On the morning of December 1, 2021, Jeremy Beau Sides descended into the Calfkiller River near Sparta, Tennessee, and filmed what he found on the bottom. The car had been down there so long it had become part of the riverbed, corroded and packed with silt, resting 13 feet beneath the surface beside Highway 84. He confirmed the license plate and called White County Sheriff Steve Page. Page ran the tags on the spot. They matched.
Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel had been there the entire time.
Their disappearance on the night of April 3, 2000 had baffled investigators, tormented both families, and generated 21 years of rumor, false leads, and unanswered questions. The answer had been a short drive from where they were last seen, submerged in a river no one had thought to search.
Jeremy Beau Sides, the Georgia-based scuba diver and YouTuber whose underwater search solved the 21-year cold case of Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel.
Sparta’s last night with them
Erin Lee Foster was 18 years old, a student at White County High School in Sparta, Tennessee, known to family and friends as a perfectionist with a willingness to take on responsibility that outran her age. She helped her mother around the house without being asked. She assisted her father with mechanical work and planned to become a mechanic herself. She was the kind of teenager who made time for people, including her younger brother Will, whom she and Jeremy picked up from an arcade on the night of April 3rd before dropping him home.
Jeremy Lee Bechtel, 17, was described by those who knew him as athletic and passionate about music and sports. He had grown up alongside Erin in Sparta, and the two were close friends.
That evening, Jeremy called his father Ronnie Bechtel by telephone sometime around 9 p.m. It was the last time Ronnie heard his son’s voice. Erin and Jeremy attended a party that night and returned briefly to Erin’s house before leaving again. At around 10 p.m., witnesses reported seeing them outside Sparta in Erin’s black 1988 Pontiac Grand Am, heading south. No credible sighting of either teenager was ever reported after that.
The delay compounded everything. Erin’s mother grew alarmed the following morning. Her father, away on a business trip, believed she would simply come home in a few days. A full week passed before the family contacted the White County Sheriff’s Office. By then, whatever trail might have existed had already gone cold.
An investigation with no evidence
The investigation was troubled from the start. Police did not search the bedrooms of either teenager. They did not question the friends who had attended the party. As years passed with no forensic evidence, no body, and no confirmed sighting of the car, the case acquired the status of a permanent open question.
One significant lead emerged in the mid-2000s. Multiple witnesses in Pensacola, Florida claimed to have seen Erin working and living there, including a retired police officer who said he recognized her photograph. Investigators traveled to Pensacola and conducted active searches across 2005 and 2006. They found nothing.
Back in White County, detectives swept abandoned wells after a tip that the pair had been killed and their bodies dumped inside. A well was excavated in 2012. It was empty. Detective Chris Isom, who worked the case for years, told the Knox News-Sentinel in 2012: “This is a case with two victims and many possibilities, but no crime scene and no forensic evidence.” He later added, “You can point to literally any scenario as to what happened that night, and I cannot prove that any are right or wrong. Every lead we get, it seems like it becomes smoke that you can’t hold in your hand.”
Theories spread for the same reason theories always do: because nothing concrete existed to replace them. Robbery. A drug deal gone wrong. A jealousy killing. A carjacking. A decision by the two teenagers to run away together. Jeremy’s mother, Rhonda Ledbetter, rejected the runaway theory entirely, on the most practical of grounds. She told reporters: “You need money to go on the run. Both of them worked and neither picked up their last paychecks, and none of their personal belongings are missing except what they had with them.” She added: “I don’t believe they got out of White County that night.”
Ledbetter provided her DNA to investigators years later in case a John Doe matching Jeremy’s description was ever recovered. Erin’s parents declined to do the same. Bob Lowry, then of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, explained what that often means: many parents refuse DNA submission because facing it means accepting the possibility their child is dead.
Rhonda Ledbetter died in July 2018, three years before her son was found.
