The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world pursuing the most dangerous criminals when a monstrous crime shocks Galveastston police.
“She was placed in three trash bags, put into a container, then tossed off a bridge.”
“It’s a small child that’s been washed up on a sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico, and what is she doing there?”
“There was so many unknowns in this case; it was searching for a needle in a haystack.”
“They called me to tell me that; they said they didn’t have her. I’m like, ‘What do you mean they don’t have her?'”
October 29th, 2007, 10:30 p.m. Robert Spin is fishing for flounder in the Galveastston Bay when the wind picks up. Unable to see fish through the choppy water, he decides to head one mile south of his usual spot.
“I don’t normally fish there, and just something put me there, and I feel like I was there for a reason.”
He cuts his engine and anchors his boat by an uninhabited island. Suddenly, he notices something that’s out of place.
“I saw a box on the shoreline, and um, I pulled up to the bank, got out of my boat, and walked over there and just [to] see what it was.”
“When I turned it over, it kind of made a thud, and I knew that, you know, something wasn’t right at that point, and it just didn’t sound right.”
Inside is a black garbage bag. Spin rips it open and makes a horrifying discovery.
“I looked, and I could see a little girl’s shoe.”
Spin calls 911.
“Galveston County Sheriff’s Office.”
“Yeah, I’m out in West Bay. I think I found a body.”
He stays out in the bay to wait for investigators from the Galveastston County Sheriff’s Department, then shuttles them to the island. Police confirm that the box contains the body of a child. Sergeant Mike Barry is 90 meters away when he gets the call.
“Randy, does it appear to be a child?”
“It appears so.”
He can’t help but think of his own family.
“I have three kids, and uh, it always is an emotional-type investigation when a child is involved in a homicide.”
Barry’s partner, Lieutenant Tommy Hansen, is equally motivated to find out what happened to this child.
“I don’t care how long you’ve been doing this job, children’s cases, they get old real fast. You get tired of working them, and you don’t get callous to that. It hit us hard, but then, you know, you shake it off, and you go to work.”
Sheriff’s deputies scour the island for evidence, but there are few clues. Did someone kill the child, or was the death a horrible accident? Police turn to chief medical examiner Steven Pastilnik for answers. Dr. Pastilnik examines the body and determines that the child is a female between 2 and 5 years old. He also reveals something disturbing: the child’s death was almost certainly deliberate.
“Cause of death was blunt head trauma. That is not the type of thing that you get from an accidental fall; kids fall all the time. It’s actually a significant velocity impact to the back of the head. So no, this is not a trip and fall; this is a push or throw.”
Investigators now suspect they are looking for a killer, possibly a predator, but there is no DNA evidence on the child’s body, and they don’t even know the little girl’s name. Before they can find the killer, they have to find the child’s family.
“We have to try to put a name to that child. Once you’re able to do that, then that can lead you in the right direction of who may be was last with the child.”
The Galveastston Sheriff’s Department recognizes that with so few leads, they need specialized assistance. They call on the experts in child crimes: the FBI. Special Agent Don Gay has worked in the Galveastston area for years and is a natural lead for the sensitive case.
“My supervisor came to me and asked if I would like to work it because of my knowledge of the area and the people, and I said absolutely. I’m a father, and I have little kids. How could somebody do what they had done to this little girl and just throw her away like trash?”
Agent Benjamin Stone, who has worked a variety of crimes against children, is also assigned to the case. His mission is to find out the girl’s home state and how she ended up in the Galveastston Bay. Agent Stone consults with the Coast Guard to determine where the box may have been dropped off, whether from the bridge or a ship.
“The theories around her identity were—I mean, we were kind of all over the place on this. We were trying to figure out where the child had possibly been dumped, but it’s almost impossible for the Coast Guard to pinpoint a single location. You have international shipping traffic in and out of the Houston ship channel, so theoretically, she could have been from anywhere in the world, and that’s what we had to start with.”
Investigators know that the child’s family members must be frantically looking for her. They search a local missing person’s database, but there is no match for the child. Agents decide to enlist the media and go global with the story.
“The sheriff’s office could handle leads and information that came in from the Houston and Galveston area, but the FBI had the ability to reach out, you know, all across the world. We needed the media to spread the word about helping us find this little girl; who is this little girl?”
Truly an emotional appeal. A forensic artist works to give the mysterious little girl a face. A picture emerges of a darling child with blue eyes and medium-length blonde hair, wearing a pink shirt and skirt with purple tennis shoes. Authorities give the mystery victim a name: Baby Grace.
Baby Grace is now America’s child. The sheriff’s department holds a press conference and shows the tiny shoe found with Baby Grace’s body.
