When Andrea Knabel went missing, the coverage of her case was co-opted by a conspiratorial narrative around her volunteer work for missing persons. What’s relevant information to solving Andrea’s disappearance, and what’s a media red herring?

This story covers an ongoing missing persons investigation and contains some statements that cannot be corroborated by Crime Scoop and should not be taken as fact. If you have any information about the disappearance of Andrea Knabel, you should contact the Louisville Metro Police Department at 502-574-7060.

LOUISVILLE, KY — Investigation Discovery recently released a sprawling docu-series, called “Finding Andrea,” about Andrea Knabel’s 2019 disappearance from Louisville, Kentucky, that meanders down dozens of rabbit holes related — or not — to the 37-year-old’s disappearance. The series reveals some of the deep chasms, rifts and dramas that have arisen among those who purport to be looking for the missing mother of two boys. The series – itself entrenched in its own biases – is just a vignette within the much larger story, and forces us to examine how the media can also do harm while trying to do good.

Andrea’s Life

Andrea Michelle Knabel was born to Cheryl and Mike Knabel in 1982, the eldest of three sisters, with what’s been described as a long-fraught relationship. From an early age, Andrea felt like the black sheep of the family, her friends say — she believed that each of her parents favored one of her siblings over her. While Andrea had a closer relationship with her middle sister Erin, her relationship with youngest sister Sarah was, at least around the time she disappeared, seemingly defined by antagonism and hostility.

Andrea graduated from the University of Louisville with a marketing degree, and eventually landed a job as an analyst at Humana. A few years before her disappearance, Andrea had been laid off from that job, and the loss hit her hard. Andrea was also engaged to be married, but the arrangement fell apart. She struggled financially but found it difficult to ask others for help, according to friends. Andrea was also using and allegedly selling meth, and at the time of her disappearance may have been in the throes of serious addiction. Nonetheless Andrea continued to do volunteer work and search for missing persons at her own expense, becoming deeply involved with the grieving families of the missing. Some of her family members, including her father Mike, weren’t aware of her volunteer work until after she went missing.

Shortly before she disappeared, Andrea’s car broke down on the freeway with her two children inside. They left the car but when they later returned it had been wrecked. The totaled car only compounded Andrea’s dire financial situation.

Andrea and her two sons (Source: Instagram)

Andrea’s friend Matt Ray, one of the series’ more reliable narrators, believes the docu-series’ producers are overly invested in the angle of Andrea’s drug abuse. Matt confirms in the series that a mutual acquaintance of his and Andrea’s was incarcerated, at which point Andrea took over that acquaintance’s local meth operation. The series notes that Louisville has in recent years become a major hub of drug activity due to cartel infiltration. It’s unclear when Andrea took over that meth operation, the size of the operation/types of customers and whether or not it was a “friendly takeover.” Clearly Andrea’s life was complicated at the time she disappeared. This is hammered home when, in the series, the family finds a counterfeit money printer with a counterfeit one hundred dollar bill in it inside Andrea’s storage unit. After the docu-series was released, Andrea’s family said the printer was a complete fabrication. Still, a connection is never established between Andrea’s work with the group and/or her drug use, and her disappearance.

Andrea Michelle Knabel (Source: Facebook)

Andrea’s father, Mike, regrets that shortly before Andrea went missing he told her her kids might be better off with their respective fathers while Andrea “got her life together.”

Matt is open and honest about the fact that Andrea, known for her street smarts and ability to make friends with anyone — Andrea had a lot of friends — was using and selling meth at the time she went missing, but he makes it clear that what emotionally consumed Andrea at the time, was the volatility of her living situation with her sister Sarah. The sisters were always at each other’s throats, Andrea lamented to Matt.

At the time that she went missing, Andrea was living with her youngest sister, Sarah Knabel and Sarah’s boyfriend, Ethan Samuel Bates.

Andrea’s volunteer work

Andrea was a core member of the group “Missing in America,” (MIA) founded by Nancy Schaefer, which looks for missing persons in Kentucky and Indiana. The group boasts a 96% success rate of finding people — a statistic the group provides — but without context it’s unclear what this means. It’s also unclear what formal licensing the members have, if any. Founder Nancy says Andrea was one of her best friends.

