Amber Hoopes (9 of Clubs, Idaho)
2023-06-14 00:30:00
For years, some law enforcement agencies have replaced the faces of traditional playing card decks with images of missing and murdered people and distributed those cards in prisons hoping inmates would come forward with information needed to crack these cold cases wide open. Now, audiochuck is dealing you in. Each week, we will be working with investigators and family members to bring you the details of some of the coldest cases from around the country in hopes that someone listening can finally bring these victims the justice they deserve.
Our card this week is Amber Hoops, the nine of clubs from Idaho. When Amber was 20 years old, she was living with her grandparents in East Idaho. Babysitting for some neighborhood kids and helping out at her family's auto body shop. To save up some cash. Before deciding if she wanted to head off to college. But in September 2001, Amber vanished, and the only clues left behind made her family and police absolutely certain she was abducted. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is the deck.
On September 14, 2001, Kathleen Bergner and her husband Norris were watching TV at their house in Idaho Falls, Idaho, before bed. It was just three days after 9-11, so almost everything on cable TV that night was news coverage of the attacks. Around 10-30, Kathleen and Norris decided to turn in on the way to their bedroom. They said goodnight to their granddaughter, Amber, who was awake in her room a few hours later, at around 1 a..m. Kathleen got up to use the bathroom and noticed that the lights and TV in Amber's room were on, but Amber wasn't in there.
And keep in mind Amber's 20 years old. So she came and went from the house as she pleased, without having to check in with her grandparents each time. But she was very shy and didn't go out much, so it was weird for her not to be at home at that time of night. The first thought that popped into Kathleen's mind was that maybe Amber was over in the shop office. Because you see, the family owned and ran an auto body shop that was right next door. And Amber liked to go out there and use the computer to send emails and download music and whatnot. Kathleen walked over to the shop and the glow of the computer light was reassuring.
For a moment, at least, when she got in there, the computer was powered on and it looked like it had been used recently. But the feeling she had of relief faded as she realized Amber was nowhere in sight. There was one other place Kathleen thought Amber might be, and that was upstairs above the shop in the tanning bed. But the room to the tanning bed was locked, so Kathleen went back down to the house to wake up. Norris, who had the keys?
Here's Bonneville County Sheriff's Detective Eric Hustad, who's lead on the case today.
Kathleen and Norris both go back and continue to look for Amber, and then Norris notices that the white and red shop truck is also missing from the shop and they still can't find amber.
Kathleen and Norris were already worried about Amber's sudden absence. But when they saw the shop pickup truck was gone and tire marks showing that the truck went east on the Lincoln Road when it left, their worry turned into panic.
Yeah, according to the grandparents, it would have been very unusual. One, Amber just didn't take things without asking, and two, the truck is a manual and she didn't like driving manual vehicle.
Not to mention Amber had a car of her own, which was still at the house. Kathleen and Norris immediately started calling relatives, including Amber's parents, to see if anyone had seen her. Amber's parents and her younger siblings didn't live too far away and her relationship with them was fine. She was just living with her grandparents because her parents lived out in the county and she preferred being in town. But no one had seen Amber, and a sinking feeling began growing in the pit of Norris stomach.
He was growing more and more convinced that someone had taken Amber, and right away he had a theory about who. So, at 2.30 in the morning, Norris called the Bonneville County Sheriff's office and reported Amber and his truck missing. Deputy Brian Lovell responded, and Norris wasted no time telling him exactly what he thought happened. He thought that a disgruntled former employee had abducted his granddaughter based on something that had happened the year before.
So about a year prior to this, Keith, he goes by Mark Hescock worked for Mack Tools, selling tools to shop mechanics, stuff like that. So he was on the property, him and Norris got into a verbal argument, and Norris asked him to leave the property. And then, supposedly, Mark Hescock had made some statements similar to, You're going to regret this. I'll make sure you regret this.
Like Husted said, Hescock's name was Keith, but he went by Mark, so just to avoid any confusion, I'm going to call him by his last name throughout the episode. Now it's not super clear what Norris and Hescock had been arguing about, but apparently, Hescock used to work for Norris at the auto body shop and later became a tool salesman. And Norris didn't want him coming around and distracting his employees during work hours, trying to get them to buy tools from him. So the two had some unresolved beef.
