'She Knew He Was Watching Her': After Teen Goes Missing, Focus Turns to Stepdad's Home Surveillance Cameras

The stepfather “exhibited an apparent obsession” with 17-year-old Alissa Turney before she went missing in 2001, police alleged in documents related to her disappearance. 

There were the binoculars Michael Turney allegedly admitted to police he used to spy on his stepdaughter at work. There were the homemade contracts written between them — including one declaring that Michael had never molested Alissa, who he'd gone on to adopt. There were the surveillance cameras scattered inside their Phoenix, Ariz., home — and the cameras are the focus of tonight's episode of 20/20 focused on Alissa's still-unsolved disappearance, airing from 9:01 to 11 p.m. ET on ABC and tomorrow on Hulu. (An exclusive clip is shown below.)

The cameras inside the home, including one placed inside a vent in the hallway, gave Turney almost unlimited access to his stepdaughter, enabling him to allegedly have “control over her, watching almost everything she would do,” Alissa's boyfriend, Jon Laakman, told police in footage acquired by 20/20 and shared exclusively with PEOPLE. “She knew he was watching her,” the boyfriend added.

The 20/20 episode dives into the recent twists and turns of the case — complete with a false confession from a serial killer, the discovery of pipe bombs in the family home, and, finally, the dismissal of charges against Turney in July. (Alissa is presumed dead, but her body has never been found.)

Each of Turney’s five other children have said they believe he is responsible for the disappearance of their sister. Most vocal among them is Alissa’s half-sister, Sarah Turney, whose viral TikTok videos, which were viewed by tens of millions of people, were part of a campaign she launched at the behest of detectives, who urged her to get more attention on Alissa’s cold case. Her online petition got nearly 300,000 supporters urging a murder trial against her father, which took place in July 2023 and did not result in the outcome she was hoping for. She also created a podcast “Voices for Justice” about her sister’s case.

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE's free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.

At first Sarah hadn’t believed her father could be capable of murdering her sister. But, "for me, it was kind of like a switch," Sarah previously told PEOPLE in an interview following her father’s arrest. 

Believing him to be the reason her sister is “gone forever,” she campaigned to get her father behind bars, even secretly recording a 2017 meeting with him in which she urged him to tell her what really happened to Alissa.

"Be there at the deathbed, Sarah," Turney told his daughter in the recording. "I will give you all the honest answers you want to hear." 

With renewed interest in the case, stemming from Sarah’s social media campaign, and helped along by Sarah's audio recording, Turney was arrested and indicted by a grand jury, charged with Alissa’s murder in the second degree in August 2020. 

But the case was dismissed against Turney, his lawyers successfully arguing that the state had no physical evidence that Alissa was dead — or that Turney had killed her.

In an interview with 20/20, Turney said that “the videos are recorded because I love my family, those are home videos that I've recorded since I can remember.”

When pressed about the security cameras stashed throughout his house, Turney said that “most of it’s for security.” He added sarcastically: “Why, because I want to spy on everybody?” He turned his head away and laughed.

20/20 airs tonight from 9:01 to 11 p.m. ET on ABC and tomorrow on Hulu.