- In March 2020, friends and family of Gretchen Anthony received a text saying she had COVID and was deteriorating
- When no-one had heard from her in days, the hospital was called, and it was revealed she’d never been admitted
- Her ex-husband David had a criminal past, and a week before Gretchen disappeared, a police report alleges he had been seen following 15-year-old girls
- An investigation followed and after police scrutinised footage from Gretchen’s home security camera, the shocking and harrowing truth was revealed….
As the COVID pandemic was rapidly spreading throughout the world in March 2020, friends and family of Gretchen Anthony received a worrying text message from her.
Good Morning. Tested positive for coronavirus early this morning, it said. I’m at a CDC/coronavirus treatment facility that only handles COVID cases.
She sent more messages over the next few days, stating that she was on a ventilator and was being transferred to a special facility for further observation.
For people who knew the 51-year-old mother well, like Gretchen’s friend Kelly Hanna, news of her deteriorating health came as a shock.
“She worked out at the gym very hard,” she told CBS News. “She took her health very seriously.”
Read more: Loving dad’s ex stabbed him as he slept
Gretchen’s loved ones grew increasingly concerned after they realised no-one had spoken to her in days, not even her 12-year-old daughter, who was staying with her father, Gretchen’s ex-husband.
Calls to the hospital revealed an even more shocking truth – Gretchen hadn’t been admitted there.
Her family called police and asked them to do a wellness check at Gretchen’s home.
On March 26 – five days after anyone had seen Gretchen – investigators forced their way into her house.
They discovered evidence of a struggle – a broken picture frame, shards of glass on the bed, and a towel stained with a blood-like substance.
They also found Gretchen’s car in the hospital car park where friends thought she’d been with her purse inside it.
A neighbour told the investigators she’d heard a woman screaming on the morning of March 21.
“I heard her scream, ‘No’ and then I heard something about ‘It hurts, stop it,’” the neighbour said.
Neighbours didn’t call police, but did take a photo of a black ute that was parked outside Gretchen’s home at the time.
Police quickly discovered the vehicle belonged to Gretchen’s estranged husband, David Anthony.
Kelly told CBS News she thought Gretchen had found the man of her dreams when she started dating David – the hot young trainer at her gym – after her divorce.
“David by all appearances was a phenomenal step-parent,” she said. “They seemed like the happiest couple ever.”
They married in 2015, but their relationship fell apart after a few years and they separated in late-2019.
Investigators learned Gretchen had filed for divorce in February 2020, a month before her disappearance.
Now, David was nowhere to be found either.
A look into David’s background, whose original full name was David Anthony Deutsch, revealed a criminal past.
In 1997, David was jailed after holding up a Blockbuster video store with a squirt gun and assaulting a police officer.
A week before Gretchen’s disappearance, a police report alleged that officers saw David following 15-year-old girls while “sweating profusely”, before covering his numberplate with black tape.
When an officer tried to arrest him, he allegedly slammed his car door on the officer’s arm.
He was arrested for resisting an officer with violence and released on bail.
Gretchen’s family told police she’d been worried for her safety when David returned to her home after their separation, and she’d installed security cameras in her house.
Investigators noticed the cameras had been removed from the walls when they checked Gretchen’s home, but soon discovered their recordings could be recovered online by the camera operator.
Investigators also tracked Gretchen and David’s phones as they pinged together at various places across the country.
Officers spotted David in his ute two days later and pulled him over.
“Last I heard she was in a CDC facility getting treatment for coronavirus,” David told them when asked about Gretchen.
Police seized David’s ute as well as his and Gretchen’s phones, but didn’t have enough evidence to hold him.
Two days later, they finally received the security camera recordings from Gretchen’s home.
It showed footage of Gretchen walking out onto her patio, where a tall man ambushes her and drags her into the garage.
Gretchen is heard screaming at her Alexa device to call the police, but was seemingly unaware the device won’t call emergency unless it’s been programmed to do so.
At one point, the man who grabbed Gretchen looks up at and approaches the camera, giving police a clear image of his face right before he rips the camera off the wall. It was David Anthony.
On March 31, 2020, Anthony was arrested and charged with Gretchen’s murder.
He denied killing Gretchen, insisting that she was still alive and on the run because someone at work was after her.
But in December 2020, David Ethan Anthony, 44, accepted a settlement of 38 years in prison, which required him to plead guilty to second-degree murder and reveal the location of Gretchen’s remains.
Anthony led investigators to a patch of grass next to a retirement home where he buried Gretchen’s body. It wasn’t far from her house.
An autopsy revealed Gretchen had died from stab wounds to her neck and torso.
Gretchen’s loved ones were finally able to lay her body to rest but have been left trying to make sense of this tragedy, most notably, the question of why.
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