Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, of the Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe, was 22 years old, eight months pregnant, and had a whole life about to begin: a new apartment, a new job, a baby on the way. On August 19, 2017, she told her mother she was going upstairs to help a neighbor, but she never came back down.
That neighbor, Brooke Crews, 40, had spent months faking her own pregnancy in front of her boyfriend William Hoehn, using old ultrasounds and heartbeat sounds taken from the internet. When she had no baby to show, she started a fight, shoved Savanna against the sink, and, while she drifted in and out of consciousness, cut open her abdomen with a knife.
Police searched that apartment three times without finding anything: Savanna’s body was hidden in a closet, and the baby was sleeping next to Hoehn as if she were his. They found her alive only on the fourth search. Kayakers found Savanna in the Red River. Crews received life in prison; Hoehn, 20 years. Her story pushed Congress to pass Savanna’s Act in 2020 to address the disappearance of Indigenous women.