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The neighbours downstairs first heard the noise on a Saturday afternoon in August. Bang. It echoed down from the apartment overheard on the third floor of a boxy bone-white seven-unit building in Fargo, North Dakota. Bang. Bang. Bang. It seemed to be coming from the bathtub.

The tenants below were used to the ceiling-shaking fights between the couple living upstairs – Brooke Crews and William Hoehn – so they didn’t give the sound much thought. As the neighbours would later tell a local newspaper, the ruckus continued for about 20 minutes, then they heard the shower kick on. Nothing remarkable.

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But as authorities now know, the banging upstairs coincided with the last time Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind was known to be alive.

A beautiful 22-year-old with long brown hair and bright green eyes, LaFontaine-Greywind was living with her mother, father and brother in the building’s basement apartment. It was temporary. She was about to launch a new phase of her life.

A year earlier LaFontaine-Greywind, a Native American, had moved to Fargo for a new position as a nursing assistant at a local elderly home. She had just signed a lease for a new apartment with her boyfriend of seven years, Ashton Matheny. She was due to give birth to the couple’s first child – a girl – in late September.

But LaFontaine-Greywind disappeared somewhere inside the apartment building on Aug. 21, leaving her car parked in the lot, her wallet behind, and a freshly delivered pizza cooling at home.

Days later, police would find her missing child alive inside the building, leading to more questions than answers. Eight days after she vanished, LaFontaine-Greywind’s body was discovered floating in a river six miles north of Fargo, triggering a chilling murder saga that has frayed nerves across western North Dakota and beyond.

This week authorities are a step closer to filling in the picture.

On Monday, Brooke Crews, the third-floor neighbour, pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder the soon-to-be-mom to kidnap her unborn child, the Star Tribune reported. Court documents detail how investigators narrowed their focus on the 38-year-old defendant. Her boyfriend, Hoehn, still faces criminal charges related to LaFontaine-Greywind’s death. But gaps in the timeline remain.