The Spanoses made those calls. Zoe had not been admitted to any hospital on Long Island. No one had seen her. She had not been to Jacob Trainer’s party. She hadn’t called anyone to say she wasn’t going to make it. She hadn’t responded when three separate friends, including Lydia Sommer, checked in via phone or text between 11:35 p.m. and 1:17 a.m.
Zoe Spanos walked out of her house in Herron Mills around nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve and vanished into thin air.
On the morning of Thursday, January second, when Zoe had still not come home or contacted anyone to say she was okay, the police finally started searching. A pair of officers went door to door in the neighborhood. Zoe was declared a missing person, her photo and description shared with local news. The police worked with the Spanos family to organize a search party for the morning of January fourth, to comb the woods behind the Spanos property. But by the fourth, they had uncovered something else.
Remember that missing boat I mentioned earlier? On the morning of January first, Mrs. Catherine Hunt of Herron Mills reported her small motorboat missing from its post at the White Sand Marina, one of two local marinas where residents can purchase docking permits.
CATHERINE HUNT: I assumed it was kids, partying in the area. It was New Year’s, after all. But then on Thursday afternoon, I heard on the news that there might be a connection between my boat and the missing girl. It was shocking.
MARTINA GREEN: When the boat had not turned up two days later—and an investigation into Zoe’s cell phone records determined that the last GPS activity on her phone could place her within a hundred-foot radius of the marina at 2:12 on the morning of January first—the police put two and two together.
But here’s where I think they got their math mixed up. The search went ahead as planned on the morning of the fourth, but with a fraction of the expected turnout. I was there. Zoe’s family was there. There were maybe thirty of us total, friends of Zoe’s home from college, neighbors, family friends. Searchers did not find anything in the woods.
At the same time, the Herron Mills PD arranged for the ocean floor to be dragged in and around the White Sand Marina. Dozens of onlookers—who should have been searching—showed up there instead.
CATHERINE HUNT: It seemed, at the time, like the divers might find something that day. The marina isn’t large. I’m sure they did a thorough job. But if she made it out of the marina, onto the open ocean …
MARTINA GREEN: The initial working theory was that Zoe had arrived to the marina early Wednesday morning, released Mrs. Hunt’s boat from its post or more likely found it already liberated by New Year’s revelers who had taken their party elsewhere, and that she tried to take the boat out and drowned.
The Spanos family was horrified, but police overturned that theory lightning-fast with a new one: Zoe didn’t drown. She took the boat, and she literally sailed away into the night.
AD MASSEY [RECORDING]: We’ve now concluded an initial investigation into Miss Spanos’s financial records and can report that the 2:12 data activity on her Verizon-registered cell phone was a PayPal transaction. The purchase from Miss Spanos’s account was for a one-way bus ticket from Asbury Park to Philadelphia for the evening of January first. Miss Spanos’s phone was turned off after the transaction went through, and no further activity has been registered.
MARTINA GREEN: We’re hearing a clip of AD Massey from Channel Four news, which aired on the night of January seventh. That’s right, listeners. The police actually think Zoe Spanos attempted to motorboat across the Atlantic to the Jersey shore, to board a bus to Philadelphia. And that she succeeded.
Maybe it’s possible, for an experienced boater, which Zoe was not. The police