Post by LadyBlue on Nov 19, 2007 21:00:33 GMT -5
Two women who vanished nearly a decade apart may be linked together. There are several similarities in the two disappearances, and police say the same man is considered a person of interest in both cases.
On the evening of March 9, 2007, Jamie Harper, 20, left her mother's house with a male companion and traveled to a party in Rantoul. She left the party the following morning, and no one has seen her since. Jamie's mother, Susan Kehrer, reported her missing the following week.
"Her friend was supposed to bring her home the day after the party, but he never did," Susan said in a telephone interview with Crime Library yesterday afternoon. "I waited to report her missing because there were times in the past where she stayed out for a couple days."
Susan was reluctant to give any further details about her daughter's case, for fear of saying something that could jeopardize the investigation. Before she hung up, she had this to say: "I don't think I should say anything else without talking to the police. I am still hoping she ran off."
Not long after her disappearance, police received a tip from an anonymous caller that Jamie had overdosed, and her body had been disposed of in an area southeast of Paxton known as Dogtown. The location is well known to veteran investigators. It has been the site of numerous missing persons searches over the years and, in 1984, they discovered the body of Cindy Mizell, 24, in the woods surrounding Dogtown. Her former husband, Kenneth Mizell, then 27, and his wife, Diana, 30, were later convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. For their crimes, they were sentenced to six years in prison.
jamieharper.org/