Amber Wilde

All witnesses, purchas of interest, and suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk Right Now and True Crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. I want to go ahead and jump in to Right Now and True Crime. After I recorded the Right Now and True Crime for Monday's episode, it was released that they found Riley Strain's credit card and it was confirmed to be his card. That was actually the first major clue that was found, and it was found by a couple of gals who were doing their own little investigation. They were kind of searching on their own along Cumberland's River Street embarkment and they found the credit card. And they were both TikTokers and using their platform to try to bring awareness to Rally's case, and they went out to search on their own and they found it. So two amateur detectives found this credit card the first clue in this case, which was huge news. Of course, it was identified as being legit and belonging to Riley Strain. Search crews have continued to be out there searching every day. The Cajun Navy has also gotten involved searching all of the bodies of water looking for any potential signs of Riley. I know the family has expressed some frustration with law enforcement and the amount of communication that is happening between the family and law enforcement. As per usual, it's really hard in these cases because I know law enforcement is probably doing a lot behind the scenes, but the family also is wanting to know what's going on. Do we have any new leads where we looking what is going on in the investigation. So I imagine that they are really frustrated, and they're obviously distraught that Riley has been gone now for almost two weeks. It'll be two weeks when this episode is released on Friday, So it's really sad and unfortunate that it has been so long, and the only really clue that we have to go off of is the credit card. They also did release a bodycam footage from a Nationale police officer who was dealing with another situation and passed by Riley that night, and you know it exchanged you know, hello, how are you used with him and then that was it. That is the last known video footage of Riley. He didn't seem like he was in any distress or anything like that. He you know, talked with the police officer just in passing, didn't stop in chat, just in passing. They talked, So that's really interesting. And then there was also a text message that he had exchanged with a girl that he had been seeing. She had texted him to see how he was doing, if he was having a good time, and his respond response was yes, and then LOPS which no one really knows what LOPS means. Some people have speculated that it means low on power. Sorry, but his phone wasn't low on power, they're saying, So I really don't know. This one is so interesting. I belong to the find Riley Strain Facebook group and there's updates posted daily. The family has come out and made statements. They are all just hoping and praying that Riley is okay and that they can find him. They do seem like they were really close and tight knit, so them going this long without communication from Riley is very very unheard of. But I will continue to keep you guys updated on this one because I feel like it is ever evolving, and I feel like, hopefully soon we're going to have hopefully good news that Riley is found and he is safe. Switching gears. Chad day Bill is officially in Boise for his trial. That trial is set to begin on April Fool's Day and I have never been more ready in my life for a trial to start. This is the continuation of getting justice for JJ Tylee Tammy, Charles Brandon Boudreau, and it is a long time coming. So Chad will go to trial, and then Laurie is also going to be going to trial here pretty soon. So it is going to be another summer filled with the day Bell Valo peeps, and I'm here for it because we are one step closer to justice. And now they are investigating Corey Richins's mother in the potential assistance in the overdose death of her son in law. So Corey Richins is the gal who killed her husband with a large amount of fetanel and then wrote a book about how her kids were grieving the death of her husband and made it into a book about like grieving and death and all along she's the one that killed him. And now her mother is also potentially involved with planning and orchestrating this murder. So she is taking a page out of the Donald Adelson playbook, and it's not going very well for Donna, and I don't think it's going to go very well for Lisa Darden either. In Chad Doerman News, he is the father who is accused of killing his three young sons. This is out of Ohio. I've talked about it on here before the judge went ahead and tossed out his alleged confession, and the judge is stating that his rights were violated before and during the police interrogation. So that is why it is so so important for officers and the court system to approach these things in the right manner because something like this can come along and happen and before you know it, it is now tossed out. So it's going to be really interesting to see what happens from this one. But I will be sure to keep you guys updated. Okay, last thing I'm going to talk about, and I'm going to keep it brief because I am