[Kansas City Star] On May 23, 22-year-old Abbi Schaeffer left her Northland Kansas City home carrying her purse and her black-and-white cat Izzy.
For six hours, a dark gray BMW, its windows tinted black, had been parked across the street in their quiet subdivision. Schaeffer walked out, spoke with the man in the driver’s seat, and got in.
It was the last time her parents knew she was alive.
On April 1, after months of searching, Belinda and Jason Schaeffer received news they long feared.
Their daughter was dead. Her body lay abandoned near an expanse of hiking trails in south Kansas City.
Despite the troubling signs, they had still held hope that she might come home. For months, they fielded tips from social media — some even claimed to have found her.
"You get everybody calling you and messaging you. And it was like, you get this shred of hope, and then it’s not Abbi," her mother told The Star on Friday.
"It was like the up and down and the roller coaster that was the worst part. The hope, and then the hope’s quashed."
Since her remains were discovered, Kansas City homicide detectives have been leading a death investigation. The Jackson County Medical Examiner’s Office is tasked with determining the cause and manner of her death. As of Friday, Officer Donna Drake said there had been no changes or updates.
Over the past 10 months, the Schaeffers have been left to wonder what happened to the brilliant, beautiful young woman they remember her as.
But they have long suspected something terrible happened to her. And on May 30, when she had been gone for several days, Belinda Schaeffer walked into Kansas City’s North Patrol station with a story to tell.
Her daughter had recently told her that she had information about a fentanyl trafficking operation, she said, and that she was supposed to talk to the FBI before she disappeared. Her phone had gone silent and dropped off the map, and its last signal had come from an apartment complex in south Kansas City one week earlier. 
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