“May be a long process, but we’re not going to quit until we figure it out.”
They plead with viewers to call in with information. Investigators can only hope that somebody somewhere will recognize the little girl.
“If we could put a name to that child, the odds are we were going to know who was involved with this. Should I do that, you know? Nobody discards a child like that and somebody doesn’t know something about it.”
It has been more than 48 hours since the body of an unidentified girl, whom police are calling Baby Grace, was found in the Galveastston Bay. FBI agents and the Galveastston County Sheriff’s Department are working furiously to figure out the child’s identity and why she was killed.
“There was blunt force trauma to her head; is it abuse? Was it child abuse?”
With ships constantly moving in and out of the Galveastston waterway, the body could be from anywhere in the world.
“Any way you look at it, we carry a piece of her with us.”
A sketch of Baby Grace is broadcast nationally in an effort to drum up leads. It works.
“Baby Grace hotline. Okay, and your name please?”
Within 24 hours, hundreds of tips pour in from family members worried that Baby Grace is their missing loved one.
“And the types of tips were missing children, custody battles—’I haven’t seen my granddaughter in a year or two years.’ Neighbors who would call in—’I haven’t seen this child in several months; it looks like it could be Baby Grace.’ One of the things that surprised me was how many 2-year-old blond-headed girls were missing.”
On November 2nd, investigators respond to a local tip in nearby Lamar. A man says a girl resembling Baby Grace lived across the street until her family abruptly moved out during the night. The officers enter the home and find discarded children’s clothing and shoes, a potential match for Baby Grace, but the family is nowhere to be found.
While police are pursuing that lead, a manager of a local hotel calls with another promising tip. One of her rooms was rented to a couple but sat unused for more than a week.
“It was suspicious activity by a couple who had equipment for a child, but the occupants of surrounding rooms never saw a child.”
Motel staff had discovered little girl’s clothing and a photograph of a child who resembled Baby Grace.
“This is the laundry room; uh, this is where we investigators aggressively pursued the tip—photo album in there.”
I don’t know, and managed to find the couple, but Baby Grace is not their child, and the lead goes nowhere.
“Let’s go!”
Police are also able to track down the family reported by the suspicious neighbor. It too turns out to be a false alarm. Investigators are back at square one, and they have hundreds of other tips to comb through.
“You know, we had to look at each one of them; I mean, you just didn’t know which one was going to be the one.”
DNA is cross-referenced from families all over the country, each wondering if Baby Grace is their little girl. While hundreds of leads come in, you have to take each one to its logical conclusion. Some were seemed promising in the beginning and then turned out to be nothing, be a dead end.
The FBI even gets a phone call from authorities more than 5,000 miles away who believe the victim might be a missing 4-year-old British girl named Madeline McCann. Madeline had been stolen from her bedroom in May of that year while on vacation with her parents in Portugal. The case was highly publicized, and Portuguese authorities are desperate for a lead.
“I ended up getting in touch with our legal attaches in Spain and Portugal; they in turn got the DNA forwarded it to us. But Madeline’s DNA is not a match for Baby Grace. Neither is anyone else’s.”
“There was so many unknowns in this case; it was searching for a needle in a haystack.”
The tide seems to turn when two fishermen call with a tip. Just days before Baby Grace was discovered, they were fishing in the same bay where her body was found when they saw something suspicious.
“These two gentlemen were fishing at a boat ramp pier in Hitchcock when they noticed an older model vehicle towing a boat pull into that particular boat ramp and launch. The couple—a man and a woman—had no fishing poles, just a blue container. They headed out into the bay and returned around an hour later.”
The two fishermen noted the woman was sobbing in tears as they pulled in. There was no blue plastic container. Who is this mysterious couple, and what happened to the blue container? Investigators begin a no-holds-barred search.
“We conducted surveillance throughout four different communities trying to locate this vehicle that he described,” but they are unable to find the vehicle and anxiously continue their search for the couple. They have another opportunity to find them when a candlelight memorial service for Baby Grace is held in Galveastston. Agents stake out the vigil in hopes the killer or killers is in the crowd.
“Could the people that committed this horrible crime show up? Absolutely.”
One of the fishermen also attends the memorial in case he recognizes the couple. It doesn’t take long before Sergeant Mike Barry hones in on a woman in the crowd.
“I happened to notice a particular lady by her demeanor and behavior was very interested in this vigil. Her demeanor just stood out to me.”
Sergeant Barry approaches the fisherman and asks if she looks like the woman in question. He felt that it was very possible that this was the same lady he saw in the boat. Treatment investigators prepare to follow the woman and get her license plate number, but before they can mobilize, she vanishes. Is the mysterious woman Baby Grace’s killer? Agents must find her if they have any hope of bringing justice for the little girl.