going to do a whole episode breakdown rundown about the Quiet on Set documentary that aired on the ID channel. It was a four part episode series about Nickelodeon and some of the horrific humans that worked for Nickelodeon back in the day and had continuous access to children. I have been on the camp of Nickelodeon is super Rotted since a long time ago. I have always heard rumors about some of the horrible things that happened on set. Obviously, watching Nickelodeon and some of the shows that we watched his kids back as adults, it is a completely different You really realize how some of the things that we were shown back then had a lot of sexual undertones, sexual innuendos. I don't know why I can't say that word today, but it was insane to listen. And then Drake Bell, who was the star of Drake and Josh, came forward with his account of what happened to him. This was even before he starred in Drake and Josh. It was when he was getting ready to star in the show. This individual named Brian Peck, who was convicted tried sixteen months in prison for these lewde acts against Drake a truly horrible human. The fact that he only got sixteen months in prison makes me want a rage. And there was another guy who was arrested for things like there were so many bad people behind the scenes of Diickelodeon. Dan Schneider allegedly, in my opinion, is not a good person, was never a good person, created a toxic working environment for the people that he employed and also for the kids that surrounded his shows. And it's so frustrating that after all of this time, this man still has managed to dodge any kind of repercussions for his horrific actions. We're going to talk all about this in the episode I do because I have so many thoughts, so many feelings, and I don't know what else to say about it. I will say there is a lot of chatter online, most of it is in supportive Drake. But a few years ago, Drake was accused of talking to an underage girl online and that ended up with him ending up at a please deal and it ended up, you know, nothing really came of it, but there has been rumors that the camp of Brian Peck allegedly made this girl come out and say that this happened more or less just to discredit Drake, because that is what people of that caliber do. They want to continue to revictimize their victims and try to tarnish their name and make them look like the crazy one. They've done it to Amanda Binds for the last decade and a half, and they're not going to stop because those are the kind of people they are. Corey Feldman has been telling us this stuff for thirty years, and no one wants to listen. No one wants to talk about how rotted and horrific Hollywood is, especially in the television movie Realm. Nobody wants to talk about it. But it's finally being talked about. People are finally listening, and people are enraged, as they should be. These are children. Brian Peck was arrested and charged with all these different kinds of child molestation, and after sixteen months in prison, he was re hired on a Disney Channel show that was a children's show, Sweet Life of Zack and Cody. What the heck? But we are going to talk about all of that in a little bonus episode that I'm going to be doing. I'm kind of waiting a little bit because I want to see what else comes out. Because Dan Schneider has already sat himself down with his little interviewee and spoken his truth of course, deflecting, deflecting, deflecting, deflecting, taking no responsibility for being a creeper. So I'm waiting for like anything else that's going to pop out in the next week or so, and then I will put that episode out. But we are going to go ahead and get started with today's episode. Okay, guys, today we are going to be talking about the disappearance of a nineteen year old girl named Amber Wilda. It is actually spelled wild and I didn't realize that that's not the way it was pronounced. It is pronounced Wilda. So we are going to be talking about the disappearance of Amber in nineteen ninety eight. Amber Lynn Wilda was born on March twenty sixth of nineteen seventy nine to her parents, Steve and her mom, Julie, and they lived in Campbell'sport, Wisconsin. So at the time of Amber's disappearance, she was nineteen years old and she had just started attending classes at UW. Green Bay on a scholarship. She had plans on furthering her academic career and going on to become a pediatrician. The school was about two hours away from where Amber's family had lived and she had a apartment there where she lived alone. Amber was also four and a half months pregnant at the time of her disappearance and had decided that she was going to follow through with her pregnancy. And her family was very supportive in Amber keeping her baby and still trying to get her education, and they had really stepped up and said, we will help you with the baby once the baby comes, so you can still go to school. Amber was a very family oriented person and she was always around her family. She was always at all of the different holidays and kids' birthday parties, and she was just always that girl that wanted to be around her family. She loved children, so her having her own child she was really really excited for and looking forward to. And there wasn't really anything going on in her