In the series, Nancy appears to be spearheading the investigation to find Andrea. I found in my own research that Andrea’s middle sister, Erin Knabel, who has been actively looking for her sister since the beginning, has suspicions about Nancy’s motives. She said in a public Facebook post that she only met Nancy once before Andrea went missing and her impression of Nancy at that point was that she was using her sister. Erin implies Nancy is now using Andrea’s disappearance to get on television. Erin seems to believe Nancy’s priorities are misplaced, at best, and that may be why the series sometimes paints Erin as uncooperative.

Andrea was interviewed by a documentary producer about her volunteer work before she went missing, and she mentioned the possibility of going undercover for a dangerous drug case the group was working. Nancy says she pulled the group off of that case believing it was too dangerous. She’s worried Andrea went rogue though, and that might be key to what happened to her.

Andrea refers to herself in the footage as a PI, but she was not a licensed private investigator. It’s possible Andrea played up her role as an “undercover” for the camera. While working the drug case MIA became involved with and then pulled out of, the group met PI Tracy Leonard, who was also working the case. It’s unknown who hired him and he’s not saying. But when Andrea goes missing, Tracy turns his focus to finding her.

There are suspicions around PI Tracy Leonard from the jump, in part because he’s cagey about sharing his evidence with the MIA group and their recruit, retired Detective Joe Fanciulli, and then his office mysteriously burns down. PI Tracy Leonard was not hired by Andrea’s family but he is allegedly working with them pro bono and Andrea’s father Mike and Erin Knabel seem to be collaborating with Tracy. If Tracy seems suspicious, it’s because he has no interest in helping “fake TV detectives” who aren’t licensed PIs, according to him.

Andrea’s family has said that Andrea did not go “undercover” for any PI operations, rather she made it known to the group that she was on-call if they needed her for any searches.

Last-Known Contact

Andrea, Ethan and Sarah were living in the house at 3113 Chickadee Road in Louisville while the house was being remodeled. At the time that Andrea went missing, their mother, Cheryl Knabel, was not staying there. The three had been living together for the summer and neighbors reported to Joe Fanciulli, the retired detective working with the MIA group that they heard arguments so loud and raucous they contemplated calling the police. There were rumors of fist fights among the threesome, and MIA member Diane Stumph says in the docu-series that after Andrea went missing she saw a place on the wall in Andrea’s bedroom where it looked like someone’s head had been bashed into the wall. Andrea’s family has denied that there was ever a hole in the wall in the house. Sarah and Ethan also allegedly re-painted Andrea’s room shortly after she went missing.

Sarah Knabel and Ethan Bates (Source: Instagram)

The evening before Andrea went missing, Ethan drove Andrea to the hospital to be treated for a “facial injury.” There is speculation that this injury could have been the result of a physical altercation, but Matt Ray also mentioned that Andrea had facial sores as a result of her methamphetamine use. Andrea took a cab home from the hospital.

Ethan, Sarah and Erin were the three last people known to have seen Andrea before she went missing. Andrea became upset after an argument with Ethan and Sarah at the girls’ mother’s house so she walked approximately one mile to Erin’s house on Fincastle Road around 1 a.m., where Erin was hanging out with a friend. It was a walk she’d made hundreds of times before. Erin drove Andrea back home but Sarah and Ethan would not let her in, so she walked back to Erin’s where Erin again turned her away. Allegedly after Erin turned Andrea away a second time, Erin called her parents and asked them to have Sarah and Ethan let Andrea back into the house. Andrea’s phone was last active in the early morning hours of August 13 on her mother’s property, at around 3:53 a.m., leading investigators to believe the house on Chickadee Road was Andrea’s last-known location.

Sarah and Ethan claimed they did not see Andrea again that night after turning Andrea away the first time and going to bed. Nevertheless, those familiar with the house’s layout have said there’s no way Sarah and Ethan wouldn’t have heard Andrea banging on the door when she returned the second time.

Theories

PI Tracy Leonard, who says he’s working Andrea’s case pro bono because they were friends, posits in his podcast that Andrea may have tried to find a place to sleep in her broken down car in the driveway or elsewhere when Sarah and Ethan wouldn’t let her back in. At that point she may have been abducted by a stranger or someone known to her.

The series floats a theory that Andrea may have called a drug dealer for a ride, maybe someone to whom she owed a drug debt. But phone tracking shows there’s no evidence Andrea’s phone ever left the property on Chickadee Road after returning there, before the phone switched off for good.

Who is Ethan Bates?

The Louisville Metro Police Department, short of calling him a suspect, is still looking at Ethan Bates, though he was allegedly questioned and cleared in the early days of the investigation, as were the two fathers of Andrea’s kids. Ethan owns the construction company that was remodeling the Knabel house on Chickadee Road at the time Andrea went missing.

