Pam Sturm Found the RAV4 at Avery Salvage Yard

Pam Sturm, a former private investigator, found Teresa Halbach's Rav4 in Avery Salvage Yard at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 5th (hearing exhibit 17). Rather than calling 911, she called the cell phone of Calumet County Sheriff Jerry Page, her cousin by marriage.

There is not only a familial relationship (by marriage) between the Pagels and the Sturms, but a long-time, close professional relationship between the generational sheriffs of Pagels and generational fire chiefs of Sturms.

By KiwiBattlerNZ, Reddit (plus other comments on the thread)

On the private search party looking for Teresa on November 5th: Suddenly Pam Sturm shows up and suggests searching the Avery property after being told by Ryan Hillegas that no one was going there...

What was surprising is that Ryan Hillegas and Pamela Sturm (who is/was a private investigator) actually testified to the opposite — they said no one was going to search Avery's until she suggested it.

Q. How do you know Pam and Nikole?
A. I had met them Saturday morning. They showed up after the good majority of everybody else had left. But that was the first time I had met them.
Q. After, then, the first wave, if you will, of citizens got their maps and they went off to do their search; what did you and Pam Sturm discuss?
A. Well, Pam had showed up after pretty much the whole group of everybody had already left to search in the morning. And we had a good — you know, so many people, we had a good portion of everything that we had divvied up. Good portion of that was already handed out to other people. Wasn't much area left to search yet.
And she just asked, basically came out and said, had anybody gone to the car yard yet, the Avery Salvage Yard. We just said, no, that we hadn't been sending anybody in there and she offered to and said she would be willing to and --

Page 167-168 of Day Two

Q. When you got there Pam, what happened?
A. Well, we got their late; the search team was already gone. Ryan and Scott were still there. And I asked them if I could help out. And they said, yes, they have maps for the area that they were going to search. And he showed me the map and then he showed me the picture of Teresa and all the details regarding Teresa.
And I indicated that I would like to go to the Avery Salvage Yard where Teresa was last seen. And he said, well, if you want to, it's not part of, you know, the search, but if you wish to do that, go ahead.

Page 199 of Day Two

The simple fact is, the Avery Salvage Yard was not on the list until Pam Sturm showed up... suggesting that at that time it was not considered to be the last place she was seen.

I have to wonder if someone told Pam Sturm that the Avery yard would be an important place to search, considering how she's the one that changed the plans.

I also noticed that the above testimony contradicts this:

Q. Let me ask you something, Mr. Hillegas, why would you center or why would you direct some of your search efforts around the Avery property?
A. Well, mostly for the fact that, you know, the media had covered so much of it. You know, all you heard about was around the Avery property. And I believe at that point we had known that, you know, her last kind of whereabouts were in that neck of the woods.
Q. So even as an untrained law enforcement officer, you knew to look for the last place she was seen alive; is that right?
A. Yes.

Page 168, Day Two
Page 165 of Day Two

A couple of pages later, he testified that no one was being sent to the Avery yard, and then Sturm testified that Hillegas told her it was not part of the search.

Hillegas testified that where she was last seen was "in that neck of the woods" not the Avery property itself, and they both testified that it was not intended to be part of the search that day.

I think it's pretty safe to say that at that point they did not believe Avery's yard was the last place she was seen. So why did the story change?

We have the telephone conversation between Wiegert and Remiker where it is said that Halbach went to the Avery property then the Zipperer property.

We have Hillegas and Sturm testifying that the Avery property wasn't even on the list of places to search until Sturm suggested it. And we have Hillegas testifying that the last place Halbach was seen was "in that neck of the woods" but not the Avery property itself.

Then Sturm goes there and within half an hour essentially walks directly to the RAV4.

It seems to me that she knew something about the Avery property that apparently no one else did.

Only Pam Sturm wanted to search there. The search party was not going to search the Avery yard until Pat Sturm showed up and specifically said she wanted to search there. Both her and Ryan Hillegas testified to that fact.

So, essentially, the story was changed after the fact. The evidence was pointing somewhere else until Pam Sturm miraculously found the RAV4 on the Avery property.

She testified she was guided by God. If she had guidance, it was from a very human source. Who guided her there? That's what I want to know. It sure as shit wasn't a fictional god. She isn't psychic, and angels didn't lead her there, but there is every reason to believe that she knew she would find that RAV4 there. So who told her it would be there?

My point is, there is no evidence that on the morning of November 5 — the day the RAV4 was found — that anyone thought the Avery property was the last place she was seen. No one testified that they knew it was the last place she was seen. We have the phone recording that shows the police believed that she had been to Zipperer's after the Avery property, and no evidence that they changed their opinion before the morning of November 5. In fact we have evidence that the search party was not even intending to search the Avery property, implying they believed it was not the last place she was seen. 

She never testified that the reason she wanted to go there was because it was the last place Halbach was seen.  Neither Ryan Hillegas nor Pat Sturm testified that they knew the Avery property was the last place she was seen. In fact, they both testified that no one even intended to go to the Avery property. The police did not believe the Avery property was the last place she was seen until after Pam Sturm made her miraculous discovery. There is no rational way she would have found that RAV4 so quickly. She knew it too, which is why she invoked God. The fact is, they either took their time looking in each vehicle for any sign of Halbach, as she testified, or she was lying on the witness stand. Either way, her story doesn't make sense unless she knew the RAV4 was there and had a very good idea where.

They're both saying Avery Salvage Yard itself wasn't being searched.

