MISSING AT DAWN A TRUE SCARY STORY FROM BENTONVILLE

 On the morning of November 20th, 2012, at precisely 6:43 a.m., a 911 call was placed from a modest home on Southeast A Street in Bentonville, Arkansas. A mother's voice, steady but fractured with panic, told the dispatcher that her six-year-old daughter was gone. She had put her to bed the night before.

 She was simply gone. Within minutes, officers from the Bentonville Police Department arrived and began canvasing the block. The search took less than 10 minutes. At a vacant house at 704 Southeast A Street, just two doors down from where the little girl had been sleeping, an officer noticed that the back door was standing open. He stepped inside.

 What he found there would shake the community of Bentonville and eventually the entire country to its core. Jersey Diane Bridgeman was 6 years old. She had just turned six, in fact, 6 days earlier on November 14th, 2006. She had not yet had time to properly celebrate her birthday. She never would.

 To understand what happened to Jersey Bridgeman, you have to understand who Jersey Bridgeman was. Because before she became a case file, before she became a headline, she was a little girl who, by every account from everyone who knew her, refused to let the world make her small. Jersey was born and raised in Bentonville, Arkansas, a city in the northwest corner of the state, perhaps best known as the global headquarters of Walmart.

 It is a place of broad, flat streets, strip malls, and close-knit neighborhoods where everyone tends to know everyone else's business. Jersey grew up in that world. She was, by all accounts, a child of infectious energy and surprising emotional depth. Beverly Engel, the executive director of the Children's Advocacy Center of Benton County, had spent time with Jersey the year before her death.

 She described the little girl in a way that stayed with reporters covering the case. Engel called Jersey a little old soul. But such a delight, she added. It was a phrase that captured something that many people who encountered Jersey seemed to notice that she carried herself with a kind of quiet wisdom that seemed at odds with her age.

And yet she was simultaneously undeniably joyful. School officials in Bentonville speaking to the Associated Press in November 2012 confirmed that picture. Despite everything Jersey had endured in her brief life, she arrived at Sugar Creek Elementary School that fall for kindergarten as a happy little girl. Teachers noticed her.

 She stood out not for sadness, but for brightness. Jersey had a 2-year-old sister with whom she shared a bed. She had a mother named Disarray who worked long hours and loved her daughters fiercely. And she had in the recent past survived something that would have broken many children entirely.

 

In 2011, when Jersey was 4 years old, a woman who had been staying temporarily with Jerseys father and stepmother contacted Rogers Arkansas police about what she had witnessed inside that home. What she described was difficult to process. Jerseys father, David Bridgeman, and her stepmother, Jana Bridgeman, had been restraining the child at night.

 According to court records, they used a belt cut to fit around her ankle, attached to a silver chain, and secured with what appeared to be a dog collar. The restraint kept Jersey tethered to a dresser in the room where she slept on the floor beside her father and stepmother. When Rogers police detective Larry Taylor interviewed Jersey about what had been happening, the little girl explained it plainly in the direct uncomplicated way children sometimes do when they describe horrors they have come to accept as normal. She told the detective that

Janna and David had chained her to the dresser because she had gotten up and eaten some pies, cereal, and bread. She said they put a belt around her waist so that she could not get up and get any food. David Bridgeman, when interviewed by investigators, offered a different explanation.

 He said Jersey may have been sleepwalking. He said she got into medication and other things around the house. He acknowledged to detectives that he had considered buying a child gate instead, but said he couldn't afford one because he didn't have a job. He and Jana had discussed it. He said the chain was the solution they had arrived at.

 When Jersey complained that the ankle restraint hurt, David Bridgeman adjusted the configuration. He moved it to her waist. Arkansas authorities arrested both David and Jana Bridgeman. The case drew immediate national attention. Both adults eventually pleaded guilty in June 2012 to false imprisonment, permitting the abuse of a minor and endangering the welfare of a minor.

 David Bridgeman received a sentence of 18 years in prison. Jana Bridgeman, also identified in some court records as Janice Slinkard, received 12 years plus an additional 3 years for a prior probation revocation. Prison records noted that David Bridgeman had a tattoo. It said Jersey. Following the sentencing of her father and stepmother, Jersey was removed from their custody.

 She was placed initially with her paternal grandmother and then as her mother Desere demonstrated stability transitioned into her mother's home. By autumn of 2012, Jersey was living with Desiree and her younger sister on Southeast A Street in Bentonville. She had started kindergarten. She was settling into a life that finally looked like it might offer her something resembling peace.