“No stone was going to be left unturned in determining her name and who this little girl was.”
November 7th, 2007. Nine days after the body of an unidentified toddler known as Baby Grace was found, authorities are working around the clock to locate the child’s family.
“It was almost like a roller coaster ride; you go up and down. You just have to keep going down the path, stay steady, and keep looking at every lead that comes in.”
Investigators have 300 leads, but none of them are panning out, and agents are beginning to suspect there’s a terrifying reason for that.
“We knew that it might be a family member because nobody was looking for her. A lot of times, mothers when they kill their children, they dispose of them in water. Could be also a boyfriend, father.”
Police now think Baby Grace’s parents could have killed her, and agents are anxious to find an elusive woman whom two fishermen saw take a mysterious container out into the bay only to return empty-handed. She then turned up at a candlelight vigil for Baby Grace but disappeared before agents could talk to her.
“We followed this lead for numerous weeks. We thought that was our best potential lead that we had.”
But weeks of searches yield nothing, and investigators begin to theorize that the woman and her partner may have stumbled across Baby Grace’s body and disposed of it in fear.
“It is believed that the couple in the boat had previously come across this container, brought it home, maybe thinking that they had just come across some fishing gear, and when they discovered what it was, then they immediately went back out and disposed of it.”
While investigators continue their search, 47-year-old Cheryl Sawyers is more than 500 miles away in Mentor, Ohio, browsing on the internet. She suddenly comes across the story of Baby Grace. Something about the child’s clothing—a pink top and skirt with purple tennis shoes—catches her eye. She’s reminded of an outfit she had given to her 2-year-old granddaughter, Riley Anne.
“And it wasn’t so much the composite drawing; I mean, it resembled her, she had the curly blonde hair and that, but it was more the clothing that she had on. I bought all of her clothing.”
Cheryl, whose granddaughter used to live with her, hasn’t seen the child in months. Riley’s mother, Kimberly Trenor, had been in a custody dispute with Cheryl’s son, Robert, when she suddenly disappeared with the child.
“They up and left, and we didn’t even know about it; we didn’t even know Kim moved.”
The Sawyers later learned that Kim had married a man named Royce Ziegler and moved with him and Riley to Texas.
“I showed up at the house on Tall Oaks to pick up Riley, and there was nobody there.”
Now, Cheryl learns from the website that Baby Grace was found in Galveastston, Texas, near Houston, where Riley had recently moved.
“Baby Grace hotline. All right, calm down ma’am.”
Though Cheryl doubts that Baby Grace is her granddaughter, she decides to make the call to the sheriff’s tip line.
“And how long’s it been since you’ve seen her last?”
“I called the number and spoke to someone down there to ask them to please go do a welfare check on my granddaughter.”
On November 10th, investigators dispatch an officer to the house where Riley lived with her mother Kim and stepfather Royce Ziegler. While an investigator is at the house, Royce Ziegler drives up. He readily identifies himself but says Riley no longer lives there.
“Me and my wife are in the process of moving in with my parents.”
“And you have a daughter, Riley Sawyers?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Riley?”
He tells authorities that Ohio’s Child Protective Services or CPS took custody of Riley following allegations of sexual abuse.
“Hey, you—you can’t just take her. There must be something I can do, ma’am.”
“And uh, where is Riley now?”
Riley’s mother, Kimberly, confirms Royce’s story to investigators and faxes a letter to prove it, but authorities are suspicious.
“What’s this about the practice?”
“And any law enforcement officer would know is that Texas CPS would have taken custody of Riley, not Ohio.”
They decide to contact Ohio Child Protective Services to see if they took Riley into custody.
“We did contact CPS Ohio; of course, they totally denied the fact that they had even sent a letter, or would they have taken custody of her.”
Authorities are growing more and more concerned and beginning to wonder if Baby Grace is actually Riley Anne Sawyers.
“We proceeded to start focusing in on, ‘Where’s a child?’ Then the dominoes started to fall more rapidly.”
Investigators decide to order DNA samples from Riley’s mother, Kim, but they’re looking for a parent who killed their child, and people close to Kim, including Riley’s father, Robert, can’t imagine she would ever hurt her daughter.
“I never saw her spank or hit Riley at all. She was a good mother. I wasn’t thinking that it was her; I was thinking that, possibly, they just had her hidden because they didn’t want us to see her.”
Galveastston, Texas. It has been months since Cheryl Sawyers has seen her 2-year-old granddaughter, Riley Anne. Riley’s mother, Kimberly Trenor, claims she was taken by Child Protective Services, but the story isn’t true, and Riley is still missing.
