Original subtitles

♪ If I tell you a secret ♪

16-year-old Jholie Moussa

only trusted one person with her deepest secrets.

Her twin sister, Zhané.

She confided everything to me.

That's until January 12, 2018,

when Jholie goes missing.

This can't be happening. Not right now. Not right now.

And the secrets that they were supposed to take to the grave

rise up again.

What are good secrets? What are bad secrets?

I don't know if I wanna tell my dad yet.

And what shockingly comes to light...

-It was horrendous. It was horrible.

...is a web of disturbing discoveries...

She did a really good job of leaving breadcrumbs for us.

...that ultimately reveals the chilling truth.

When you love someone, you believe that they love you, too.

She solved her own murder from beyond the grave.

The fitness app on the phone, it was overwhelming evidence.

♪ I've been haunted by these visions ♪

♪ That I've seen with my own eyes ♪

♪ And the only way to find you ♪

♪ Is to go beneath the lies ♪

She did help catch this killer.

Mount Vernon, Virginia.

It's picturesque,

quiet, and, most of all, safe.

You couldn't ask for a better place

for a couple of teenage sisters

like Zhané and Jholie Lee to grow up.

And you know that special bond you hear about between twins?

These two have got it.

That was until January 12, 2018.

So, it's Friday. My dad's outta town.

-We're all vibing, having a good time.

I am Zhané Ervin,

Jholie Moussa's twin sister.

It's Martin Luther King weekend, and for the first time ever,

the 16-year-old twins will be home alone.

Their uncle Christopher isn't far away

and the girls are just planning to have a chill evening.

-Or so Zhané thought.

While she's doing my hair,

my sister is constantly looking at her phone...

...and seems a little bit like in a rush.

Like she has... like stuff going on.

She tells me that she has to go real quick, and she'll be back.

An hour after Jholie has left,

her friend, Leslie, arrives.

My sister's best friend Leslie pulls up.

She comes and says, "Where's your sister?" And I'm like,

"You don't know where she is?" And she said no.

That's when I text her and be like, "That's kinda rude for you

"to not tell Leslie where you are.

Leslie's supposed to be picking you up today."

You know? Like, "Why aren't you here?"

She texted me.

She said she's going to a party in Norfolk.

For Zhané, this all feels wrong.

This isn't like Jholie at all.

She never went to parties.

And I was like, "That's weird that you're going to a party,

but you didn't wanna tell Leslie that?"

And she was like, "I'll be fine. I'm okay."

Zhané knows that she and Jholie

never lie to each other,

so when her twin tells her she's fine, Zhané believes her.

But morning comes, and Jholie still isn't home.

As soon as I woke up, I called.

And it went straight to voicemail.

Your call has been forwarded

to an automatic voice message...

And then, that's when my stomach started dropping.

Deep down inside,

Zhané knows that something is desperately wrong.

So she tells Uncle Christopher that Jholie didn't come home last night.

And I was crying and scared.

He said, "Did you tell your mom?" I said no.

"Did you tell your dad?" I said no. Like...

He said, "Well, I'm gonna have to."

Uncle Christopher makes a call that no parent wants to receive.

I could just feel it, something's not right.

I don't know. I start to tear up.

I'm Cyrille Moussa. I'm the father of Jholie and Zhané Moussa.

Cyrille calls the twin's mom, Syreeta,

his ex-wife, who now lives in Texas.

Cyrille's flipping out

cause this is so out of character for her.

So I called her. She didn't answer her phone.

It went straight to voicemail.

In that very moment, I got this pit in my stomach.

If nobody has heard from Jholie,

maybe we have to call the police and report a missing person or something.

So her parents instruct Uncle Chris to file a police report

while they scramble to get back to Virginia.

My name is Detective Brian Byerson,

Fairfax County Police, Major Crimes Bureau.

When I first heard about Jholie Moussa,

she was a missing person,

and we had a specific unit that worked missing persons cases.

They got some information about Jholie.

We heard some of the specifics around how she went missing.