Mike Knabel, Andrea’s father, says Ethan has a temper and that he and Ethan do not have a good relationship. In the series, a neighbor also tells Fanciulli that around the time of Andrea’s disappearance, there was construction going on in the yard and at the Knabel house in the middle of the night. Ethan and Sarah moved to Lexington, KY some time after Andrea disappeared, and have refused to participate in any searches for Andrea. The Knabels have said that Ethan and Sarah left for Lexington because that was their primary residence, not because they were “fleeing.”

There is also a rumor that Ethan allegedly wiped the data on his and Sarah’s phones the night Andrea went missing.

Ethan Bates and Sarah Knabel (Source: Instagram)

Ethan Bates has an arrest record with multiple charges

Ethan is linked to a few businesses, including Affinity Construction LLC and Affinity Concrete LLC, though OpenCorporates lists Affinity Construction as “inactive” as of 2019. Sarah, a former model, now appears to work in real estate.

Sarah Knabel used to be a model (Source: Instagram)

Ethan also has a rap sheet with multiple arrests for shoplifting, cocaine possession and other infractions.

Court records from 2010 describe one of Ethan’s encounters with law enforcement: “On a Friday evening in June 2008… Around 11:30 p.m. [Lexington Police Officers] noticed Bates’ vehicle parked in a deserted area of a public parking lot. The vehicle was backed in and parked up against a building bordering the lot…three officers approached Bates…”

The record continues: “Bates appeared to be very focused on Officer Thomas, who was examining the interior of the vehicle with the flashlight. When first asked what he was doing in the parking lot, Bates said he was meeting his friend Dave. Later, he changed his answer and stated he was waiting for his girlfriend. When asked for his driver’s license, he stated he had inadvertently left it at home. Officer McBride detected the odor of alcohol coming from the vehicle. He was not able to tell if the smell emanated from Bates or just the interior of the vehicle. He asked Bates to exit the vehicle and Bates rolled up the car window and announced he was going to call his lawyer.”

“Bates then reached for his keys in the vehicle’s ignition. Officer McBride drew his baton and appeared ready to break in the windshield of the car before Bates complied and exited the vehicle… Officer McBride went around to the passenger side of the vehicle. He looked into the rear of the passenger area and saw what his experience and training led him to believe was a bag containing an illegal controlled substance partially sticking out from the map pocket on the back of the passenger front seat. That item was removed along with a small set of digital scales and Bates was placed under arrest.”

What Really Happened to Andrea?

There are several theories as to what happened to Andrea in the early morning hours of August 13, 2019. After her phone tracked Andrea leaving Erin’s house for the final time and arriving back at the property on Chickadee Road at 1:54 a.m., her phone was again active on the property, though there is some dispute as to what time. PI Tracy says Andrea’s phone was last active at 6:31 a.m. The MIA group clocks Andrea’s phone’s last activity at 3:53 a.m. Andrea’s friend and MIA group member, Suzzette Maria Rodriguez, received a facetime call from Andrea at 2:12 a.m. but did not answer it. Assuming Andrea placed that call, she was presumably alive and with her phone on the Chickadee Road property at 2:12 a.m.

Based on her phone’s last activity, it’s clear Andrea was on or near the Chickadee Road property at the time she went missing. If she arrived back at 1:54 a.m., it’s possible she was not let in and that she placed several phone calls in an attempt to get a ride somewhere. If someone indeed came to pick her up and Andrea was met with foul play, whoever came to meet her would have had to have the foresight to first get rid of Andrea’s phone somewhere on that property, and the phone still has not been found.

Whatever happened to Andrea must have happened on or around the 3113 Chickadee Road property on August 13, 2019, between approximately 2:12 a.m. and 6:31 a.m., or the even narrower window of 2:12 a.m. and 3:53 a.m, according to her phone data. The key to solving the mystery of Andrea’s disappearance could be in finding eyewitnesses and/or surveillance camera footage of Andrea or anyone else in the vicinity during those hours, as well as conducting a thorough search of house and property, including checking construction work that took place during that period of time. However, the family has said that investigators did conduct an eight-hour forensic search of the property after Andrea disappeared, and found nothing.

Andrea’s disappearance remains an active investigation. If you have any information about the whereabouts of Andrea Knabel or what happened to her, you can call the LMPD at 502-574-7060.

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