Tammy Kingery

On the morning of September 20, 2014, Tammy Kingery (born April 13, 1977), a nurse in South Carolina, called her husband Park from work and asked him to take her home as she was not feeling well. He did, and afterwards went to run some errands with his two sons. When they returned, the house was locked and Tammy was not there. A note inside the house, apparently left by Tammy, said she was going for a walk and would be back soon, but she never returned and has not been seen since.

Tammy's family said it would have been unusual for her to leave a note, or walk in the woods near their North Augusta home. In the house, she had left her purse, phone, and keys, which would have been needed to lock the door. An extensive search of the area around the house turned up no sign of her.

Investigation by local police revealed that she had been exchanging texts with two men in the area, but police do not believe that is related to her disappearance. She had suffered depression.

Background Kingery, a native of Northwest Indiana, met her husband Park Kingery there in the mid-1990s when the two worked together at a local drugstore. On September 20, 1994, the two were engaged. After their marriage, the couple had three children and settled down in a house they built in a wooded area of Edgefield County, South Carolina, just north of North Augusta, near where Park Kingery had gotten a job as a welder. After finishing a degree in nursing in 2001, Tammy took a job as a nurse in a local branch of the NHC Healthcare nursing home. She was still working there in September 2014. While her father, who still lived in Indiana, says he was not aware of any marital or psychological issues his daughter may have had at that time, her mother says the couple had grown distant from each other since their youngest son was born and had considered divorce.

During the first weeks of September, Tammy seemed to be suffering physically—according to Park she had missed a few days of work, which was unlike her. She often went to bed shortly after returning from work. Park says Tammy believed no treatment would work.

Disappearance On the morning of September 20, 2014, Tammy went to work her shift starting at 7 a.m. Her coworkers there say she was agitated about something, uncharacteristically raising her voice in conversation, and checked her own blood pressure four times, finding it high. They urged her to calm down as her agitation was keeping her heart rate high. Around 10, he left with the couple's two sons to do some errands and give his wife the chance to rest. Their daughter was still at the house of a friend with whom she had spent the preceding night. but that was later corrected as the backpack had been sold a week before at a yard sale. Her purse, wallet, cell phone, and keys were still inside the house.

When he saw the note, Kingery believed right away that something was wrong,

Searches and investigation Deputies from the Edgefield County Sheriff's Office responded. They, too, attempted to locate Tammy nearby but could not. Then they searched the house for any signs that a crime might have been committed; there was nothing unusual. Search dogs were given the nursing scrubs Tammy had worn to her job that morning but did not find a trail anywhere. A local police dog handler said in 2023 that while heat can make searches for human bodies challenging, it would also have made it easier for dogs to smell a decomposing body from some distance away.

Park, who had personally traveled as far as Atlanta looking for his wife,

Deep in the woods near the house, the volunteer searchers caught the scent of something that they thought was a corpse. They followed it to an abandoned wooden shack, in an area thick with briars. Inside they found sponges, gloves, and a plastic bag containing a dead dog, the source of the stench. While many of them believe the shed may have some connection to Tammy's disappearance, the sheriff's office had checked it on their original search and contend that it does not.

However, some of the volunteers were not so easily convinced. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to put that dead dog there," said one family friend. Even if it did have nothing to do with Tammy's disappearance, he said, it showed that there were potentially dangerous people in the vicinity of the Kingerys' house.

Police looked at Tammy's phone to see if anything there might help establish what she did or intended to do that day. They found two sets of text messages with other men, which they described as "romantic" in nature, that Tammy had apparently deleted prior to her disappearance. However, they investigated the two men and do not believe they had any involvement in her disappearance.

In 2016 the arrest of serial killer Todd Kohlhepp raised hopes that Kingery might have been found with his victims, but none of the bodies buried on his property matched her DNA. In 2021 the Kingerys' daughter Caitlyn started receiving messages on Facebook from a "Chris Slade" who offered to share information about the case with her in exchange for sexual favors, claimed to have known her in high school and made statements suggesting some knowledge of her family, like what kind of car her father drove. She continued to communicate with him, until "Slade" began attempting to blackmail her.

Theories and aftermath A few weeks after Tammy's disappearance, police officially stated that they believed there were "suspicious circumstances" in the case. Her family likewise believes that something unpleasant befell her. The question they and police have is what that was.

After the initial searches, police decided to thoroughly investigate Park Kingery again. His account of his actions and whereabouts on the morning Tammy disappeared was corroborated both by independent interviews with his sons, cell phone pings and security camera footage from the stores he and the younger son had visited.

Unlike other missing persons cases, there is currently no reward available for information leading to the resolution of the case. Kingery says he had to spend the $4,000 he put up to pay bills with his wife's income, the greater in the household, gone. "I wish I could have put out more but it's gone; that was my money out of my retirement fund". "There was nothing I could do" he recalled later. "I ended up living in my parents' basement at almost 50 years old."