Her voluntarily leaving on her own accord,

telling her sister she was leaving, walking out the door,

and that's all.

The detective who they assigned to the case,

he was kind of still like, "She might've just ran away."

And we're like,

he's not listening. We know she didn't run away.

That Monday was MLK,

and apparently police doesn't work on Martin Luther King Day. I don't know.

We're like, what? What sense does that make?

So, what, so there's no criminals on holidays?

We weren't getting anywhere.

If Jholie was a white girl,

I think it would've been taken more seriously.

My name is Rynata Leach,

and I am Jholie's cousin.

The police told us that we would be better off searching for her ourselves.

The first thing the family does is check the doorbell camera.

Maybe it captured a clue to where Jholie went.

This footage was the last footage that we had

of her leaving the house.

♪ Time slowly ticks away ♪

She was now gone.

Has Jholie decided she wants a secret for herself this time?

One that she doesn't have to share with her twin sister,

that's all hers?

Growing up, that was never their relationship.

The person that was born first was Jholie.

Two minutes older. Bossed me around.

They had their own language.

And nobody else knew it.

It's like they lived in their own world.

Although lovingly bossy at times, it doesn't matter.

The twins' bond becomes stronger with each passing year.

Me and my twin sister got a tattoo on our 16th birthday,

saying basically "forever Zhané and Jholie."

But forever is shattered with Jholie's disappearance,

and her family will do anything to bring her back.

And I'm putting all these clues together.

I saw it in the camera footage. I could see her on the phone,

and then I can see her looking at the garage door.

She was going to meet somebody.

Could this mystery person know what happened to Jholie?

Or could they have abducted her themselves?

As a family, we knew we needed to figure out who she was going to meet.

It's not much, but it's something.

And Jholie's sister Zhané has an idea

of just who she was talking to as she left.

But why wouldn't she just tell Zhané?

Why is this the one secret she didn't share?

Will Zhané ever learn the dreadful truth?

16-year-old Jholie Moussa

vanished more than 24 hours ago,

after walking out the door while talking to someone on the phone.

And her twin sister, Zhané, has a pretty good idea of who.

A local boy named Gio.

He was just a boy that I didn't really personally know.

I've seen them talk, and they seemed really cool,

but it gave more of a friend vibe.

-I wouldn't even say they were dating.

She was like, "Oh, I talk to him sometime."

But she's seen them texting a lot recently,

so Zhané is pretty sure this is the guy

Jholie was talking with before disappearing.

And because it's been more than 24 hours

since her twin sister has gone missing,

Zhané does the unthinkable to help find her.

-She shares her sister's secret.

Jholie never mentioned a Gio to me at all, ever, right?

Which is odd. If she liked him, she would've said something about him.

But we still follow every lead, right?

There's just one problem with that.

I didn't have Gio's number,

so I didn't know what else to do.

We started asking around.

Cyrille is asking people at the barbershop, like, "Hey,

does anybody know a Gio that lives in this area?"

We couldn't find anybody named Gio.

Meanwhile, the investigators are taking a deeper look

and following up on leads.

There were some text messages that indicated Jholie had gone to Norfolk

to go to a frat party.

But there was really no way to prove

whether or not she had actually attended that frat party.

I mean, there's a college down there.

There's probably a lot of frat parties that took place that weekend.

The police are hoping Jholie's cell phone data

will confirm the Norfork lead.

But processing the necessary warrant will take time.

But another warrant gives the police early access to her cell tower data

in hopes of tracking her movements that night.

Her cell site data was not helpful for that

because, at some point, it cuts off.

We know that she leaves the house,

and we know that she goes over to the area of Woodlawn Park.

We didn't have any evidence that she ever went to Norfolk.

By Sunday,

Cyrille and Syreeta are back in Virginia.

Though the twins lived with Syreeta

after their parents' separation over a decade ago,

when their mom remarried and relocated to Texas,

they decided to live with their dad.

Now, Cyrille fears that was a terrible mistake.

It was snowballing in my head,

just the, the, the self-blame

and the everything else,

and the more people would keep saying that,

"It's not your fault, Cyrille, it's not your fault,"

it would make it even worse.