“The red flags obviously go off, and you’re, ‘What’s going on? Where is this child? Is Baby Grace really Riley Anne Sawyers?'”
It’s inconceivable to her father, Robert, who can’t imagine Kimberly hurting their daughter.
“She was great with Riley; she was a great mother.”
Robert Sawyers was a high school student when he first met Kimberly in 2004. Kim was quiet and intelligent, known as a good student. She was looking for love, and her relationship with Robert quickly got serious.
“When she found out she was pregnant, she actually took the news a little bit better than I did; she was more excited than I was at first.”
Riley Anne’s birth was a joyous occasion.
“It was a very, uh, emotional experience just seeing uh Riley for the first time was just, gosh, I think I was on cloud nine when it happened. I could never have been any happier than that.”
When Riley was 3 months old, she and Kim moved in with Robert and grandmother Cheryl. Kim was overwhelmed with finishing school, and Cheryl became the baby’s primary caretaker.
“When we would go, um, shopping, you know, we’d pick out different things and we’d, ‘Okay, Riley, which one do you want?’ And usually it was pink or purple, so her wardrobe had a lot of pink and a lot of purple in it.”
Over time, the young couple’s relationship began to cool.
“I mean, Kim would take care of Riley, but most of the time she would go straight to the computer; it seemed like she was just not there.”
“Hey, sweetie, what you doing?”
Before long, Robert had moved out, though he saw Riley frequently.
“She was a daddy’s girl. We would always go outside and play in the snow and stuff like that during the winter; then we’d go down to the park, uh, during the summer months. You know, when I wasn’t working, I was with her.”
Kim continued to live with Cheryl Sawyers but was lonely for romance. She began an intense relationship with Royce Ziegler, whom she had met over the internet.
“She was saying she had a boyfriend.”
“I said, ‘You do?’ I said, ‘Who?’ But then when she said he was in Texas, it’s like, ‘Well, how does that work? How do you have a relationship with somebody who lives, you know, 1,500 miles away?'”
In 2007, Kimberly moved out of Cheryl’s home. Cheryl continued to see Riley Anne regularly until the little girl and Kim suddenly vanished.
“I didn’t know where they were, how my granddaughter was. That was upsetting after having her there every day for, you know, 2 years, all of a sudden she’s not there anymore.”
Cheryl later learned that Kim had moved with Riley to Texas without telling a soul. She had also quietly married her internet flame, Royce Ziegler.
“So you can come home.”
Cheryl never saw her granddaughter again, a fact that now seems ominous.
“Let’s go out to the truck and get the rest of the box.”
“All right, come on, sweetie.”
Four weeks after the body of Baby Grace was found, Sergeant Barry and Lieutenant Hansen are called into the station to meet with Kimberly and her attorney. They need a DNA sample from her and are expecting to get only a cheek swab, but Kimberly starts talking and gives them much more.
“Riley is Baby Grace. Riley is Baby Grace; I’m positive.”
“You know, show me.”
Kim begins to explain what happened to Riley, a horrifying tale she says begins with her husband, Royce Ziegler.
“Riley, what is up with all that racket in there?”
According to Kim, Royce had a history of disciplining Riley harshly.
“Discipline works when I’m at home, but when it’s you and Riley, you aren’t doing it right.”
She says that on July 25th, Royce had grown tired of what he viewed as the 2-year-old’s misbehavior. He decided to stay home from work.
“He really wanted to stay home and make sure I was disciplining Riley.”
“Riley, when you want something, you ask me.”
“I have.”
“He said we need to break her.”
“Riley, I thought I told you to ask before taking things.”
She screamed; she had a belt. She got her head shoved into a pillow. As the day went on, Kim claims she participated in the abuse in order to please her husband.
“He wanted me to shove her head under water, and I found myself doing that and hitting her with the belt because that’s what he was doing. It just seemed like it went on and on and on.”
The couple stopped at one point to give Riley some Tylenol and ice her wounds.
“During this, she said, ‘I love you.'”
“And it stopped for a brief moment.”
“She said that to who?”
“She had said that to me.”
“I—I think she had said that to him.”
But the abuse continued until, finally, Riley collapsed.
“I could just feel her going cold, and we had a heating pad on her ’cause we thought she was so cold from from the ice.”
“He died—my arm.”
Kimberly says she and Royce never discussed calling 911. Instead, they immediately drove to a store to purchase black garbage bags, a blue plastic container, and other supplies. They bathed Riley in bleach to destroy any DNA evidence. They put her body in the box, then left her in the garage to decompose for almost two months in the heat of summer.
