It was 21st-Century technology — a surveillance camera on a country road about five miles east of Lancaster — that may have captured the moment when an 18-year-old Amish woman encountered the person on June 21 that police say is responsible for her disappearance.

But it took some instances of good old-fashioned community concern to help police officers understand exactly what needle they were looking for, and in which haystack, that ultimately led them to charge Justo Smoker, 34, of Paradise Township, with the disappearance of Linda Stoltzfoos this weekend.

Searches are still underway for Stoltzfoos, though police have recovered several articles of clothing that they believe she was wearing on the date of her disappearance.

That video — described by police as “not viewable” when they first retrieved it but eventually recovered and enhanced with the help of Federal Bureau of Investigation lab experts — on Friday showed the moment that one person walking south on Beechdale Road was approached by a second person coming from across the road at 12:42 p.m.

It was a time when Stoltzfoos, according to witnesses at her church, had said she was headed home to change clothes for a day-long youth group meeting starting later that afternoon. The walk has been measured by police to be slightly more than nine-tenths of a mile. She hasn’t been heard from since.

The two people on the video, police said, can be seen walking back across Beechdale Road out of view of the camera. Then, moments later, a car described as a red four-door Kia Rio with black trim and a rear spoiler, is seen driving by the camera’s location from the area where the two subjects had walked.

Police believe the car was pulled off on a farm lane, just out of the camera’s view.

As police have knitted it together now, that 34-second encounter on Beechdale Road in Upper Leacock Township — the same road that Stoltzfoos lived on with her family — may have been the kidnapping for which Smoker is now being held in Lancaster County Prison.

Police knew they needed to focus on that red Kia because of two separate accounts they had received on June 29, eight days after Stoltzfoos’s disappearance, of a red sedan seen traveling in the Gap area — about a 15-minute drive from the abduction site — with a white male driver and an Amish woman in the front passenger seat on the afternoon of June 21.

The witnesses’ stories, recounted in Smoker’s criminal complaint, were at once independent and consistent.

At about 1:30 p.m. on June 21, police said, husband and wife Sarah and Isaac Stoltzfus were walking on Amish Road, when the car passed them.

Three things stood out:

• First that an Amish women in “church clothes” would be traveling in a car at all. Stoltzfoos, wore a tan dress with a white apron and white cap to church that day, according to the missing persons flyers posted on her behalf;
• That the woman wore a white apron, but also black head covering, something that is not a part of the tradition of the churches in the area;
• And finally, that the woman in the passenger seat did not exchange a wave when they passed by, a breach of Amish custom.

Sarah Stoltzfus had come to believe that the woman she saw that day — who passed within several feet of her — was the missing 18-year-old. Isaac saw the driver, and described him as a white male with black hair and a mustache.

On the same day, police interviewed Gideon King III, who reported passing a similar red, four-door on Amish Road about the same time. He too, saw a female passenger with a white apron and black head covering, and said he thought it strange to see a plain woman in a car in her church clothes.

By this point, the red car was a clearly a vehicle of interest, but it would take one more witness and the video to tie that vehicle in Gap more directly to the girl’s disappearance.

Both came through, according to police records filed with Smoker’s arrest, on Wednesday, July 8. That’s when police got their first view of the video images from a camera on Beechdale Road, where the Stoltzfoos family lives, and pulled images of a red car passing the camera at 12:42 p.m.

They also spoke to a third witness, a man named Isaac Esh, who told them he saw a red sedan traveling east on Stumptown Road — the road where Linda Stoltzfoos’s church is — between 12:30 p.m. and 12:45 p.m. on June 21. Esh, who was sitting on his front porch, noted the car in part because the driver stopped and turned around to head back west on Stumptown in the direction of the church.

This was around the time witnesses said Linda Stoltzfoos was making her nine-tenths of a mile walk home from church. Police knew that she likely stayed on the roads because of a bending creek that cuts across between the church and Stoltzfoos’s property.

Esh described the driver as a white male with dark hair, possibly Hispanic. He was alone in the car at that time. When police showed him images of the car pulled from the camera on Beechdale Road, Esh said he was “75 percent sure” it was the same.

After further review of their video that same day, detectives identified the car in the Beechdale Road video as a red Kia Rio from 2005-2010, with a spoiler on the trunk. It’s not clear from the arrest records if the license plate was captured by the camera. Even so, within hours, police had scored a hit on Smoker’s registration.

After a day of background checks and surveillance — Smoker was a onetime Pequea Valley High School wrestling star who, in 2006, was charged and convicted in a string of armed robberies in Lancaster County and sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in state prison — investigators went to see him on July 9.

Smoker denied being in the area of Linda Stoltzfoos’s disappearance on June 21, but he didn’t know that police were already running down another lead associated with his car.

Turns out that on Tuesday, June 23, another person had called police about a suspicious vehicle in a business lot at 3104 Harvest Drive, near the village of Ronks, about 5 p.m. and someone looking in windows and doors as if to see if there was anyone there. The driver left, but returned later that evening.

This site is about three miles away from the Stoltzfoos home.

The car in question had left before Pennsylvania State Police answered that call, but the caller had taken the license plate: It matched Smoker’s car. Police noted the caller also took photos of the inside of the vehicle, though arrest records did not state what they showed.

It’s also not immediately clear when police linked that call to Stoltzfoos’s disappearance.

On Friday, FBI agents assisting in the Stoltzfoos case established through cell phone records that Smoker’s phone was in the general area of 3104 Harvest on June 21, between 2:32 p.m. and 3:35 p.m. – the same afternoon as Stoltzfoos’s disappearance. A search of a wooded area to the rear of the property found a bra and stockings that Stoltzfoos’s family identified as similar to what Linda would have worn to church that day.

Police took Smoker into custody later that night on charges of kidnapping and false imprisonment, and the arrest was announced on Saturday.

The investigation is continuing, and anyone who may have pertinent information is asked to contact East Lampeter Township police at 717-291-4676.