It's Monday.

Jholie has been missing for three whole days,

and the Moussa family is desperate.

So, Syreeta takes it upon herself,

and she called Peggy Fox.

I was in the newsroom when a call came in

from a woman who said her daughter was missing.

There was just something about the tone of this woman's voice.

Like she had a mission

that she needed somebody to come out and listen.

Here in Alexandria with the Moussa Family,

-and this is Zhané. - Thank you.

And she's the twin sister of Jholie,

and Jholie went missing on

-Friday afternoon, right? -Yes.

So, Zhané, why don't you tell us what happened?

In past missing person cases I had covered,

it seemed like there was more concern,

community concern, more police concern.

I felt like maybe the police just hadn't pieced it all together.

So this right here is a picture of what her...

-What she looks like. - What she looks like.

-She has braids.

She just got new blonde braids for Christmas.

A lot of people praying for Jholie's safe return.

Thank you so much.

The story goes out on Facebook Live,

and within 15 minutes, it has 50,000 views.

Hashtag findjholie goes viral,

with celebrities Meagan Good and Eva Marcille

-sharing the missing teen's photo.

Social media helped us out a lot.

People from Massachusetts drove down to help look for her.

It was crazy how much support we were getting.

Cyrille's got all these papers,

and he's on his computer, and he's trying to track down information.

Syreeta reaches out

to all of Jholie's friends and acquaintances,

looking for anyone who might know anything.

And that's when I thought, "Okay, has anybody checked Nebiyu?"

Nebiyu was Jholie's first boyfriend

and her first heartbreak.

Not to say that she didn't think little boys were cute before

but this was the first time she's like,

"Oh, my goodness, I'm in high school now,

so I'm allowed to have a boyfriend."

But that was then, and this is now.

At this point, her and Nebiyu are not speaking.

They're not cool.

They do not have any contact with each other at all.

They're not together.

She had a bad altercation with him beforehand.

With little else to go on,

the family starts to consider all possible options.

Might Jholie's disappearance

have to do with her troubled past with Nebiyu?

Right away, I'm thinking,

"I'm gonna go see this boy. I'm gonna go see Nebiyu."

But Zhané is sure that Nebiyu has nothing to do with it

because there's no way Jholie

would ever speak to Nebiyu again after what happened.

You see, there's a horrible secret between the three of them.

One that threatens to change everything.

It's now been 72 hours since Jholie Moussa

said goodbye to her twin sister, Zhané,

and walked out the front door.

She was talking to someone on the phone as she went

and hasn't been heard from since.

Now, the only hopes of finding her are a mysterious boy named Gio

and an ex named Nebiyu.

Nebiyu was Jholie's first boyfriend,

so this was new territory for us.

♪ Please be gentle with me ♪

♪ I'm not as hard as I seem ♪

There were moments where I would hear them arguing.

♪ Sometimes I push the people away that I really need ♪

I thought it was like puppy love, like teenagers.

They break up, and it is what it is, and they move on.

- Like most teenage loves,

they burn brightly, and then burn out just as quickly.

After six months, it was over.

Jholie was done, but was Nebiyu?

Towards the end of September, I leave work.

On the way home, I look at my Ring video feed,

and I see that the police had came to the house.

Jholie said she was walking home from school,

and Nebiyu popped out of nowhere

and was trying to get her to talk to him

'cause they had broken up at this point.

He proceeded to push her into some bushes by the house.

Then, Nebiyu got up and ran, and then the neighbor called the police.

The next day, I take off work, and me and Jholie

go to the courthouse to get a restraining order.

But Jholie told me

that she didn't want to press criminal charges.

She was like, "The restraining order is enough.

We don't need to ruin his life by sending him to jail."

The school took it upon themselves

to relocate him from Mount Vernon High School altogether

and put him in another school within the Fairfax County District.

It's been four months since that alarming incident.

Surely Nebiyu is a thing of the past, right?

I go over to Nebiyu's house. Maybe he knows where Jholie's at, right?

