Post Mortem | Sade Robinson and the Secret Beach

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1:09Anne-Marie Green:Welcome to Postmortem. I'm 48 Hours correspondent Natalie Morales, filling in for Anne-Marie Green, who is on the other side of the mic, to talk about her latest report on the murder of 19-year-old Sade Robinson. Thanks for joining me, Anne-Marie. Thanks, Natalie. I'm looking forward to talking about this. Now, this all started when the Milwaukee Fire Department responded to a vehicle that was set on fire in April of 2024. Turns out that car belonged to Sade, but nobody could get a hold of her. Well, that same day, a body part from an unidentified female washed up on a remote beach on the Wisconsin shoreline of Lake Michigan.

1:51Anne-Marie Green:And Emery, Sade's friends also hadn't heard from her since she went on a date the night before, right? Right. Yeah.

1:56Natalie Morales:And in fact, it was one of her co-workers at Pizza Shuttle that really raised the alarm. She was concerned that Sade hadn't showed up for work. She's such a good employee. She would never just not show up. She just couldn't let it go. And she was the one who contacted police.

2:11Anne-Marie Green:Well, good for her for following through with that. And you also talk about in this hour, as we see how much security footage played a part in helping police put the pieces of this puzzle together.

2:27Natalie Morales:Absolutely. I mean, I think we all know that there's a lot of surveillance cameras around security cameras, ring cameras. We know that we're on camera a lot. But in this case, it wasn't just sort of the places that you would expect, like the lobby of her apartment building. But that remote area of the park, Wanamark Park, was just it was remarkable that they even had video from there. And Sade in particular left kind of digital breadcrumbs pretty much everywhere. And that is part of what led to police honing in on Maxwell Anderson so quickly.

3:04Anne-Marie Green:There are eyes in the sky everywhere, as we can see throughout this hour. We're going to talk about it all. But first, I want to remind our listeners and our viewers, if you haven't, listened or watched this episode yet, please go ahead and do that right now. Go check it out and come on back and join our conversation. So Anne-Marie, at first, while watching the episode, I thought that this was going to be one of those dating app horror stories. Turns out, though, that Sade actually met Maxwell Anderson in person before their date. Right.

3:37Natalie Morales:I mean, this is the old fashioned way, right? She was looking for yet another job. She already had two jobs and she was looking for a third one at the bar. She meets him there. He's working there. And so, yeah, why not think it's OK to go out on a date? This is a young woman who has everything going for her. She's unbelievably driven. She wants to enter the Air Force. She's finishing up her education. She's going places. And this one person, you know, ruined everything.

4:08Anne-Marie Green:Such a tragic turn. She had everything and seemed to be doing everything right. The first person we meet in this episode, she's so fascinating, is the detective, Joe Donner. And, you know, I wasn't quite sure what to make of her fashion sense. I mean, she's incredible. She's like something out of another era almost.

4:28Natalie Morales:And that is deliberate. That is by design. She is just one of those people that's really into 1940s and 1950s fashion and the aesthetic of the time. She actually owns a vintage clothing store. And she does these like online social media sales where she, you know, where she'll show like the latest haul that she's gotten. And people all over the world tune in to buy stuff from her. She does these, I guess, pinup contests. We're not talking burlesque stuff, right? We're talking about people who dress like in the era. Her pinup name is Misdemeanor. How appropriate is that, Natalie? I love it. And so, yeah, she's got this whole fascinating other side to her.

5:12Natalie Morales:But boy, is she a damn good investigator.

5:15Anne-Marie Green:She sure is. And when she gets down to business, she really gets down to business, as we see. Now, it was Detective Donner who took you to that remote beach, showed you around. What was it like?

5:27Natalie Morales:The beach is an interesting spot. It's quite desolate. Though there's a road leading down there, there's a big fence. You can't drive down there. You have to know the pathway to take to get down there. And certainly people come down there to walk their dogs or maybe just to get away. But you would have to really know that that spot is there to venture down there. I wouldn't go down there, and I wouldn't go down there alone.