Hescock also had a criminal record that included burglary and poaching, so Deputy Lovell made a note to try and track down Hescock soon. And he continued taking statements from Norris and Kathleen, then he radioed out for other units to start searching for Norris red and white collision shop truck. He also told them to be on the lookout for Amber. A 20-year-old white woman, 5 feet 5 inches tall with brown hair, last seen wearing a t-shirt, gray and white boxer shorts and a gray robe that went down to her knees, basically her pajamas. At around 3 a...m. a deputy came across the radio, saying that he had found the truck, but there was no sign of amber.
The truck was parked in a dirt parking lot, not even a mile down the street from Norris and Kathleen's house and business. There was no mistaking it because it was a big red truck with a white hood and cab. With classic written on the doors. Shorthand for their business name Classic Truck and Auto Body. The parking lot where it was was near a store called Arnold's, and it was a popular place for workers to park and catch the bus to the Idaho National Laboratory site, which is this huge employer in the area. So, I mean, it was normal to see a bunch of cars parked there and nothing about the truck really stood out.
There's no obvious signs of footprints or a struggle that took place, no blood or anything inside or outside the car.
The one thing that did stand out, though, was that the keys were still in the ignition and the hood was still warm, as if someone had just been driving it. Maybe whoever took Amber was still around, so the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office made the call to leave the truck be for the next few hours. And they just sat and watched it, hoping that whoever stole it would come back and also lead them to where they took Amber.
But nobody came back by 7 o'clock-ish the next day or the 15th.
So they had it towed.
Deputies had the Idaho State Police Forensic Lab process the truck for evidence, looking for fingerprints and any other trace evidence. They didn't find any fingerprints, but they did find a few interesting things first. There were 56 miles on the odometer that weren't accounted for, based on some employee's memories of the truck's mileage prior. So that gave those looking for amber at least some kind of potential radius to look within, although it was still a huge area. But there were other clues that might narrow down what types of landscapes within that area that they should look at.
In the wheel wells, there was a lot of mud, and inside the cab of the truck, there were plants on both the driver's side and the passenger's side. Almost as if the truck had been driven through tall grass or some kind of vegetation with the doors open, and then when the doors were closed, some of that tall grass got stuck inside. They took samples of the mud and the plants to try and see if they could indicate where exactly the truck had been driven. But all it told them was something they had already assumed, just by the look of the plants, that the truck had been driven at a higher elevation. Something else they noticed inside the truck was a car phone. It was one of those phones from the early 2000s that sat in the center console and you could call out and even receive calls in. And it's not so much the phone itself that stuck out, but rather the fact that the phone had a missed call, which came in at 1.38 in the morning on September 15th.
When they tried calling the number back, it was out of service, so deputies got a search warrant to see if they could use other means. To figure out who was connected to that phone number that placed the mysterious missed call, but the number wasn't connected to anyone, Detective Husted called it a trunk number.
It's a randomly generated phone number that doesn't really return to any one person. If I asked for a search warrant on my cell phone number, I would get my name and my address and all that stuff. This number doesn't return to anybody.
Detective Husted said that back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there were these companies that basically allowed you to use a flash drive to place a phone call over the internet. And every time you'd make a call, the number that was assigned to you was auto-generated. Or you could even choose which area code showed up, even if it wasn't the place you were calling from, so it was untraceable. It was kind of like the early Aughts online spin on the burner phone, so trying to figure out who made that call was a dead end.
But by this time, Amber's parents and other concerned family members were gathering at Norris and Kathleen's house, and deputies were taking their statements. Amber's mom, Heavenly, said that she had called the car phone after she learned from Norris that Amber and the truck were missing, but she said that nobody had answered. The thing is, she was certain she had made that call somewhere between 2.30 and 3 a.m, not 1.38. So, at first, detectives wondered if Heavenly could have just maybe been off on her timeline, but that didn't explain. The untraceable number Heavenly called from her cell phone, so it would have shown up as her cell number.
But actually, that created another unexplainable mystery. Because the truck phone only showed that one missed call, it didn't show any missed calls from Heavenly's cell phone at all.
The telephone technology is still pretty new in 2001.
I don't know if they ever even thought about trying to do a tower ping or anything like that. It doesn't sound like they did.