Nebiyu comes down the stairs.

I'm asking him, "Where's Jholie?

I know you know where she's at. Where's Jholie?"

He's like, "I haven't seen her. I haven't seen her.

I stayed away from her since. You know, I haven't seen her."

At that point, I believe what he's telling me.

Jholie's family seems to accept that Nebiyu is not involved,

but because of his past, investigators remain suspicious

and decide to interview him.

We were hoping to locate her maybe in Nebiyu Ebrahim's home.

Officers came out and interviewed him.

He says that he hasn't seen her in some time. They don't talk.

He's trying to move on with his life.

The investigators know it's not much of an alibi,

but there's nothing else pointing at Nebiyu's guilt either.

So they turn their investigation

back to the elusive Gio.

So as the investigation is continuing,

we're going through her social media.

We knew that she was corresponding

with someone that went by the name Gio

around the time of her disappearance.

But finding him is harder than they anticipated, until...

Someone knew a Gio at the barbershop, and they contacted Gio,

and they said, "Hey, if you know where this girl is

or if you know anything about this girl, you need to call and let someone know."

Gio ended up calling me.

We had a lengthy conversation

and he seemed very adamant that he did not know her.

Didn't know anything about her.

And to be honest with you,

I believed him.

The family's advice to him was to call the police,

which he did.

We were able to speak to him

and alibi him out.

So, this guy isn't the Gio that everybody has been looking for

but someone is.

Zhané has seen it.

They would text long paragraphs to each other,

and it was just like the most dramatic relationship I ever seen.

♪ Twisting, spinning ♪

♪ Splitting me in two ♪

The answers have to be in Jholie's cell, but that's locked.

Police had to get a warrant to find out what was in her phone,

and that warrant wouldn't come until weeks after.

Jholie's family can't wait weeks to find her.

They need access now.

I'm still playing daddy detective.

I come up with the idea that, hey,

our phone records, we all have the same plan.

Finally, a way to find the last phone number Jholie had called...

...and the last person she talked to when she disappeared.

We called that number to find out who called her phone.

Someone picks up immediately,

but it isn't Gio on the line.

And it isn't Nebiyu either.

Hello?

It's been 10 days since Jholie Moussa walked out her front door

and nobody's seen her since.

But daddy detective Cyrille looks through his phone bill

and discovers the last number that his missing daughter called

and dials it.

Hello?

It was a little boy who picked up.

I think the boy was like 10 or something.

And the boy was like, "I don't know who Jholie is.

I didn't call that number." He was like,

"But somebody at the park used my phone. Maybe that person called."

It's not what Cyrille hoped for,

but it's something.

He needs to learn more.

We went to the basketball court

where all the kids would be playing at.

The boy described the person who used his phone.

He described him as an older person

with a low haircut, who was like six-foot-tall or whatever.

This has to be the guy

Jholie was on her way to meet.

Why would anyone ask

to use someone else's phone? Everyone's got a cell phone.

He doesn't want anyone to trace his phone.

It's now been 12 days

since Jholie vanished into the cold winter night,

and the search for her has stretched

all the way from West Virginia to Philadelphia,

only to come up empty.

So, with no other way to move forward,

investigators go back to Jholie's last-known location

to see if there is anything they might have missed.

On January 26, 2018, I got a phone call

saying that Search and Rescue was out at Woodlawn Park.

The park has been searched several times before,

but this time is different.

The only thing that they told me was that they had found what they believed

to be human remains.

As I'm driving in, I can see

the crime scene tape that's up.

I could see that there were media vehicles here.

I'm just trying to get under the tape,

so I can get out and actually see what it is that we're dealing with.

So, off the path over here,

in this little depression next to this tree,

is where we ultimately find the body.

She was probably 10 feet off of this path,

completely covered with leaves.

And who knows how many people

unknowingly walked right by her

in those two weeks that she was out here?

As we were excavating, there was a tattoo that was visible,

and that tattoo was the same tattoo that her sister has, exactly.

