Hello and welcome to Missing Persons Mysteries!
And thanks for joining us for Episode #1 of our new series Missing in America.
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While the statistics are constantly changing as to how many people are
missing at any given time in the United States, that’s sometimes a good thing
because a lot of the time these types of cases are solved relatively quickly.
There are, however, those cases, just like with anywhere else in the world
where there is never a resolution, and the friends and loved ones of the
vanished person are left with nothing but their own thoughts of the horror
their loved ones could have possibly suffered at the hands of someone else.
Even without the element of possibly knowing your loved one has been involved in some kind
of abduction, there is the never-ending torture of not knowing where they are,
what they’re doing or even if they’re still alive.
We have decided to go state by state, in the United States and find some of
the most intriguing and strange cases of the disappearances of missing people in each state.
We are starting with Alabama and will work our way through
the list from there. Let’s take a look.
1. Sherry Lynn Marler
The morning of June 6, 1984 was just like any other morning for
the String fellow family on their farm in Greenville, Alabama.
Greenville is the county seat of Butler County and
in 1984 it had approximately 7,600 people residing in it.
Since it petitioned for the Camellia to become the state flower of Alabama in 1959,
Greenville was also known as Camellia City.
Back in the early eighties, you’d be hard-pressed to find another
small town that felt as safe as Greenville.
It was a town full of people who all seemed to care for and look
out for one another and not a single resident had any idea of the horrible
ordeal that awaited the Stringfellow family on the morning of June 6th.
Betty, the matriarch of the family, woke up early at around 7 o’clock in the morning in
order to make sure she was on time for her breakfast shift at the local Waffle House.
She got herself ready for work and quietly left the house without waking her daughter, Sherry, up.
Sherry was sleeping on the living room couch that morning because she had been kind enough to give
her bed and bedroom up to a visiting relative, her stepfather’s aunt, who was visiting for the week.
When Sherry finally woke up about two hours later, at approximately 9am, she noticed that
her stepfather Raymond was backing his red pickup truck out of the family’s driveway.
Sherry wanted to go with him and so she grabbed her shoes and ran outside
barefooted in order to ask him if she could take the trip into town with him.
Raymond agreed and the pair headed out to run his errands for the day.
At around 9:30 they stopped at the First National Bank so he could drop off some papers to them.
Before he could go and do that though, Sherry told him she was thirsty.
Raymond gave his stepdaughter a dollar and told her to go across
the street to the Chevron gas station and get herself a soda.
There was no reason for either of them to believe that this was unsafe in any
way and Sherry gratefully accepted the money and they both went about their separate ways.
They had agreed they would both do what they needed to
do and meet back at the truck a few minutes later.
On her way to the gas station Sherry would have had to have crossed a parking lot where
there was a furniture store called Jernigan's Furniture and the General telephone building.
Witnesses would later come forward to say
that they had seen Sherry at this time crossing that parking lot.
When Raymond came back out to his truck 15 minutes later after finishing his business at the bank,
he was very surprised that Sherry wasn’t there in the truck waiting for him already.
He waited another 25 more minutes for her but then could no longer control the panic rising inside of
him and called his wife, Sherry’s mother, at the Waffle House and asked if she had seen Sherry.
He was thinking that maybe the young girl had
taken the walk to her mom’s job in order to surprise her and say hello.
Maybe she figured, thought Raymond, that he was going to be a lot longer than he was in the bank.
Betty said she hadn’t seen her daughter since she
left the house that morning when she was still asleep on the couch.
Raymond went and checked the gas station where he had initially sent the girl to
get herself a soda but she wasn’t there either.
He asked around in all of the neighboring stores in the area,
such as the feed store and the tractor shop.
The family called Sherry by the nickname “Little Farmer” because
she loved everything having to do with farming, including hanging out in the
previously mentioned two stores for no reason at all other than to see how everything worked.
However, this was also a dead end and no one had seen Sherry that day.
At 11:46 am Sherry was finally reported as missing.
Immediately a massive search effort was in place and volunteers were
scouring the surrounding areas to where Sherry had last been seen.
Crenshaw Flying Service even conducted an aerial search while family, friends,
and other volunteers printed and handed out flyers in the surrounding areas.
All of Sherry’s relatives, including her biological father and the man she was last
seen with, her stepfather Raymond, were investigated and ruled out as suspects.
A few weeks later some interesting information was reported.
Three separate witnesses had all come forward and reported seeing Sherry in
the area of Betaw Road in St. Stephen, Alabama.
Each time she was described as being accompanied by a man in his fifties,
who had a husky build and stood at approximately 5 feet 8 inches tall.
The man was said to have had a weathered complexion and wrinkles around his eyes.
Another witness said that he had seen the pair at a truck stop in Conley,
Georgia and all of these witnesses described the
twelve-year-old girl as being noticeably upset, disheveled, and seemingly dazed.