life that would warrant anyone to think that Amber was about to run off to start a new life or that she would just leave for no reason, because she had pretty much everything going for her. She was going to have a baby, she had just gotten this scholarship, she had just started classes. We are going to talk about her relationship with the baby's alleged father, because I feel like obviously it's going to turn into be an important part of the story. But despite everything that Amber was dealing with personally, she was very much dedicated to making it work and trying to live her life and keep up with her goals of becoming a pediatrician, and she wasn't going to let anyone stand in her way. So we are going too fast forward to the morning. It was Wednesday, September twenty third of nineteen ninety eight. Amber was in a minor car accident and it was just kind of a fender bender, but she did end up hitting her head on the windshield. So she did go and get checked out by somebody, a nurse that was on campus, and they said, everything seems to be fine, but make sure you have somebody that can call you later on tomorrow just to check on you to make sure that you're okay and that you don't you know, you haven't developed any further symptoms. Right after this, Amber went ahead and called her dad, Steve, and had asked him, you know, can you please call to check on me later and tomorrow to make sure that I'm okay, And Steve did that. He followed through with that. He called her that evening and talked to her. The person who had the accident with Amber had also called her that evening to sort out the insurance realm of things. Amber's dad then calls her the next day, and to his surprise, he gets no answer. Now, at the time, Steve didn't realize it, but Amber had missed a appointment that she had and then she also missed her morning class that she was supposed to go to. So at this point Steve is over two hours away and of course is very concerned. So he gets in his car and he drives two hours away to Amber's apartment to try to figure out what's going on. When he got there, he noticed that her car wasn't there, and her apartment seemingly looked normal. There was nothing out of the ordinary that necessarily stood out to Steve right away. The biggest thing was that Amber was not there. From there, Steve knows something is wrong because he's never not been able to get a hold of Amber before. She did have a cell phone, and he had not been able to reach her. So he went straight to the Green Bay Police department, and he wanted to file a missing person's report, but they told him that because she is nineteen years old. They had to wait forty eight hours to file that missing person's report, so they didn't end up being able to file it until September twenty sixth. Of course, police did start their investigation. They had checked her financial records and her phone statements, and they didn't think that this was a woman who had left on her own. They ended up putting out an APB on Amber's missing car, and they went to her apartment to search for any signs of potential foul play, but they didn't really see anything that seemed out of place. They did see a map with directions to a restaurant that was about fifty miles away from Green Bay, but they had checked in with the restaurant to see if anyone had seen Amber in the area, and nobody had. But one thing that they did find in the search of Amber's apartment is they found a diary. And this diary definitely led them down a path that I don't think this case would have gone if they hadn't found that diary. So the diary was under Amber's mattress. And I assume you're doing a search for a missing girl. You're gonna check all of your You're gonna check everything. So they found this diary, and this diary literally detailed the last few months of Amber's life, and she wrote pretty much everything down. So we are now able to come up with a timeline of what has been going on in Amber's life leading up to her disappearance. So obviously Amber was pregnant, and this diary kind of let everyone into what was going on with the father of this child. So the father of this child, allegedly according to Amber and I believe her, is a guy named Matthew Schneider. He went by Matt. They met at a party and it was like a one time hookup kind of situation. They went back to Amber's place, they were intimate, and then Amber ended up getting pregnant. Amber's family did say that Amber and Matt were in a bit of a relationship for about four months following this, But little did Amber know that Matt was engaged to a woman, and when he found out that Amber was pregnant, he obviously flipped out. Immediately wanted Amber to have an abortion and didn't want any part of her having this child, and Amber even considered it. She did consider initially having the abortion because that's what Matt wanted, but ultimately decided that she was going to keep her baby and really didn't care from what I've seen about as far as like her relationship goes, like, she realized, Okay, he has a fiance, I'm not going there, but I do want him to be a part of this baby's life and to be a father to this baby, which is a reasonable request. So what Amber decided to do next with this information about her pregnancy, Matt didn't