So, at that point, I was confident

that this was Jholie Moussa.

I left the scene

and I went over and I met the Moussa family.

I'm in the basement, so I see them go straight upstairs,

and then I hear my mom screaming.

That's when I knew.

♪ We'll make it out alive ♪

Why would you just leave me...

here by myself?

And I'm still here by myself.

I remember telling Cyrille

that I had a 15-year-old as well

and that I would do everything in my power

to bring someone to justice

for what happened to his daughter.

And he looked at me, and he was like,

"I'm gonna find the person who did this.

I'm gonna treat it like, like, this was my daughter."

The autopsy of Jholie Moussa

occurred on January 27, 2018,

at the Northern District medical examiner's office.

We were able to establish that she had been manually strangled.

There was some damage in and around her neck

that would've indicated that.

Took swabs all the way around Jholie's neck

and a whole bunch of other places.

We were able to get DNA off of her neck from multiple different spots.

Finding DNA gives investigators hope.

But whose DNA is it?

Meanwhile, Jholie Moussa is laid to rest.

Jholie's funeral was massive.

It was like about 200 people showed up.

It was very emotional

and I just remember Zhané...

losing her mind.

♪ The darkness comes over me ♪

And she jumps up, and she started screaming.

Several people grabbed her to try to calm her down.

And I think that's when she realized her sister was gone.

I was so angry.

I had to get picked up and taken out.

As the family tries to accept their new reality,

it's becoming abundantly clear

that Zhané is struggling with more than just grief.

She was crying like crazy.

The thing is, Zhané, she was hiding a secret.

Zhané is haunted by a disturbingly dark secret

her twin Jholie told her shortly before she disappeared.

I don't wanna tell my dad yet...

...'cause then that means that this whole thing is actually more real.

It's a secret that may lead to Jholie's killer.

Jholie Moussa's body has been found and laid to rest.

But now that her twin sister is gone forever,

Zhané realizes that a secret Jholie told her,

a secret she has never shared with anyone,

could be the key to catching her killer.

Jholie and Nebiyu,

they would see each other in secret,

like, even after the whole situation with him.

I didn't know at first, but then she told me,

and when she did tell me,

she was just like, "It's not even that big of a deal."

I was just like, "Okay."

Jholie goes on to tell her twin

that the last time she saw Nebiyu

was actually in December, but this time, it was different.

It was terrifying.

He was blaming her for the fact

that he got himself in trouble,

blaming her

because he had gotten locked up,

ended up going to a new school.

He was looked at badly.

He was blaming her because he's like,

"All of this wouldn't even be happening if it wasn't for you."

They were arguing about that, and he ended up strangling her.

Nebiyu put his arms around her neck and strangled her,

and she passed out.

When she woke up, her neck hurt.

She heard him on the phone, talking to a friend,

and he was like, "Oh, I think I killed her."

He does let her leave, but at the same time,

he's kinda begging her to like forgive him,

and he's sorry,

and all that stuff that he would do.

She was like, "I can't stay here. I gotta go."

And when she told me about it,

we cried in each other's arms.

She told me, "I can't see him again.

We can't talk, we can't date."

And I was like, "What do you mean you can't?"

She was like, "I'm not going to."

The time, I felt like I knew that she was not gonna talk to him again.

That was the last straw. Nobody would go back to that.

Confident that this time Nebiyu was gone for good,

Zhané kept her sister's secret about that terrible night,

even after she disappeared.

But once Zhané learns that Jholie's killer strangled her,

alarm bells go off.

That's when I knew.

I know that Nebiyu had something to do with it.

Zhané can no longer keep her twin's secret.

And when Zhané told me, I was like, "Why didn't you tell me these things?

"Y'all could've just told me. Y'all could've told me.

I would've been there. I would've helped you."

And when Cyrille brings these new details to Detective Byerson,

the investigators immediately make their move.

We decided to utilize the unreported strangulation

and see if we could charge him with it, in the hopes to get a little bit more time

to shore up this murder charge.

Some officers interviewed Nebiyu about this allegation of strangulation.

