Psychic tips, an explosive appearance on a tabloid talkshow, two failed polygraphs,
and a suspected human trafficking ring. The mysterious disappearance of Christina
Whittaker has haunted Hannibal for more than a decade. Keep watching for the details.
On Friday the 13th of November, 2009, Christina Whittaker was last seen outside of a couple of
sports bars in Hannibal, Missouri. The night began at Rookies, located at 611 Broadway,
on the east side of town. Some accounts say she initially met her friends at the bar,
and that the evening marked the young mother's first night out since having her baby.
But things took a dramatic turn for the worse at roughly 11:45 p.m. Whittaker
allegedly got rowdy after drinking too much, and the bartender at Rookies kicked her out.
"She started getting belligerent towards me, and I told her, 'Well, we're gonna ask you to leave.'"
However, Whittaker didn't give up, and apparently reentered Rookies after being thrown out.
Bouncer Curtis Raine recalled the incident on the Discovery+ documentary "Relentless,"
revealing that two guys had allegedly come in and carried Whittaker out. Inexplicably,
her friends refused to leave with her. Whittaker found herself inebriated and alone outside on
a cold November night. Whittaker's mother, Cindy Young, claims her daughter begged the bartender to
speak to her friends, who were still inside the bar, and let them know she needed a ride home.
Young was out of town at the time of Whittaker's disappearance. Despite her pleas,
Whittaker's friends reportedly still refused to leave the bar to take her home.
Christina Whittaker headed next door to the Sportsman's Bar and then River City Billiards,
according to Jerrie Dean of Missing Persons of America. She begged people for a ride along
the way. Both acquaintances and strangers apparently refused Whittaker's request,
a strange indictment on "America's Hometown," as Hannibal is often billed.
Of course, there's no way to gauge how Whittaker really behaved that night
apart from eyewitness testimony. However, it's hard to believe that in a town of nearly
17,500 people, no-one was willing to help Whittaker get home, especially
since she started the evening in the company of so-called friends. Unable to secure a way home,
eyewitnesses reportedly last saw Whittaker sobbing and running out the back entrance of Sportsman's.
"And next thing I know, she darted out the back door, and that's the last time we all seen her."
No one has seen her in Hannibal since. Authorities later recovered her phone
just a few yards from Sportsman's, in front of an apartment complex on the 200
block of Seventh Street near Church Street. Although Whittaker's frantic night took place
at a commercial area with multiple bars, no surveillance video from that night has emerged.
Christina Whittaker didn't have proper clothing to ward off the cold of a November night.
As reported by the Charley Project, people last saw her wearing jeans,
a pink tank top, a white half-sleeve shirt, and white and pink Nikes. She stood about
5-feet 5-inches tall and weighed between 120 and 130 pounds. Whittaker had brown eyes,
red hair, and a variety of distinctive scars and tattoos, including a Care Bear
with a marijuana leaf on her ankle and a large angel with a raised middle finger on her back.
Whittaker lived with her mother in the Oakwood neighborhood,
which is roughly a six-minute drive from Rookie's or a 52-minute walk. Prior to her disappearance,
she'd been arrested for driving with a revoked license. She subsequently
missed a court date on December 18, 2009, and now has a warrant out for her arrest.
My True Crime Stories notes that Whittaker was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, anxiety attacks,
and bipolar disorder for which she took daily medication.
It's very possible that Whittaker's medication didn't mix well with the alcohol
she'd been drinking that night. It's worth noting that interactions between
bipolar medications and alcohol can prove incredibly dangerous. Very Well Mind reports,
"Alcohol abuse can complicate the management of bipolar disorder. Drinking impairs your
judgment and makes you more impulsive and increases the risk of suicide,
injury, hospitalization, and sexually transmitted infections like HIV."
At the time of her disappearance, Christina Whittaker was dating Travis Blackwell. The
Las Vegas World News reports that Blackwell received a call from Whittaker at 10:30 p.m.
on the evening in question to check in with him. Blackwell had stayed at Cindy
Young's house to babysit Whittaker's six-month-old baby girl, Alexandria.
"She did love her daughter."
Whittaker told Blackwell she had a ride home and would return around midnight
after stopping at a restaurant to pick up food for him. However, Whittaker never showed up.
On Saturday morning, Blackwell notified Young that her daughter never returned home. He stayed
with the baby until he could find another family member to watch her. For some reason,
Young waited until Sunday to file a missing person report. As the Las Vegas World News reported,
"A 21-year-old girl who is the mother of a 6-month-old baby
and who allegedly either speaks to or sees her mother daily just ups and disappears,
but she wasn't reported missing right away can [...] seem strange."
Whittaker also missed taking her medication, which meant further cause for alarm.
Cindy Young described her daughter as mentally fragile, naïve, and prone to childlike behavior,
per True Case Files. It was also suggested that Whittaker might be dealing with postpartum
depression. This characterization of Whittaker's genuine vulnerabilities only serves to underscore
her potential for endangerment. It also makes it all the more shocking that Whittaker's
friends and family waited so long to contact the police when they knew about her difficulties.
"You want to protect your kids from everything, and I can't protect her from anything."
But why wasn't an alarm raised by Saturday night when the mentally fragile woman hadn't come home?
Why didn't the friends she went out drinking with contact her to check if she was okay?
As why didn't her boyfriend, Travis Blackwell, wait up for the takeout Whittaker had promised
to bring him at midnight? The Hannibal Police Department played devil's advocate, claiming
that neither Young nor Blackwell acted outside of the norm. According to Captain Jim Hark,
"It's not uncommon to have a person gone for a day or two, but after that,
we start taking a hard look at what is going on."