The man who follows cars into rivers
Jeremy Beau Sides was born on October 2, 1979 in Acworth, Georgia. After high school he served in the U.S. Navy in aviation hydraulics before eventually owning and operating an automotive tire shop. In 2016, he launched a YouTube channel to document his hobby of metal detecting, hunting for Civil War relics and lost items in local creeks and rivers. His coworkers at the tire shop had given him the nickname “Nug,” a joke about his searches for gold nuggets, and when his channel broadened to include scuba diving and river exploration, he renamed it Exploring with Nug.
The logic behind his method was straightforward: he scours the Charley Project, an online database of missing persons cases, looking for individuals who vanished near bodies of water while in vehicles. “Cars don’t just disappear,” he told the Washington Post. “Nine times out of ten, they’re in the water.”
In November 2021, Sides turned his attention to Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel. He had already found the car of Miriam Ruth Hemphill, an 84-year-old Oak Ridge woman missing since July 2005, that same month, pulling her vehicle from Melton Hill Lake.
The Foster and Bechtel case, he said, caught him personally. He had been approximately the same age as the two teenagers in 2000. “In high school, I lost two close friends in a car accident,” he told The Independent. “All this was running through my head as I was searching for them.”
Thirteen feet below Highway 84
Sides arrived in Sparta on November 24, 2021, and began scanning a lake near where the teenagers had attended the party. He found a submerged vehicle. It was not Erin’s Pontiac.
Around the same time, the White County Sheriff’s Office became aware of his search through his YouTube uploads. Sheriff Page, who had made a personal commitment to finding the two teenagers since taking office in 2018, made contact with Sides and passed along a detail that had been buried in the files for years: a misfiled report had recently resurfaced indicating that Erin and Jeremy had likely driven along Highway 84 on their way back from the party. The entire investigation had focused on the wrong end of the county.
On November 30, using side-scan sonar, Sides detected a vehicle on the floor of the Calfkiller River, next to Highway 84. Daylight ran out before he could dive. He returned the following morning, December 1st, descended 13 feet, and confirmed what the sonar had shown: a Pontiac Grand Am, almost entirely intact, with human remains inside. He surfaced and called Steve Page.
Page told the Washington Post: “I was in doubt until I got there and ran the tags. I made a promise to the Foster family that as long as I was sheriff, I’d be looking for these two kids. I did. I have.”
The remains were later positively identified as Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel. Investigators concluded that Erin most likely lost control of the vehicle while driving along that section of Highway 84, which in April 2000 had no guardrail. There was no evidence of foul play. Page later reflected on what the discovery meant for the prior two decades of searching: “We’ve gone in wells, dug up areas. We’ve used ground penetrating equipment looking for bodies, but it was right under our noses the whole time. It’s heart-wrenching to know it was that simple, and it was made that hard because of all of the rumors and horror stories through the years.”
“It’s like losing him all over again”
Jeremy Bechtel was buried in 2022. Erin Foster was cremated the same year. The families held separate funerals and a joint memorial service. Ronnie Bechtel, Jeremy’s father, described what the discovery felt like to family who had spent more than two decades not knowing: “It’s like losing him all over again. It just shattered my heart again. We always kind of thought through the years that something happened, but I just didn’t know what.”
Erin’s father, Cecil Foster, died in 2025. He lived to see his daughter found and buried, but not long enough to fully leave the weight of those 21 years behind him.
In his video documenting the discovery, Sides said: “I’m lost for words. I’m so glad I could find them. I’m so sad that that’s where they ended up. I can’t believe it’s been over 20 years that they’ve been sitting there waiting for someone to find them.”
As of July 2022, Sheriff Page confirmed the investigation remained technically open, but with no evidence of foul play and the cause of death consistent with a road accident on a dark highway without a guardrail, no further suspects have been named. The section of Highway 84 beside the Calfkiller River now has guardrails.
Erin Foster was 18 years old. Jeremy Bechtel was 17. They went to a party on a spring night and drove home, and the road gave out beneath them, and for 21 years no one knew. That is the whole of it.