want anything to do with it. She went and she told Matt's mom, and she also tracked down Matt's fiance and let her know that she was pregnant and the baby belonged to Matt. Now, in the midst of all that, obviously, I'm sure if you're engaged to somebody and another girl comes up to you and says, hey, I'm pregnant and the baby is your fiance is You're immediately going to go on the defense. And Matt was telling his family, this girl is crazy, she's stalking me, she's obsessed with me. I have never been with her. I don't really even know her. This baby is not mine. And when they were interviewed, Matt's mother and Matt's fiance both said that they don't think that this baby belonged to matt and they think that she just went off and disappeared on her own because she was going through some stuff and just wanted to leave. Investigators tried for a while to get in touch with matt and actually like sit and have a conversation with him, but it was really really hard to get that out of him, but they eventually did, and he basically said, I've never had sex with Amber, that kid is not mine. I don't know anything about a pregnancy. He had thrown out a couple of dates. Is the last time that he saw Amber one day? He said was July fifteenth, and then he changed it to August twenty third. He never really expressed any concern about Amber being gone and said that he didn't communicate with her regularly. They weren't really anything other than acquaintances at most, But Amber's phone records told a completely different story. They found about sixty numerous contacts between them over the last few months, and typically these phone conversations would correlate with an entry in Amber's diary talking about what was going on. So there's no way to deny that Matthew and Amber definitely had some type of relationship. He is more likely than not the father of her child, and they were in a bit of a situation where matt didn't want anything to do with it. He didn't want his family to find out, he didn't want it to ruin his life, and he was kind of at a loss as to what to do. Now. Matthew was twenty one. Matt I should say, was twenty one, and like I said, he was engaged, and I think he was at a loss. He didn't really know what to do with this whole situation, was kind of grasping its straws, trying to figure it out, and was trying to spin it in a way where Amber's the crazy one. I'm just an innocent bystander in all of this, and his family believed him. So it is October first, It has been now eight days since Amber has disappeared, and her car mysteriously turns up in a bar parking lot which was right across from Lambeau Field, and this is a highly trafficked area. It is peak football season, lots of action going on at lambeau Field with the Packers playing, so there was a lot of people in and out of this area definitely something where you know that that car hadn't been there and it did just turn up on October first. So police are called to the scene. They go inside of the car and they find that the doors are unlocked, the keys to the car or in the ash tray. Her cell phone was found on the front seat, and her purse was found in the trunk of the car. And of course these are items that someone if they're going to voluntarily disappear on their own, it's items they're going to take with them. So they also had noticed that the driver's seat was pushed pretty much all the way back, and Amber was pretty short, so there was no way that she would have ever been driving her car with her seat in the furthest position from the steering wheel. So they thought that that was really interesting, and I think at this point they very much thought that something bad had happened to Amber and they were potentially looking at a homicide case. Another thing they were also looking into is they knew that Amber's car had been serviced a week before she went missing. They were able to backtrack with the autobody shop that Amber had gone to, and they were able to check what her mileage was when she was there, and they noticed that there was about six hundred unaccounted for miles from the time that Amber had gotten her car service and now the car being found, and she had driven back and forth to work and to school to her apartment. But there would be no way that six hundred miles would have made up that amount in just a week's time. So that is a very interesting tidbit. Did somebody drive this car way way, way far out to dispose of evidence, to dispose of Amber's remains? That is a question that still remains to this day. Investigators did collect DNA and fingerprints from the vehicle and they have sent the evidence to crime labs and they added the fingerprints to the national databases. Most of the fingerprint in the car did kind of lead back to Amber or Amber's father, And of course new day DAIC technology is arising every day and hopefully something eventually is going to hit and they are going to get a match on something at some point in time. Investigators do officially release that Matthew Schneider is their number one person of interest. He was not very cooperative with the investigation. He was very defensive, and the things that he did tell police they have now been able to prove are not true just tracking her phone records on all of