Exactly. Yet, the implication has been that was the last place she was seen and everybody supposedly knew it. But they never planned to actually search there on the first day?

They're not saying they weren't looking anywhere near the Avery property.

Exactly. The Zipperer residence is "near" the Avery property... "in that neck of the woods".

The question is, if they thought that morning that the Avery property was the last place she was seen alive, why did the search team not plan to search there?

I think you're reading way too much into specific phrasing — they knew Teresa would've been in that area when she was last seen, based on her phone records.

You're the one reading into the testimony. You're assuming they thought that property was the last place she was seen, despite none of them actually testifying to that effect.

With the audio of the phone call between the detectives, it seems pretty clear that the police didn't believe that it was the last place she was seen at that time. The actions of the search team make it pretty clear they did not think it was the last place she was seen.

As I said... when did the story change? After the RAV4 was found?

Remember Teresa was reported missing the evening of Nov 3. This was very early on Nov 5.

The video this thread is about has been dated to November 4, but some have suggested it was November 5. Either way, it seems that on the morning of November 5 the police believed the last place she was seen was the Zipperer property.

Why did that change? When did that change? And why was the former private investigator Pam Sturm the first to suggest searching the Avery property?

They'd basically only had a day to start sorting through information. The fact that they didn't have it all perfect yet isn't proof that she actually went to Zipperer's after Avery's.

I'm not saying it is. I am suggesting that Pam Sturm was told something that caused her to want to go directly to the Avery property and from there almost directly to the RAV4.

Could the detectives have had a quiet word with her based on information they discovered on November 3rd or 4th? Could someone else have told her she would find the RAV4 there?

And it really isn't strange she'd find it so quickly. Have you seen pictures of the Yard? The way the RAV4 was parked and hidden, it would stand out.

Yes, I have. I also read the testimony that it was at least 3 football fields from the crusher and even further from the entrance and the residences on the property. Yet she walked that 300 or so yards and went directly to the RAV4.

Here is an aerial photo of the yard with the locations marked

She must have walked past literally hundreds of vehicles without even pausing to look in them to cover that distance within the time frame she testified to. The RAV4 was found on the far edge of the yard from the entrance.

That's why she had to come up with the "divine guidance" excuse.

And just going in looking for a specific car means you can just generally walk up and down the rows at a decent pace, not that you need to stop to inspect every single car thoroughly

See, now you're not even sticking to the testimony:

Q. Now, which batch of vehicles did you search, if you can — if you can explain the kind of searching that you were doing; I'm sure the jury is going to be interested in that as well.
A. Okay. I started up here. And up here are trucks, cars, RVs. And we had tried to look in each and every one of them. And you can see there are rows here.

Page 206-207 of Day Two

They didn't just quickly walk around. According to Pam Sturm, they supposedly "tried to look in each and every" vehicle they passed.

Here is another damning part of Ryan's testimony:

Q. And on November 3rd, can you tell the jury what you did, please?
A. Yeah, in the afternoon, I believe it was, I'm going to say around 3:00 or so, Scott had called me and said that Teresa's dad had went over and asked if he had seen Teresa. And Scott called me and I went over to the house that afternoon. Basically, tried digging up any information on where she might be. We started calling her friends. We found a list of her friends on her computer with all their numbers. So we started calling all them to see if anybody had whereabouts. And then after that we printed off her cell phone records off the internet, just to see what calls she had made, or other numbers of friends we could find on there.

Page 158-159, Day Two

Q. Had you known at that time that she hadn't been seen since the 31st of October?
A. Basically, I knew that she was missing. I didn't know she hadn't been seen by anybody. But I knew that -- knew that she was missing or decided that she was missing at that point.
Q. After printing off or getting access to her cell phone records, I assume to her account, through her cell phone provider; were you able to provide that information to law enforcement authorities?
A. Yes.

Page 159, Day Two

So on November 3rd he had her phone records, but did not know she hadn't been seen, and thus couldn't know the last place she was seen.

Knowing who she called doesn't tell you who saw her last.

On November 4 (or November 5) Wiegert and Remiker were talking about her being at Zipperer's after Avery's... So the next day (or a day later) the police did not know where she was seen last.

Later, when asked how he knew the Avery property was the last place she was seen, Hillegas deferred. He did not say he knew the Avery property was the last place she was seen — just "that neck of the woods" — and he did not say the phone records led him to that conclusion, just that the media were talking about the Avery property...

Can you point me to the page number?

I got my Sturms mixed up. It was Nicole Sturm, on page 14 of Day 3. Put simply they were not just walking past vehicles, they were looking inside them — at least 50 each — to see if they could see her body or anything that might indicate her presence. But they walked in essentially a straight line over 300 yards directly to the RAV4, while at least "glancing" in over 50 vehicles each. And note, most of those vehicles were parked perpendicular to their line of travel, so every few yards south, they would have to walk a yard or two between each vehicle to look inside them.

Earl Avery went rabbit hunting "down in the pit" with Robert Fabian, driving past the spot where the Rav4 would be found on Saturday, November 5th. Earl said the Rav4 wasn't there when they drove past. Fabian said that he went rabbit hunting with Earl around 4:30 p.m. on October 31st, but he is lying or mistaken. He was at the Avery property rabbit hunting with Earl on Wednesday, November 2nd (CASO file, page 208 and page 237). At the pre-trial hearing (page 172), Earl said it was Wednesday or Thursday, not Monday, October 31st, when he and Fabian went rabbit hunting at the Avery property (Fabian and Earl's statements given to detectives in November 2005 were coerced and not truthful).