Jacob Block pleaded guilty to two felonies tied to the concealment of Abbi Schaeffer’s body, while a separate federal fentanyl sentence and an open co-defendant case continue to shape the broader investigation.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Missouri man has been sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to hiding the body of 22-year-old Abbi Schaeffer, a Kansas City woman who vanished in 2022 and was later found in a broken box in a roadside ditch.
The sentence closes one part of a case that has moved in pieces through state and federal court for nearly four years. Jacob Block admitted guilt to accessory abandonment of a corpse and accessory tampering with physical evidence, charges that focused on what happened after Schaeffer died, not on causing her death. That distinction matters because investigators have said the condition of her remains prevented a definitive ruling on how she died, even as testing found fentanyl in her system and messages examined by police suggested she overdosed.
Investigators traced Schaeffer’s last known movements through family video and phone-location data. Her family later told police they saw her leave home on May 23, 2022, get into a gray BMW and head away with her cat. The family reported her missing on May 30 after not hearing from her for days. Police later learned that her Life360 app had stopped at a Jackson County residence. Surveillance video reviewed during the investigation showed Schaeffer and Block entering that home together the night she disappeared. Detectives said cameras never showed her leaving. That gap became one of the central facts in the case. It marked the last confirmed sighting of Schaeffer alive and shifted the investigation from a missing-person search to a close review of what had happened inside the home over the following days.
According to court records summarized by local news outlets, the video trail did not stop there. Detectives said Block and Eunice Carlo-Martinez, who also has been charged, were seen going in and out of the house several times after Schaeffer disappeared. At one point, prosecutors said, Carlo-Martinez moved mops and buckets away from a sliding glass door. She also was accused of pulling a power cord that shut off one of the cameras for about 45 minutes before it came back on. On May 26, according to investigators, Block and Carlo-Martinez loaded a large black box-like object into a U-Haul parked outside the residence. That detail later took on major importance. Nearly a year later, on April 1, 2023, skeletal remains were found in a broken box in a ditch near East 95th Street and Blue River Road in south Kansas City. The remains were identified days later as Schaeffer’s.
The forensic record answered some questions and left others open. Authorities said brain matter recovered from the remains tested positive for fentanyl. Public reporting also said THC and benzoylecgonine, a cocaine metabolite, were detected. But the remains were too decomposed for the medical examiner to determine a precise cause of death, and investigators have said other manners of death could not be excluded. That uncertainty has shaped the legal posture of the case from the start. Rather than charging Block with homicide in the state case, prosecutors charged him with abandoning the corpse and tampering with evidence. The Jackson County complaint said the alleged concealment happened between May 23 and May 30, 2022, and that the body was disposed of near 95th Street and Blue River Road without being reported to law enforcement. A second count alleged the body was concealed in order to impair a felony homicide investigation.
Block’s guilty plea led to a sentence of three years on each state count, with the terms running consecutively for a total of six years. The sentence is significant on its own, but it is only one part of his legal exposure. In federal court, Block had already been sentenced in January 2025 to 20 years in prison without parole for his role in a fentanyl trafficking conspiracy that resulted in another person’s overdose death in 2020. Federal prosecutors said he admitted distributing fentanyl, including counterfeit M-30 pills, and selling powder fentanyl repeatedly over a period of months. The victim in that federal overdose case was not identified in court documents. Public reporting on the Schaeffer case has noted the overlap in timing between the state charges and the federal drug sentence, but it has not clearly stated whether the new six-year state sentence will run at the same time as the federal term or begin afterward. That question may be settled only through later court paperwork.
The case against Carlo-Martinez remains open, which means the Schaeffer investigation is not fully over even after Block’s plea and sentence. Jackson County prosecutors charged her with the same two felonies in January 2025. The charging document filed in her case says a defendant acting alone or with another knowingly disposed of Schaeffer’s corpse and suppressed or concealed it in a way that obstructed the prosecution or defense of a felony homicide. Publicly available reports have not listed a next court date for Carlo-Martinez, and no trial result has been reported. That leaves a central part of the case still unresolved. It also means some evidence that could eventually become public in her case may remain sealed, disputed or incomplete for now. As a result, the record still does not fully explain what happened inside the residence before the cleanup efforts seen on camera.
For Schaeffer’s family, the case has long been about more than the wording of charges. Her relatives spent months searching for answers after she vanished. After her remains were found, family members returned to the ditch where the box had been discovered and began cleaning trash from the area. Audrey Davis, Schaeffer’s older sister, said the family wanted people to see “how beautiful Abbi is” and know she was loved. That act of cleanup became one of the most visible public responses to the case, turning a discarded roadside patch into a place of mourning and memory. It also underscored the emotional split that has followed the case from the beginning. The court files describe surveillance footage, phone data, mops, buckets and a moving truck. Her family has spoken in a very different language, one centered on loss, dignity and the effort to reclaim a place tied to the end of her life.
As the case stands now, Block has admitted to helping conceal Schaeffer’s body and has been sentenced for that conduct, but the public record still stops short of a full account of how she died. Investigators have pointed to fentanyl, digital messages and suspicious movements caught on camera. Even so, no murder conviction has been announced, no official cause of death has been fixed in court and a related case against Carlo-Martinez is still pending. Those unresolved points are likely to remain the next major markers in a case that began with a young woman walking into a house and not being seen alive again.
Author note: Last updated April 20, 2026.