that, investigators do think that her pregnancy and her wanting Matt to be involved in the child's life was definitely potentially a motive for him to do something to her, but they were never able to prove it. They didn't really have the concrete, real eviden that they needed. But in twenty sixteen, the public was made privy to some sealed court documents that had come out. So these documents indicate police believe that Matt Schneider had either an accomplice or a confidant that was involved in the potential cover up of Amber's murder. So there was a guy named Nick Pettitt, and him and Matt had worked together as surveyors for a company that was contracted by the state Department of Transportation, and they were working on this project during the state twenty nine upgrade, which was a project that spanned a long distance. So the documents don't exactly say what they believe Nick Pettitt's role was, but only that, like Matt Schneider, he is a person of interest and somebody that they have talked to and kind of looked into over the years. At some point in time during the investigation, Nick had said that his girlfriend possibly had saw Amber and gave the description of the vehicle that Amber was driving. And this was a really interesting little tidbit of information that Nick came forward with because police had never publicly really said what kind of car Amber had, so for them to be able to describe this car was pretty interesting given the fact that it had never been publicly put out there. Investigators knew it, local law enforcement knew about it, but no one else in the public had any idea what kind of car Amber had. Nick's alibi for the day that Amber had gone missing was that he thought he had gone to see a movie and had dinner by himself after work, and Nick's girlfriend at the time, who is now his wife, had told police in nineteen ninety eight that he had come home from work around six o'clock that afternoon, and then a year later there was a John Doe hearing held in Brown County Circuit Court. Nick and his girlfriend both had testified that Nick was not home that evening and that his girlfriend had made several calls to try to figure out where he was, and Nick said, I most likely wasn't at home, but I really don't remember where I could have been or what I was doing. So we have a lot of inconsistencies, a lot of changing stories. And I get it. If you have a night in your life that isn't super significant, you really don't remember exactly what you were doing if it's not significant. I get that. But also the ever changing of the stories, when you've given one story and now years later you're giving another one just kind of a little suspect. In July of twenty fourteen, Nick had told investigators that he wasn't really close to Matt and really had known him for a couple of months when they had worked together in nineteen ninety eight, so when Amber disappeared, he really didn't know him very well and definitely not close enough to him to be willing to risk everything to help him out as it was concerned with Amber. However, this was contradicted by Matt's wife, who was his fiancee at the time. She testified in December nineteen ninety nine at the John Doe Hearing that Matt knew Nick well enough and had asked him to be an usher at their wedding, and she had also told police in April of twenty fifteen that Matt and Nick had known each other well before they worked together in nineteen ninety eight, and they were really good friends and they continued to have different contacts over the years, and investigators ended up saying that Nick was Matt's constant companion, somebody that was there with him through all different phases of life. So this information is let out. And there's also search warrants that have become public and they were filed in twenty fourteen, in twenty fifteen, and these are all in conjunction with Amber's phone records from the time around her disappearance, and also in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, and twenty fifteen because they were trying to figure out if Matt and Nick are still in contact, and how much contact they're having, how many calls are going back and forth. There's just a whole lot going on with this whole thing. In July twenty fourteen, police delivered a profit letter to Nick Pettitt. And I'm going to tell you what a profit letter is if you don't know, so, a profit letter, and this is, according to Wikipedia. In United States criminal law, a profit agreement, profit letter profit or queen for a day letter is a written agreement between a prosecutor and a defendant or a prospective witness that allows the defendant or witness to give the prosecutor information about an alleged crime while limiting the prosecutor's ability to use that information against him or her. So Nick's response was that he said that he would think about it and ask for the detective's business cards. They also did have other search warrants out after that to see if they could get the phone records to see if Nick had contacted Matt about the profer letter. So the lead investigator on this case never did say if Nick accepted the profer but it expired in August of twenty fourteen, and as of right now, the investigation is still ongoing. There have been no arrests, they have never