Unbehaun was finally reunited with her father in 2023 after an employee at a consignment store in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized her mother from a photo featured on the Netflix show Unsolved mysteries. After the Unbehaun was discovered, Eichholz learned during the subsequent investigation that the couple had actually been living in Oregon until a few months ago.
“I don’t want to say it wasn’t actionable, but I couldn’t just take their information and stick with it,” Eichholz says. “That’s always been the stop for us. “Okay, you’ve given me that information, but I still have to check and check and do my work with search warrants.” The child abduction case against Heather Unbehaun continues.
Any help they can get
“It was new technology and I was curious, so I thought, ‘Let’s try it and see how far we can go,'” says Borden. “I’m thankful it didn’t go into evidence in my case that I didn’t need to get my conviction.”
The emails show that Global Intelligence sales representatives regularly offered to run police department cases through Cybercheck for free to demonstrate the technology. They also refer to cases that Global Intelligence characterized as high-profile and that Cybercheck allegedly helped solve, without naming the cases directly or providing evidence that Cybercheck made any difference in the investigations.
Gessner of the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office says that when his agency was deciding whether to use evidence from Cybercheck, it asked the Ohio BCI Cybercrimes Unit for an opinion. “They said, yes, it makes sense … we don’t have the technology to do that, but we’d like to have it.” District attorneys also approached the DANS Institute, he says, and were told the institute doesn’t “do this type of thing.” .
But even though he retracted the evidence provided by Cybercheck, Gessner says the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office is asking other companies if they can do the same kind of open-source tracking that Global Intelligence is marketing.
“We don’t want to close doors that can help point to the truth in our cases,” he says.