5:49Anne-Marie Green:she also took you to the place where they have Sade's burned vehicle yeah so seeing the car I

5:58Natalie Morales:mean it was almost a little emotional because it is absolutely charred but even though maximal Anderson tried to get rid of every stitch of evidence he fails to get rid of some really crucial evidence three pieces of crucial evidence where the driver's seat is situated that doesn't change. So they know that, you know, Sade probably wasn't driving that car. But then her purse is found basically intact. I mean, it's singed, but it's found underneath the car seat and the clothes she was wearing that night. Those are in the trunk of the car. And finding that car really helped to speed up this investigation as well.

6:36Anne-Marie Green:Yeah, that was what was so fascinating. I never thought about that clue of measuring the seat distance and that being a big clue into the height of the individual who last drove the car, which would turn out to be really important in helping solve this case.

6:51Natalie Morales:And I should say that the other officer, right, Donegan, who was the one who was called to do a check on her apartment, she was crucial. She said to us that that day she was getting ready for work and like the news was on in the background and she kind of heard about a body part being found, you know, and then she gets this call to go to the apartment and like immediately she has this gut reaction. She went on a date. She's not here now. I heard about this this news report about a body part. And she was also really significant in speeding up the investigation, because if it had not moved forward as quickly as it did, Donna really feels like there's a good possibility that a lot of that really crucial video would have been lost.

7:39Anne-Marie Green:Let's also talk, though, about Sade's younger sister, Adriana. I mean, her ability to offer up data on Sade via Life360, the app. I mean, it proved to be invaluable, right?

7:51Natalie Morales:Yeah, exactly. Detective Donner calls Adriana the quiet backbone of the family. And I don't know how Adriana was able to keep a level head in the middle of all of this chaos. I've never, ever, ever met an adult, much less a teenager, with the type of presence that this young girl has. I'm glad it came through in the hour. She's remarkable. And she was able to provide the information about the Life360 app. She could show them where Sade had gone. She could show them that she had been at Maxwell Anderson's house at around 930. She could show, according to the Life360 app, that at 2.53, the phone arrived at Warnamont Park.

8:39Natalie Morales:All of these things were crucial.

8:41Anne-Marie Green:That Life360 app, that was something, the minute my kids got their driver's license, I put it on their phones because it goes beyond the Find My feature. You can actually track if they're going and driving above the speed limit. It gives you an alert. So it's an incredible tool.

8:59Natalie Morales:Yeah, I had never heard of the app before. I have since put it on my phone because it really is remarkable the amount of detail. I mean, it helped investigators literally kind of like walk the path that Sade did to figure this whole thing out.

9:18Anne-Marie Green:Well, this brings us to the man who was then charged with Sade Robinson's murder, Maxwell Anderson. Tell us about him.

9:27Natalie Morales:So this guy's, you know, as you can imagine, an interesting character. He's 33 years old. Sade was a teenager. She's 19. We spoke to his ex-girlfriend, Chloe, and Chloe also was very young when they started dating. Perhaps preying on their vulnerability. Exactly. Even before he met Sade, he had a criminal record operating a vehicle while intoxicated, disorderly conduct. And you saw in The Hour that he was arrested for battery against a bystander who tried to intervene. He was apparently having an argument with one of his girlfriends, and he ended up pleading guilty to a lesser charge for that.

10:06Anne-Marie Green:What was really fascinating and kind of alarming, in my opinion, was when detectives did search his apartment, they found he had a large collection of knives in his apartment, which, I mean, that really raised my eyebrow. Yeah, 51 knives in the kitchen alone.

10:26Natalie Morales:I like to cook.

10:27Anne-Marie Green:I have a lot of knives, but I certainly don't have a collection like that.

10:31Natalie Morales:Yeah, I know. And, you know, I'm pretty sure investigators were hopeful that amongst those knives they would find something that maybe played a role in this case, and that simply wasn't the case. Chloe says that he sort of fancied himself a handyman, but he was always starting projects that he would never finish. But there were two projects, she said, that he did finish in the time that she knew him. And they were both secret compartments. And she sort of described how you would like touch something and then a compartment would pop out. We didn't know what he was hiding in those compartments. The other curious tidbit, investigators found tons of women's clothing in his house.