found any remains that lead back to Amber. There have been multiple searches that have been concluded. They have served a thirty acre site in rural Portage County in November of twenty fourteen, and they definitely do speculate that, given the line of work that Matt worked in, that she potentially was buried in part of an area that she will never be found. Investigators are sure that Amber is dead, and they are quoted as saying, with her strong family ties and she was determined to finish school and the things she said about her pregnancy, there's just no way she just vanished. End quote. Both men, Matt and Nick, have refused polygraph tests, which is interesting. Amber had eight different piercings in her ears and she always wore small gold hoop earrings in each ear, eight of them in each ear. She was four months pregnant at the time of her disappearance. Her baby was said to be born February of nineteen ninety nine. They also do things she might have had a concussion due to the head injury she sustained in the car accident. She was driving a gray four door nineteen eighty eight Suberu gl with the license plate number X five seven two five T, which they have now found because it was found in that parking lot. She is a Caucasian female with brown hair, brown eyes, and if Amber was still alive today, she would be forty five years old and her baby would be twenty five. So it really shows you how much time has passed with this story with no leads now I went down the rabbit hole of looking up social media for Matt Schneider and Nick Pettitt. It is not at all hard to find. Matt is still married to the girl that he cheated on back in nineteen ninety eight with Amber, and they have a family. They are in their forties now, and Matt's friendless is on private. But I am a super sleuth and I went through every single one of his photos and looked at who liked the pictures and found his wife's page, went to her page. Her friend's list is wide open and she is friends with none other than Nick Pettitt himself. So it's really interesting. It really infuriates me because Amber never got a chance to live her life. She never got a chance to have her child, she never got to pursue her career. And if Matt is involved, if Nick was involved, in any way, shape or form, they took that from her. They took her life from her. And they've gone on to be able to live their lives and have families and get married and have all of the things that Amber did not get to have. And it really makes me It is all very alleged that they are in any way, shape or form involved, but investigators have definitely named them at the forefront of this investigation. So that is what I'm doing in reporting this. I am just reporting what is out there. Nothing that I have said is not public knowledge. If you google Amber Wilde and Matt Snider, you're going to get a treasure trove of information. So that is the story of Amber. Somebody out there obviously knows something, especially if it's a kind of situation where Nick was just helping out his friend in this situation that he was in. If he decides one day that he is going to come forward and let everyone know what he knows, I think that's going to be the smoking gun of this case. I think there are probably a few people that know what happened to Amber, and they are holding it tight, and they are not going to come forward with what information they know until they have to. I think that because they were able to take some DNA evidence. DNA is ever advancing, technology is ever advancing. They don't need quite as much as they used to sometimes now to get a match. So I think time is running out for the people that took Amber's life, the people or person that took Amber's life, and I do think that I hope twenty twenty four is the year that their charade finally comes to an end, because I do think it's going to happen. So that is the story of Amber. If she is no longer with us, may she rest in peace. I think she did everything she could to try to further her life and further her knowledge, going to school. She was going to bring this baby into the world, with or without the father of the child, and I think that that's very admirable. She was only nineteen years old, she was a young young girl, and she did not deserve any of this. Her baby did not deserve any of this. And the person that did it, really I don't know how they live with themselves, how they sleep at night, how they go on and function day to day knowing in the back of their mind that they did something horrible to another person and to an unborn baby. So that is something that they're going to have to live with. And I think the day will come when I hope Amber and her family will get justice and maybe we'll find out exactly what happened and why it happened. But at this point Amber's case is unsolved. So share this episode with everyone you know, especially in the Wisconsin area if you are listening from that area, Green Bay area, because I do think that one of these days somebody is going to figure out that they know something that they didn't even realize they knew in regards to this. So I appreciate all of you for listening and I will see you guys next week for a brand new episode. I hope you guys have a fantastic weekend and stay safe. Bye.