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[Beth] Tonight, in East Tennessee,
hundreds of families are missing their loved ones.
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We are launching a new series, The Vanished,
to draw attention to those missing people.
10News reporter Katelyn Keenehan spoke with so many family members
and it's hard to imagine their pain.
[Katelyn] Dennis Martin, Mike Hearon, Summer Wells, Trenny Gibson, and Charles Toliver
are among the most well-known missing persons cases in East Tennessee.
But these five barely scratch the surface.
There are hundreds more.
And that's what this series is about.
We're going to try to find The Vanished.
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In the state of the Smokies,
more than 600 families gripped
by what the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls "the nation's silent mass disaster."
[Todd] There's a lot of missing persons in all of Tennessee and even East Tennessee.
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[Katelyn] Nobody navigates the missing persons scope quite like Todd Matthews.
He served as the former director of the National Missing Persons Database,
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also called NAMUS.
[Todd] I was help to develop that project
and I still work very deeply with missing and unidentified persons in Tennessee and beyond.
[Katelyn] The database carries information for more than 22,000 missing people across the United States,
including those close to home.
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There are 161 missing people in East Tennessee, according to NAMUS.
And this map shows the spread of those folks.
Many of those cases are congregated in Knox County,
likely because it's the most populated on this side of the state.
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Nearly one-third of the missing people in Tennessee are younger than 18.
55% are men, 45% are women.
But behind each of these pins is a person
with family and friends who don't have answers.
[Todd] So in my experience, missing can be worse than dead.
[Katelyn] That's the case for the Hearons.
[Andy] It's a lot.
[Katelyn] 14 years ago their dad, Mike, vanished.
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Nobody knows why.
Nobody.
[Andy] The first year, it was really rough, the first year or two even.
Just, you know, some depression, some...
your mind's just going over so many different things
and you have so many questions that you just want answered.
[Katelyn] It's the same trauma for Byron Edwards' family.
His baby girl, Blessing, is growing up without a dad.
[Marilyn] Most importantly of all, Blessing needs her father.
You know, going through this rough time of healing,
it can bring her so much comfort and peace
to be held in her father's arm.
Every child should know their father.
[Katelyn] Those stories stick with you,
just ask Todd Matthews.
[Todd] You live through some of this with some of the families.
It hurts; you hurt when they hurt.
You cry when they cry, you really do.
And it's...
it's just not possible to separate yourself.
I mean, what kind of human would you be if you could just say, "It's just work?"
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[Katelyn] Every day, moms, dads, sisters, brothers are left wondering.
[Todd] As humans we can accept death, we can.
But to not have a body at all,
it's almost impossible for a family to reconcile and actually move forward.
So that's really horrible.
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[Beth] If you are missing a loved one, we want to help you get the word out.
We want to help you get them into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
You can text us at 865-637-1010
or visit our website WBIR.com
for a full list of East Tennessee's missing people.