What the discrepancies meant, they didn't know, but detectives didn't have time to dwell on it, they had to focus on finding amber. They sent out some off-road search teams and even sent up a plane to do an aerial search, which they had to get special clearance from the FAA to do. Since this was just after 9-11. In the meantime, the lab sent off the mud and grass from the truck to be tested. While detectives did their best guesswork, just based on the look of the plans, to try and guide their searches.
It was somewhere at a higher elevation, but most likely east of town, which leaves a pretty big area.
Idaho Falls is a small city, but as soon as you get out of town, it's rural. It has this mountainous landscape, so east of town, at a higher elevation. Didn't narrow it down much. But the fact that the truck had likely gone off-roading out into the mountains made detectives think Amber was likely injured or already dead. And probably nowhere near town, they were starting to wonder if there was any chance that they were going to find her alive. Searches didn't turn up anything in that first day, but the investigation didn't stop.
Deputies were taking a look at things at the auto body shop and in Amber's room. They found her purse on her bed and her clothes were all accounted for. They also bagged her hairbrush as evidence so they would have her DNA should they have anything to ever compare it to. A deputy also had Norris show him the room above the shop with the tanning bed. that was the room that was always locked, and the tanning bed was only for family use.
But what was weird is that there were marks on the door near the lock that looked as if someone had tried to pry it open. But Amber's family told deputies that she didn't like to use the tanning bed alone, so they would be surprised if she was using it by herself. Late at night, deputies were learning more and more about Amber through interviews with her family. The common theme was that she was very shy and went to church and didn't really drink or party.
She babysat for a local family, she did some clerical work for Classic Auto, and she emailed regularly with a couple of pen pals. Now, the mention of pen pals did make police perk up. So they got Norris permission to take the shop computer, and they had an agent with the local field office of the FBI help them process it. They were able to recover correspondence between Amber and two men, one from Egypt and another from India. In fact, Amber had actually sent an email to the man in Egypt at around 1am on September 15th. Which gave investigators a better sense of the timeline they were working with.
Because that meant Amber was alive and well and still using the shop computer up until 1am.
But nothing really stood out about the emails themselves. It didn't sound like Amber had any plans to meet up with either of the men. And their conversations were mostly about fashion and what females wore in their respective countries.
They would talk about clothing, so Amber was asking what kind of jewelry people liked in Egypt and wanted some sterling silver jewelry. And then, in return, she would purchase clothing like t-shirts and stuff like that and ship them to Egypt.
Now was this weird, maybe, but we don't have a ton of context around the conversations. Our reporter did ask if police had any confirmation that Amber wasn't being catfished by one of her pen pals.
I don't know if they even tried that at the time. To be honest with you, I don't know if we still can. But there's no indication of like they were more concerned about. Was there talk about meeting up or flights or plane tickets, or money being exchanged? There didn't seem to be any of that, it really seemed to be. How's your family?
This is the weather here, this is what's going on. Obviously, the most recent email mentioned the September 11th attacks and, you know, stuff like that.
The FBI search and data download showed that Amber logged off the computer at 1.
02 a.
M This helped with the investigative timeline even more. Because, if you remember, that was right about the time when Kathleen noticed Amber wasn't in her room and then went to go look for her. So Amber had to have left or been taken. Within minutes of her grandmother walking into the shop, Norris mentioned to police that normally the front doors of the shop were locked at night, but the back doors were usually left unlocked. But who would know that?
Well, employees of Classic Auto, for one, deputies gradually collected fingerprints from all 12 or so employees of the auto shop and got statements from them as well. Most of them said that they saw Amber daily because of her job at the shop and that she was shy and didn't really interact with them much. However, investigators learned that there were two men that Amber had actually complained about. One of them was that former employee, Mark Hescock, who Norris already suspected.
When they asked family members who would Amber not be comfortable around, Hescock's name came up from several people, and they had said that Amber had told them that. She didn't like Hescock, Hescock makes like, kind of sexual comments toward her about she has a nice butt or would try to hit on her, and she didn't like that. They asked him to come in for an interview and they also asked him for a polygraph. He agrees to do the interview and gives an alibi that he was home with some of his other family members, but declines to participate in the polygraph.
Like I mentioned before, Hescock did have a record he had spent time in prison, which he said is where he learned from fellow inmates to never take a polygraph. And even though Hescock agreed to an interview, he wasn't super forthcoming in it. He just said that he had been with family on the night of September 14th and he said they would vouch for him, obviously. Deputies went to his house, they interviewed his sister, his niece and nephew who lived with him. And they told police that they were pretty certain Hescock had been home the night in question because his door had been cracked open just a bit. And plus, they thought they would have heard him leave.