However, the hours and days following Whittaker's vanishing continue to raise a lot of questions.
Eighty-two days after her disappearance, Steve Wilkos invited Whittaker's family
and friends to appear on an episode of his show titled
"Did You Kill Christina?" Many previously undisclosed details seemingly surfaced.
"I wanna find answers, I wanna know did Travis have anything to do with it?"
Whittaker's mother, Cindy Young, accused Travis Blackwell of showing no concern or emotion
following her daughter's disappearance. She stated that the 10:30 p.m. call between him and Whittaker
likely involved a heated argument. Young also claimed her caller ID showed Whittaker had called
again, and that other family members in the house heard the phone ring, but that Blackwell allegedly
refused to answer. It's unclear why Young's other family members also didn't pick up the phone.
One of Whittaker's friends even corroborated the phone call fight during her interview with
Steve Wilkos. She said Whittaker got removed from Rookie's for yelling over the phone, and claimed
that a history of extreme domestic violence existed between the two. The show culminated with
the results of Blackwell's two failed lie detector tests regarding Whittaker's disappearance.
"And the results for Travis' lie detector tests are that he did not tell the truth."
It looked like a slam-dunk case until Young rescinded everything. In a Herald-Whig interview
published after the episode aired in February 2010, she said that Blackwell would never hurt
her daughter. She also claimed he had passed a lie detector test carried out by the Hannibal
Police Department. Young even corroborated Blackwell's alibi for the evening in question.
However, Young's changing opinions only confused anyone hoping for a resolution in the case.
After announcing that Travis Blackwell wasn't involved in Christina Whittaker's disappearance,
Cindy Young's concerns grew that her daughter had fallen prey to a predator.
"Christina is childlike. She's very childlike."
According to My True Crime Stories,
within two weeks of Whittaker's disappearance, an informant gave the Hannibal Police Department
its first solid lead. The informant claimed a group of men dealing in sex work and drugs had
trafficked Whittaker to Peoria, Illinois. Young started spending time in Peoria,
questioning locals about her daughter's whereabouts, and a private investigator
also scoured the city for clues. Officer Doug Burgess of the Peoria Police Department stated,
"We do have prostitution and drug activity. As far as human trafficking,
we don't see it all that much. I've never seen it in my career here."
In an exposé of human trafficking published in Peoria Magazine in May 2018,
Carol Merna presented a different picture, explaining,
"Millions of women, men and children around the world — including here in
central Illinois — are modern-day slaves. We have seen with certainty that the inhumane
practice of human trafficking is prosperous in Peoria, Tazewell and Woodford counties."
However, it's currently unclear as to whether Whittaker was a victim of trafficking or not.
There have been several reported sightings of Christina Whittaker in Peoria, Illinois,
adding fuel to the speculation about her vanishing. It was reported that
a waitress working at a cafe near East Peoria
claimed she saw Whittaker just days after the young mother's initial disappearance.
Plus, a woman alleged that she'd spent time with Whittaker in a local mental hospital.
However, according to the Peoria Police Department,
there'd been no confirmed sightings of Whittaker in the area.
"We don't have any confirmation she is in the area."
As for a possible police sighting, the department revealed that a woman looking
similar to Whittaker had run away from a narcotics officer after he made initial
contact with her. As a result, the officer couldn't confirm the woman's identity.
Christina Whittaker left behind her daughter Alexandria, her mother Cindy Young, her family
and friends, and hundreds of unanswered questions. On the 10th anniversary of her disappearance,
KHQA interviewed Hannibal Police Department's Lt. Jennifer Grote.
Grote has handled the case from day one, and has interviewed more than 200 people in connection
with the investigation, including individuals incarcerated for other crimes. The family's DNA
is also registered through the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System,
a nationwide database where unidentified remains get matched with missing people.
"We have worked with about 45 different agencies."
About two months into the initial investigation,
the FBI even stepped in, as Grote revealed to KHQA,
"They said we had done more than what they would've done in some instances. Because some
of the leads that we follow up on are things like with psychics and just very strange and odd tips."
Users on Reddit have theorized that Whittaker could have drowned, suggesting that there's a
significant geographic detail often overlooked in articles about the missing woman. The bars
that Whittaker visited on the night of her disappearance are just half a mile
from the Mississippi River. Broadway, the street Rookie's bar sits on, dead-ends at boat slips.
The trek from Rookie's bar to the Mississippi River's banks is approximately just nine minutes.
Turning right or left could result in falling off a ledge into the river,
especially when drunk and disoriented. Currents in the river prove powerful,
making swimming to safety nearly impossible. When bodies end up in the water, accidentally
or intentionally, fast-moving currents wash them hundreds of miles or more downstream.
Others on Reddit also note the rural nature of Hannibal's setting. Had Whittaker tried to walk
home through the woods, hypothermia might have set in. Almanac reports that on November 13, 2009,
the night Whittaker disappeared, Hannibal experienced a low of 39.9 degrees Fahrenheit.
Eight years after her daughter's disappearance, Cindy Young stated she believed that Christina
Whittaker was alive and most likely the victim of human trafficking, as reported by the Hannibal
Courier-Post. In January 2021, Young discussed the trafficking narrative during a YouTube interview,
this time disclosing new details based on alleged street interviews in Peoria.
With so many twists and turns in this case,
it would be easy to assume the disappearance of Whittaker will remain unsolved. However,
a six-part Discovery+ true crime series called "Relentless" sheds new light on the case,
after filmmaker Christina Fontana spent more than 11 years investigating Whittaker's disappearance.
Fontana gathered more than 400 hours of footage from video diaries and field investigations for
"Relentless," exploring every angle from police corruption to human trafficking
to organized crime to dark family secrets.