11:16Natalie Morales:Random items, you know, shirts, pants, not necessarily like all intimate items. Chloe wonders if some of the clothes might be hers. They also found the ID of a woman. They did track the woman down. She's alive and well. A couple of other interesting things about that house. The house is actually sort of split. He owns the house, but he lived on the second floor, and then there was a tenant on the first floor. Apparently, the tenant complained a lot about the noise. Maxwell Anderson had dogs. He would complain about the dogs making too much noise upstairs. The tenant was home the night Sade went over there and never heard a thing.

12:00Anne-Marie Green:Did investigators have a theory as to how Sade Robinson could have been killed without making any sort of noise? Strangulation, perhaps? It's a silent death?

12:11Natalie Morales:Yeah, I was going to say that could have been, you know, a way someone could have been killed without making a lot of noise. and certainly without a lot of blood, which is also something else that they didn't find. You know, he goes on the date with her April 1st. He's arrested by April 4th.

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13:36Anne-Marie Green:on april 12th 2024 the sheriff's office announced that the remains found on that remote beach were identified as belonging to sade robinson and on that same day maxwell anderson was formally charged with first degree intentional homicide mutilation of a corpse and arson he would plead not guilty to all the charges. Now, one of the worries for Detective Joe Donner was that there wasn't any direct evidence linking Maxwell Anderson to the case, but it didn't seem, Anne-Marie, that the jury really needed that so much, right?

14:14Natalie Morales:No, it was really the last piece of evidence that sealed his fate. We spoke to a number of jurors, but one juror, Becca, talked about seeing those photos that Maxwell Anderson had taken on his phone and then deleted. There are photos of Sade. You can see his hand on her. He's touching, you know, intimate areas of her body. And that basically did it for these jurors. I want to read a little bit of what Becca had to say about this. She said, I mean, I personally felt like I had lived the last few hours of Sade's life with her. And to see her end up like that was disgusting, humiliating, just horrible.

14:51Anne-Marie Green:Yeah, and to think that, to not know if she was dead or alive when those photos were taken. They seemed staged, almost like a trophy. But then he deletes them. I mean, that tells you a lot if you're a juror, right? It was perhaps the most powerful piece of evidence that the jurors saw. Right. That along with, you know, we did see the footage of the man on the beach with the backpack. Yeah. Also, then you saw the surveillance footage of the man leaving the burnt car. And then you see clearly Maxwell Anderson's face when he hops onto a city bus. I mean, thank goodness that security footage was very crisp and clear.

15:33Anne-Marie Green:You could clearly see his face. Oh, absolutely. Well, and then it turns out the defense didn't call any witnesses. So the jury didn't take very long to deliberate. Great. Anderson was found guilty of intentional homicide, mutilation of a corpse, and arson. Although he continues to maintain his innocence at his sentencing, Sade's mother, father, and sister, they weren't having any of that.

15:58Natalie Morales:No, they were very outspoken. Sade's mother is, you know, really, she's been dealing with a lot of stuff, even before the disappearance and the murder of her daughter. She's been dealing with sort of health stuff. And so it really took a lot out of her. And she has kept the fight going. But it wasn't just the family members that spoke. Maxwell Anderson's father also spoke. He was crying. He said Sade's family, he thought about them every single day. He said that he loved his son and that he hoped for a path for his son that would allow his son to become a positive influence. in some way. There was also members of the community that sent in letters because like the whole city was moved by this murder.

16:48Natalie Morales:And there was one particular letter from an anonymous person that even the jurors said had a significant impact on them. And I just, I'm going to read some portions of this because I think it really captures the way the entire city of Milwaukee he felt about Sade. Sade Robinson was not a torso. She was not evidence. She was a full, living, radiant human being. She had dreams, plans, and a future she was building with pride. She had people who loved her and that still love her more than words can hold. And she had a right to live, to breathe, to laugh, to grow old. That right was stolen, and it continues.