Police couldn't hold him because there was nothing tying him to the truck or Amber's disappearance, so they had to let him go. Though they were by no means done with him, they did need to vet other men who reportedly creeped Amber out. Another employee of Classic Auto, This guy named Farron Poole. Someone had told police that Farron asked Amber out a few times and she had turned him down. But that wasn't the part that really stood out.
Farron was a registered sex offender that only lived a few miles away.
So, initially, he said he was at his second job at Idaho Labs when they confirmed with Idaho Labs that he was not at work that day. Obviously, they confronted him and he changed it to. Well, I was just home by myself.
When police got Farron's work logs, they showed that he left work on Friday morning, the 14th, and then didn't return until his Sunday night shift. So he actually didn't have an alibi at all. He lied. That's Strike one and that place where he worked a second job.
That was Idaho Labs. Remember? Idaho Labs is the place where people usually worked at when they parked in that commuter lot where the truck had been found. That's strike two. He also showed deception when they gave him a polygraph, specifically on two questions Do you know where Amber's body is?
And did you participate in the disappearance of Amber Hoops? That was strike three, but they couldn't call it game over just yet. During the interview, Farron told police that he worked as a sandblaster at Classic Auto, removing paint from cars. He said that the last time he saw Amber was that very week.
She had been at the shop with the kids that she babysits. Farron actually disputed the fact that he ever asked Amber out on a date. He told police he couldn't because his probation prevented him from engaging with underage girls. Farron apparently thought Amber was under the age of 18. Police asked Farron if they could search his apartment and he let them.
But it didn't result in anything, so police released him, but they did keep surveilling him around the clock, according to police reports from back then. Something they noticed over the next few days was that he rode a bicycle a lot and there had been bicycle tire marks found near the auto shop at the Bergner House.
If it was Farron, and if he did ride his bike over that night, then maybe that's why the shop truck was taken. Now. What's interesting is that during their surveillance, they noticed that Farron did not use the commuter parking lot where the truck had been found. To get to his night job at Idaho Labs. The question was, was he avoiding it or had he never used it? And that connection was just a strange coincidence.
Within a few days, Amber's disappearance hit the local news, and calls started coming into the Bonneville County Sheriff's office. People were reporting possible sightings of Amber. And one person thought they'd seen a shop truck driving that night. But none of the leads ended up panning out. Weeks later, in early October, there was one lead, though, that got police excited. They'd had canine teams out searching northeast of town, and one of them indicated near some hot springs and a reservoir. They sent out the Bonneville County Dive team, but they didn't find anything.
Aside from occasional ground searches based off tips, the investigation really slowed down in fall and winter of 2001.
It kind of seemed like it stalled, like they didn't quite know where to go. We didn't have a whole lot of physical evidence to work with, so they waited for the plant results to come back. We'd still investigate tips as they came in. We had two suspects that we had some circumstantial evidence, but nothing that would be solid enough to get a warrant.
And I don't even think they tried to get a search warrant on Hescock at the time for his property or anything.
But the following year, they got a really good reason to search his house.
Late one night in 2002, two sisters were having a campout on the trampoline in the backyard of their parents Idaho Falls House. But when one of them woke up at around 5.30 the next morning, their 14-year-old sister was nowhere to be found. The family called relatives and friends to see if they could find her, and they started searching their neighborhood and scouring fields. According to reporting by Deseret News, the family asked a local farmer to fly his helicopter and search by air. At 10.30 that morning, her family called the police and dog teams descended.
But there was still no sign of the missing girl. Who? For clarity, I'm just going to call Mary. Finally, at 3 o'clock that afternoon, Mary's dad's secretary got a call. It was Mary. She had been kidnapped but had broken free.
So somehow she's able to kind of free herself a little bit from the chain she has around her. And then she uses a fire extinguisher and just bangs the chain with the fire extinguisher against, like a brick fireplace to break the chain. And then she's able to free herself.
Mary had been held captive all night, and the man who took her had recorded himself sexually assaulting her over and over. When morning came, she said her abductor tried to call out sick from work, but his boss said that he had been out too many days. And if he didn't show up, he'd be fired. So he tied Mary up and left when Mary broke free from her restraints. She found a piece of his mail to figure out where she was and who had taken her. When she called her dad, she had an address and a name.