He talked about it. He said it happened.

Made some confessions about that,

and he was subsequently charged with a strangulation at that point.

Nebiyu pleads guilty to assault for the December 16 attack

and is sentenced to six months detention.

My name is Casey Lingan,

and in 2018, I was the Chief Deputy Commonwealth's attorney

for Fairfax County.

We executed on Nebiyu Ebrahim for his DNA,

and that was submitted to the lab for comparison

to a number of swabs from Jholie's neck.

And what we came to find out

was that his DNA...

was on her neck.

So as Nebiyu is released from detention

for the December assault charge,

Detective Byerson is waiting for him.

As I was placing handcuffs on him,

he just turned his head over his right shoulder

and asked me if there was somewhere we could talk.

And I said yeah.

Nebiyu walked me through that day.

We knew that she was corresponding with someone

that went by the name Gio

-around the time of her disappearance.

Gio was...

Nebiyu.

Jholie was utilizing the name Gio

because she did, in fact, know someone named Gio.

And when she would be questioned

by family or sister or mom, her dad or stepdad,

about who she was corresponding with,

she knew that she was speaking to Nebiyu,

which she wasn't supposed to be doing.

The Gio that Syreeta and the investigators had spoken to

was simply the wrong guy.

The Gio that Jholie was talking to

had been Nebiyu all along.

- He told me that

he had met up with the two boys at the park,

at the basketball court.

He had asked to use one of their phones.

He had called Jholie from that phone.

He had asked her to come down to meet him in Woodlawn Park.

When Jholie arrives at the park,

an argument ensues.

Nebiyu tells me that he decides to place her in...

an MMA-style choke hold.

He squeezes...

until her body becomes limp.

He says that, after the strangulation,

that he goes to move her body

off into the wood line,

covering her with leaves.

Then, Nebiyu also confesses to me

that that whole text message about going to the party in Norfolk,

he authors that message on her phone and sends it out

in hopes that it'll confuse everybody

as to what her location is.

He puts a weight in a bag with the phone and throws the phone into the pond.

And as evidence kept coming in, cell phone records,

talking to other witnesses, and ultimately DNA evidence

and the medical examiner's report and the cause of death,

we were developing a strong case

that Nebiyu Ebrahim was responsible and had murdered her.

And so, he was charged with first-degree murder.

But before it can get to trial,

investigators are met with another surprise.

We were scheduled for a status hearing

to set a trial date,

and we got word that Nebiyu had decided to plead guilty.

After Ebrahim pleaded guilty,

the judge convicted him of first-degree murder.

He will spend between 20 years and life behind bars.

I felt like, you know...

I mean...

Justice was done, right?

To me it's not enough, you know?

He gets to live in that jail cell.

It's our law, it's our system.

♪ How will you feel... ♪

And at least I can say that the system didn't fail Jholie.

And that's probably the most I can say...

♪ Now you're on the other side ♪

♪ Will I see you again ♪

Jholie was cremated, so I have her remains.

And I can't go overnight someplace

without her remains with me.

This is how I cope. Like, I left her, and this happened,

so I'm never gonna leave her again.

I'm never leaving her again.

It took us a while to figure out,

how do we keep her name alive?

We started a nonprofit, The Importance of You,

to help educate our community

on intimate partner violence and mental health issues.

What are good secrets? What are bad secrets?

If you don't feel comfortable sharing it with your family,

you can share it with us. We can help.

Jholie Moussa did a really good job

of leaving breadcrumbs for us

that eventually led back to Nebiyu.

She told people about the strangulation. She told people about the relationship.

She left us a lot of very important evidence

that really assisted us in capturing her killer.

Had she not told me that

she had gotten strangled the first time from Nebiyu,

we wouldn't have been able to build a case

on him murdering my sister.

I believe she kinda solved her own murder.

♪ I don't know where my head is lately ♪

♪ Have I lost my mind? ♪

♪ But I know that I have a secret ♪

♪ And it's only mine ♪

♪ And the only way to find me ♪

♪ Is to go beneath the lies ♪