“One night, he decided that we needed to get rid of it. He really, ideally, wanted to keep it there, but it was starting to smell, uh, in the heat. I was an emotional wreck because I knew my daughter is dead in that box in that storage shed right there, and he decided it would be better if we took and moved.”
They drove in the dark to Galveastston and dumped the body off a bridge. Investigators are speechless at Kim’s story.
“How can a mother stand back and watch that happen to their little girl? Most people will fight to the end for their child. It just shows a level of of contempt for human life that I just can’t fathom.”
They need to find out whether she’s telling the truth, and they need to move quickly. After her confession, Kimberly tells investigators that Royce Ziegler attempted suicide just a few days earlier. According to Kim, he had written a suicide note confessing to the brutal killing. If agents don’t get to him in time, there’s no telling what could happen.
“We didn’t want to see him do anything to himself or anybody else.”
November 23rd, 2007. Kimberly Trenor has just stunned investigators by revealing how she and her husband, Royce Ziegler, callously beat her toddler daughter, Riley Sawyers, to death.
“It looked like she didn’t have control over her legs anymore, so he held her for a little bit, and he tried to get her to stand a couple more times, but she couldn’t.”
Kimberly tells investigators that Royce is suicidal and has written a note confessing to the monstrous crime. Agents rush to his house and are relieved when he’s alive and willing to talk, but once in custody, Royce tells a much different story than the one Kim told just hours earlier.
“I was in bed the entire time.”
Royce claims he was asleep when he heard Kim yelling at Riley. He came out of his bedroom, and that’s when he realized that Riley was in bad shape. Royce is putting the blame on Kim, and investigators need to find out who is telling the truth. FBI agents and sheriff’s department investigators search the couple’s home for evidence. Inside a nearby storage unit, investigators find the suicide note. In it, Royce appears to take responsibility for Riley’s murder. The FBI evidence lab confirms that Royce wrote the note. Analysts there also recover a list of rules Royce wrote for 2-year-old Riley Anne.
“These disciplining sessions were child abuse; they were beyond any standard form of disciplining a child.”
In spite of the evidence against Royce, prosecutors decide to charge both Royce and Kimberly with capital murder.
“She never said stop, she never called 911, she never said, ‘This is my child; I’ll take care of it,’ and she participated.”
Cheryl and Robert Sawyers are emotionally shattered that Kim participated in Riley’s death.
“I couldn’t tell you exactly what I felt; I was just numb to the core at that time.”
“I just kept it all inside; it wasn’t even me anymore.”
“I was absolutely shocked by it, um, and I still don’t know why she would have let it happen; it surprised me. It never, ever would cross my mind that a baby would ever be in danger from her.”
Experts believe Kim allowed the abuse to occur because she was afraid of losing Royce.
“She wanted to keep her life; I mean, he was her prince charming, he moved her down here, he gave her a new life, and she was willing to do anything to keep this life. And if that meant not having Riley around, then that’s what it was.”
In their opinion, that doesn’t change Kim’s level of guilt.
“I mean, I think any two people who are willing to torture a child all day long, both of them are monsters.”
That doesn’t stop Kimberly from having another child, however. In a shocking twist, she gives birth to their son while awaiting trial in prison.
“Royce told her if she was pregnant, law enforcement would be more lenient on her than they would a woman that is not pregnant.”
The jury isn’t swayed. On February 2nd, 2009, Kim is convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. Royce Ziegler is convicted of capital murder later that year and is sentenced to life without parole. Their son is being cared for by relatives. The Galveastston Island where Riley Sawyers was found was renamed Riley’s Island in her honor. She is now buried in her hometown of Mentor, Ohio. Sergeant Mike Barry, FBI Special Agent Don Gay, and two other investigators served as pallbearers, carrying her to her final resting place.
“I was very touched and honored that, uh, I was asked to be a pallbearer. I have to say that God played a part in this for me to be a pallbearer; it was closure for me realizing that Riley is now in a better place. It was rewarding at the end, obviously sad, but to at least give her back to her grandmother and, uh, give her a burial.”
Robert Sawyers has since married and has two sons. Still, he grieves for his little girl.
“Spent two wonderful years together; it didn’t seem like long enough. She was just a sweetheart, loved her to death, and couldn’t love anybody else more besides my other two boys that I have right now.”
Cheryl Sawyers still feels the intense pain of losing her only granddaughter. She now passes out bracelets with Riley’s name on them to raise awareness about child abuse.
“I don’t want anybody ever to have to go through what we went through, and no child should ever have to go through what she went through. And hopefully, by keeping her story out there, uh, that you’ll have parents—young parents, you know—who will think twice before striking their child.”