And that name was none other than Hezkoff.
Coincidentally, the detective that responds to that was also one of the detectives that worked on Amber. And he says, I know who that is, and I know where that house is. So the plan is to actually try to arrest him, like, kind of, as he's arriving at the house. But he sees one of the detectives and immediately takes off.
Deputies chased Hezkoff east and he led them out of town through a canyon to a neighboring county. And finally, they ended up on a winding dirt road. That dead ended at the edge of a butte, according to 2002 reporting by Deseret News. Hezkoff's truck became high centered, so he got out and, armed with a pistol, started shooting. He hit a canine, killing the police dog, and the same bullet went through the police dog and hit a deputy in the leg, all before Hezkoff turned the gun on himself.
The deputy was flown to a hospital and survived, but Hezkoff didn't. The story, Mary told police, was horrifying. She had been asleep on her family's trampoline, right next to her sister, when a man that she didn't know approached. He made her get on his motorcycle with him, and when she started to resist, he pulled out a gun.
Now she didn't know his name until the next morning when she found that piece of mail. So even with Hezkoff gone, police got a search warrant for his house. And it was there that they found tapes of him sexually assaulting Mary and two other kids. But Amber wasn't on any tapes and there was no other evidence of her in his house.
They even go as far as to drain the septic tank on the property. Looking for any sign of amber?
So they get a lot of evidence for later on, but nothing to link him to Amber, really.
After his death, Hezkoff's family walked back their statement that supported his initial alibi for the night that Amber vanished. They said that they had no idea if he'd been home, but they had been scared of him, so they vouched for him at the time. Detective Hustad said once Hezkoff was dead, similar crimes stopped happening in eastern Idaho, which made detectives wonder if Hezkoff had been the one who abducted Amber. But with their prime suspect deceased, they lost hope of ever finding her body.
I mean, they still did everything they could over the next several years to try and make progress in the case. When any tip came in about a possible location of Amber's body, deputies organized massive digs with excavators and dogs. In 2004, they got hair samples back from a lab that showed that a couple of hairs found in the Classic Auto truck were a match to Amber's hairbrush. Which confirmed once and for all, kind of what they already knew that whoever abducted Amber took her in the Classic Auto truck. But the other thing that they learned was that a few of the hairs that they had were not Amber's, and they've never been identified. Detective Hustad said that none of the unknown hairs matched Hezkoff, though, but they haven't been compared to anyone else yet.
In 2006, police got a weird lead from nearby Rexburg, Idaho. That's where someone had written on a handrail in the men's restroom of a gas station, it said. Quote I buried her under John Hull's Bridge slash hoops. Police dusted the handrail for fingerprints, but nothing came of it. More ground digs followed, but none of it resulted in finding any remains.
Whatever was done was done kind of quickly. I almost, I'm open to the theory that whoever took her, took her, most likely killed her at some point where he. She figured no one would find her. And then came back, and then went back and moved her at some point with her own vehicle. With more time, what makes you think that? I think because we don't have a whole. So the mileage on the truck is definitely disputable between who you ask for how far the truck was driven.
There's, I mean, there's an hour or so gap between when the truck is missing and when the truck is found, or a couple hours, I suppose.
But if you don't already have something pre-planned, pre-staged, of how you're just going to make somebody disappear, it's going to take some time to do that. So if you don't already have that done, you're going to have to leave that person somewhere where you only know where they're at, and then come back and finish later.
Nowadays, anytime bones are found in the vicinity of Idaho Falls, whispers of amber hoops spread around town. So far, there haven't been any matches. Today, Detective Husted is focused on trying to get more advanced testing done on the grass found in the truck to see if they can maybe pinpoint an exact location. And he's trying more testing on the mysterious missed call to her car phone. Maybe to see if they can match it to an IP address or even a physical address.
And Detective Husted is still looking into Farron Poole as a suspect. He's never been ruled out, so Husted hopes to re-interview him and test the unknown truck hares against him. Amber was a young lady with a bright future ahead of her, and her family deserves to know who took her from them and where she is. If you have any information about the 2001 disappearance of amber hoops in Idaho Falls, Idaho, call the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office at 208-529-1200. The Deck is an audiochuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.
To learn more about the Deck and our advocacy work, visit TheDeckPodcast.
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