On June 13, 2008, 59-year-old Donna Barnhardt, who worked as an office manager at the Sun-Drop Bottling Company in Concord, North Carolina, was preparing to leave work early to travel to Myrtle Beach for a family vacation. Sun-Drop company president John King, his wife Connie, and their daughter were also on vacation at Oak Island in North Carolina. John was surprised that day to receive a call from another employee at the company asking...
On May 25, 1989, 10-year-old Cora Hamby left her family’s residence and walked to a nearby Food Lion grocery store in the Southland Shopping Center on Shelton Avenue in Statesville. It was 8 p.m., and the sun had not yet set. Once at the store Cora used a pay phone to call and ask her older sister what kind of candy she wanted. Cora, who stood around five feet, one inch tall and weighed 87 pounds, had long, dark brown hair and blue-green...
One of North Carolina’s oldest missing persons cases involves a 36-year-old mother and her 4-year-old daughter who disappeared from Carolina Beach, and their extended family has been searching for answers for years. They thought the mystery might have been solved in 2008, but unfortunately, that also turned out to be a dead end. Leila Lewis was working as a nurse in Wilmington when she met a man named Edis Bryan, also known as E.C., who had...
Thirty-year-old Norsaadah Husain, a graduate student from Malaysia, was working on a doctorate degree in food technology from Clemson University. She lived alone in a small mobile home not far from the campus. She was scheduled to finish her degree in May 1993 and planned to return home to Malaysia to teach at a local university there. Norsaadah had been planning to speak at a national meeting of food scientists about her process for removing...
On March 18, 2012, a man named Robert McCaffrey, who went by Bob, called police from his West Ashley home near Charleston, South Carolina, to report his wife missing around 5 p.m. He said the two had gone out to dinner the day before around 2:30 p.m. When they returned home, they got into an argument. When Gayle refused to speak with him, he got into his truck and drove four hours away to Easley, South Carolina. He drove back in the early...
On April 26, 2005, police in Durham, North Carolina responded to a home 2606 Ferrand Drive, after receiving a frantic phone call around 10 p.m. Twenty-five-year-old Raven Abaroa had returned home from a soccer game to find his wife, Janet, deceased in their home. He told police at first he thought she’d been shot because there was so much blood around her body. She was lying on her back in an upstairs bedroom when police arrived on the scene....
In Episode 149, I shared the story of Phonesia Machado-Fore, who was a 52-year-old mother and grandmother from Pee Dee, South Carolina when she went missing in March of 2024. She had worked as a paramedic for Florence County EMS since 2017, and her EMS director described as being very happy-go-lucky. He said that “She was always around, always had a smile, and just loved her job and loved people.” Phonesia had recently accepted a job in...
In March of 1987, 29-year-old Jimmy Dale Whitfield disappeared from Seneca, South Carolina. At the time, he was living with his wife Wanda and their two children off Route 3, which is now Whitfield Lane. Here’s a little more about Jimmy. He was born on March 28, 1957, to Selena and Fred Whitfield. Fred passed away in 1977. Jimmy was a smoker, had no criminal record, and considered himself a man of faith. He married Wanda Gail George in the...
On June15, 2004, a prisoner went missing from the Brown Creek Correctional Institution in Anson County. Local media reported the prisoner, 32-year-old Jeffrey Manchester, likely escaped the grounds by hanging on to the undercarriage of a truck as it was leaving the prison’s metal plant. Manchester had been assigned to work in the plant, which made prison beds and footlockers. Corrections Administrator Rick Jackson said the supply truck had...
The week after Thanksgiving in 2006, friends and family of 27-year-old Sherri Jackson were concerned. She didn’t attend a party she’d RSVP’d for and no one had heard from her. They knew she wouldn’t leave town without telling anyone or notifying her job. Sherri failed to pick up her paycheck from Shipman Family Care the week after Thanksgiving. This was when Sherri’s family knew for certain that something was wrong. Sherri was born in...