She was heard referring to the man she was with as BJ.
Sometime later that same year, the final sighting of Sherry was said to be in a mall in Louisiana.
None of the sightings have ever been confirmed
however and it’s still unknown if any of these sightings were actually of Sherry.
Back in 1984, she was described as being a tomboy who knew how to ride a tractor and loved farming.
Her mother never believed she ran away voluntarily
and the case is classified as a non-family abduction.
She’s said to have had no significant issues in her life and was looking
forward to visiting her grandmother later on in the day when she vanished.
Sherry Lynn Marler was twelve years old at the
time of her disappearance and today she would be almost 52 years old.
She was a Caucasian female with brown hair and brown eyes.
Her birthdate is August 18, 1971,
and she stood at 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed approximately 120 pounds.
She was last seen wearing a long-sleeved, red flannel work shirt, jeans that were faded,
brand-new gray sneakers with velcro instead of shoelaces, and a watch with a black band.
Sherry has a two-inch scar on her abdomen and a wide,
one-inch scar on her upper back near her shoulder.
At the time of her disappearance in 1984 she
still had some baby teeth but also some adult teeth as well.
She had two fillings as well.
Sherry’s hair was longer than shoulder length at the time of her disappearance.
No further evidence or clues have ever been uncovered in the disappearance and
the investigating agency is still the Greenville Police Department.
Anyone with any information, no matter how small or insignificant you think
it might be, is encouraged to contact them at 334-382-7461.
It’s important to understand that this abduction, if that's in fact what it was,
took place in broad daylight in the middle of a crowded intersection.
Could Sherry have simply ceased to exist as we have seen in so many cases on this channel or is
it more likely she was a victim of opportunity for some passing unknown criminal with bad intentions?
How could there have been no witnesses to her being dragged into a vehicle?
She hadn’t even been seen speaking to anyone and there were so many eyes everywhere and
so many potential witnesses which is why this case is so overwhelmingly mysterious
and why we hope anyone with information will do the right thing and come forward.
Maybe now enough time has passed and her family
can finally have some sort of closure- whatever that means.
2. Daniel Barter
Daniel Barter was born on December 12, 1954, to his mother Maxine, and his father Paul.
He was affectionately called Danny by his family
and friends and was the third youngest of seven children.
His mother described him as “a sweet and pretty kid” and everyone who knew him loved him.
On June 17, 1959, when he was just 4 years old,
Danny had gone camping with his parents, one of his uncles, three siblings, and two cousins.
The rest of his siblings stayed behind with other relatives.
Danny and his family who were with him went on a trip to Perdido Bay which is
located near Lillian, Alabama, and about an hour’s drive from the Barter’s home.
Once they arrived there and reached the bay’s eastern shore,
the children stayed the night together in their uncle’s vehicle.
The next morning on June 18th,
Daniel went with his father to a nearby store to purchase drinks for the family.
He was barefoot and still wearing the boxer shorts he had slept in the previous night.
Once they got back to the campsite,
while the adults were preparing things for all of them to head out on a fishing trip,
Danny is said to have wandered off and was last seen playing on the banks of the bay.
He had a bottle of Nehi brand soda in his hand and that was the last time he was ever seen.
His mother Maxine searched everywhere for him for
ten to fifteen minutes immediately after she realized he was missing
and no one had seen him for a while but she was unable to locate him anywhere.
Authorities initially suspected that the four-year-old had been eaten by one
of the alligators that infested the swampy area where he was last known to have been.
They even cut open and gutted two alligators in search of any human remains but found nothing.
They not only didn’t find remains inside the animals but they found no
evidence otherwise of animal predation or attack.
There was no blood ever found and nothing else
to ever indicate where young Daniel could have gone off to.
Extensive searches of both the land and the water
in the region were searched but also turned up nothing.
The Nehi bottle he had been drinking from was never found
and the bloodhounds who were sent to search the area also turned
up nothing useful as far as figuring out what became of 4-year-old Danny.
Maxine Barter insisted that her son would never have entered the
bay voluntarily nor gotten close enough to it to have accidentally fallen in.
The little boy was said to have been afraid of the water and
didn’t go anywhere near it unless being held by one of his parents.
Even then it was a challenge to get him to relax and enjoy the water.
The bay was also shallow enough at the time that someone was said to
have been able to walk a considerable distance without even getting very wet.
His family also never believed that he would have gone into the undergrowth
surrounding the bay because it was extremely thick and prickly.
He had been barefooted that entire day and had only been wearing boxer shorts.
Once the initial extensive search had concluded, it was announced by the
investigators that they agreed with the family in that they didn’t think that Daniel had gone
either into the bay itself or wandered into the undergrowth that surrounded it.
