When a Nebraska mother went missing in November of 2022, authorities at the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in west Omaha say digital evidence led them to her ex-boyfriend, Aldrick Scott, who was suspected of kidnapping her.
“She was a well-liked person and just knowing that we were going to take every step and we weren’t going to stop until we solved it or we exhausted every lead,” said Captain Eric Sellers with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office.
Five weeks later, in December 2022, her body was found more than 150 miles away in Topeka, Kansas.

“Cari Allen was murdered on November 20, 2022 in Douglas County, in west Omaha,” said Donald Klein, the Douglas County Attorney. “This individual was stalking her and had driven up from Topeka, Kansas. She didn’t want anything to do with him anymore, but he would let that happen. And so the evidence showed at some point that he shot her, that he took her body back down to Topeka and buried her in a shallow grave outside of Topeka in a rural part of the community. The only way that we found her body was from digital evidence.”


Captain Sellers says digital evidence is key to building cases in modern policing.
“At one time we would go door to door, look for video, and now almost every case we see touches digital forensics to some degree, whether it’s a theft case, an assault, domestic violence or murder. Usually we’re looking for locations. We’re looking for deleted texts. They’re trying to hide what they were doing,” Cpt. Sellers explained.

“People expect digital evidence. I think jurors expect it. They watch TV. They see all the different crime shows on TV and the digital evidence as it’s displayed,” said Klein. “So it’s so important, and we train our lawyers to make sure that they understand it. It offers so much to us. I’ve been doing this job for a long time, and the fact that now we have digital evidence as much as we do is vital.”

It only took two hours for the jury to convict Scott on all counts and he was sentenced to life in prison.

“When that verdict comes in, it’s such a tremendous relief,” Klein said. “It’s a tremendous sense of closure and justice for the victim’s family.”