 And that cruy is precisely when everything fell apart again. Desiree Bridgeman worked hard. She worked the kind of hours that meant her daughters sometimes needed looking after when she wasn't home. And she found that help next door. Zachary Holly was 28 years old in the fall of 2012. He lived at 702 Southeast A Street directly next door to the Bridgeman home with his wife Amanda Holly.

 By the accounts of those who knew them on that block, Zachary and Amanda were a friendly couple. They were the kind of neighbors who got involved, who helped out, who made themselves available. Amanda and Desiree had become close friends, and Zachary and Amanda both took to looking after Jersey and her younger sister, babysitting them regularly, feeding them, bathing them, making sure they said their prayers at night.

 According to testimony later presented at trial, Jersey and her little sister called Zachary Holly, Uncle Zack. He was a trusted figure. He was someone Disarray relied on. He had access to her home. She had given the Holl's a key for babysitting purposes. And on the evening of November 19th, 2012, Zachary and Amanda Holly were watching the two girls once again while Deser worked a late shift.

 Desiree arrived home from work at approximately 11:30 that night. She went next door to the Holly home to collect her daughters. She and Amanda chatted for a few minutes. Then the children were carried home to bed. Desiree carried her younger daughter. Zachary Holly carried Jersey, who was already asleep, across the short distance from his house to hers.

 Together, they laid both girls down in the same bed. Desiree Bridgeman went to sleep. Her daughters were home. They were safe. She had no reason to believe otherwise. When Desiree woke up on the morning of November 20th, 2012, she went to check on her daughters. Her younger daughter, 2 years old, was still in the bed where they had been placed. Jersey was not.

Desiree searched the house. She found nothing. She went next door and knocked on the Holl's door. She asked Zachary and Amanda to help her look for Jersey. They agreed. The search that followed was brief, and Bentonville police were called at 6:43 a.m. Officers arrived quickly and began searching the neighborhood alongside family members.

The search ended 10 minutes after it began. A Bentonville police officer scanning the street noticed that the back door of the vacant house at 704 Southeast A Street was standing open. The house sat immediately next to the Holly residence. The officer entered. He found Jersey Bridgeman's body in a closet inside one of the empty bedrooms.

She was face down. She was unclothed. Her pajama bottoms were wrapped around her neck. She was 6 years old and 6 days past her birthday. Bentonville Police Chief John Simpson immediately declared the death a homicide. The FBI was contacted to assist with the investigation. The state medical examiner was called.

 The neighborhood on Southeast A Street was sealed off. Within hours, the medical examiner's findings confirmed what investigators already feared. Jersey Bridgeman had died of asphixxia, a lack of oxygen caused by strangulation. Physical evidence also indicated she had been sexually assaulted. She had been taken from her bed while she slept.

 In the immediate aftermath of Jerseys discovery, Bentonville detectives began interviewing people connected to the child. Among those brought in was Zachary Holly. In his first conversation with investigators, Holly expressed grief. He spoke about how much he cared for Jersey and her sister. He denied any involvement in her disappearance or death. He was cooperative.

 He agreed to provide a DNA swab. He agreed to surrender the clothing he had been wearing the night before. Detectives later testified that during this first interview, Holly appeared emotional, crying, visibly distressed. But they also noted in what would become a significant detail at trial that he seemed able to turn that emotion off as quickly as he turned it on.

 A second interview followed. In that conversation, Holly again denied harming Jersey. He told detectives he loved her like she was his own child. He described tucking her into bed and said the last time he saw her alive was when he laid her down that night. When investigators pressed him about the possibility that forensic evidence might connect him to the scene.

 Holly told them his DNA would not be found on Jerseys body. That statement, investigators would soon discover, was a lie. DNA analysis from the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory returned results that directly contradicted Holly's denials. Forensic evidence, including DNA found in Jerseys body, was matched to the sample Zachary Holly had voluntarily provided.

 His DNA was also identified on her shirt. On November 26th, 2012, 6 days after Jerseys body was found, Bentonville detectives Chris Moffett and Jared Weisman confronted Zachary Holly in a third interview. They told him what the laboratory had confirmed. Holly confessed. In the third interview, which was recorded and would later be shown to a jury in full, Holly described what he had done.