They also were confident there was no animal attack or predation of any kind.
There simply would have been clues or evidence- something- left behind.
They were also never able to uncover any clues or
evidence that would allude to Daniel having been abducted.
They did look into the theory though but the Barter’s weren’t wealthy by any stretch
of the imagination and no communications from any alleged kidnappers ever came in.
A motive of ransom was very unlikely.
About a month before his disappearance, Daniel’s mother saw a mysterious and
strange vehicle parked directly in front of the family’s home in Mobile.
She approached the car and when she did the driver immediately seemed to cover
up his face by holding a newspaper up in front of it and quickly speeding away.
Not long after this odd encounter with the strange man in front of the home,
a neighbor claimed to have seen a strange man staring into the bedroom
at the Barter home where Danny and some of his siblings slept.
The children were asleep when the neighbor had seen him and this is known because the
neighbor immediately went and told Maxine but by the time the two of
them went to the spot where the man had been standing, no one was there anymore.
Though the man was gone, his footprints remained there under the kid’s window.
The police were called and immediately took a report.
They snapped photos of the footprints and even took casts of them.
It’s unknown whether or not the evidence still exists in this case
or if any of it is even connected to Daniel’s eventual disappearance.
The incidents that happened previously to him disappearing, with them just having
happened weeks before the boy was never seen again, led most people - including
Daniel’s family - that he had been kidnapped by someone who had been stalking the family.
It’s unknown whether or not the perpetrator was
stalking Danny specifically or any one of the seven Barter children.
His case has since been reopened, nearly fifty years after he had initially disappeared but
almost all of the original investigative files were lost or destroyed and most,
if not all, of the evidence had gone missing or was destroyed as well.
Daniel’s father died in 1965 and his mother passed away thirty years later in 1995,
neither even having the knowledge of what became of their precious son.
The rest of Daniel’s siblings, aside from one who
was born after he disappeared who died in 1997 as a result of cancer,
are alive and still keep hope alive that perhaps one day they will finally receive some answers.
Daniel was born on December 12, 1954, and would be 68 years old at the time of this video.
His case is classified as a non-family abduction.
He is a Caucasian male who was four years old when he went missing.
He stood at exactly 3 feet tall and weighed approximately 50 pounds.
He was wearing nothing but gray boxer shorts
the last time he was seen and had brown hair and brown eyes.
He has scars on his finger and a scar on his tongue.
Anyone with any information on this cold case should contact the
Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office at 251-972-8589.
3. Kimberly Arrington
On October 30th, 1998 16-year-old Kimberly Arrington said goodbye to
her mother at around 5 pm as she left her home in Montgomery, Alabama to go
to the CVS on the corner of Third Street and Forest Avenue to pick up some soda and candy.
The CVS was a very short walk and one Kimberly had taken many times.
This time though, she never returned home.
Kimberly’s family went out and looked for her for several hours and when they couldn’t
locate any sign of her, they contacted the authorities and reported her as missing.
Kimberly was described as friendly and well-behaved and not as someone who
would have had any reason or desire to run away from home voluntarily.
On the day of her disappearance, she had spoken to
her father about her plans to do some Christmas shopping later in the day.
That was the last time he ever heard from his daughter.
Because of her age, the authorities originally investigated Kimberly’s disappearance as a runaway
but they very quickly realized she was more than likely abducted and taken against her will.
However, many sources say that the situation and circumstances
surrounding her disappearance are still very unclear, even all of these years later.
There are no known witnesses who ever came forward saying whether
or not they saw her at CVS or on her way there but there is also
no evidence whatsoever of any type of foul play having taken place.
Though her mother passed away in 2005, her father is still alive and
still actively searching for answers as to what happened to his daughter.
Kimberly will be 41 years old in May of this year 2023 and is described
as an African American female with black hair and brown eyes.
She stood between 5 feet 2 inches and 5 feet 4 inches
tall at the time of her disappearance and weighed approximately 110 pounds.
She was last seen wearing a gray Bugle Boy brand shirt with a collar and light blue Levi’s jeans.
She had on white Reebok sneakers with gray trim,
an emerald ring with two diamonds on each side, and a double heart ring set with a diamond.
Because she suffered from very severe allergies, at the time of her disappearance it’s been
said that Kimberly actually preferred to stay indoors and she didn’t go out much.
Kimberly Arrington has a small surgical scar on the
left side of her abdomen and she has pierced ears.
Her nicknames are Kiwi and Kim.
She is classified as an endangered missing child/person.
Anyone with any information on the whereabouts of
Kimberly Arrington or what became of her are urged to contact the
Montgomery Police Department at 334-241-2790.
What do you think of these bizarre cases?
Be sure to let us know in the comments down below!
But please given the nature of our content, keep it both friendly and respectful!
I'm your host Bob and I will see you in our next video!