Angela Hammond

On 4 April 1991, twenty-year-old Angela Hammond, then four-months pregnant, and her fiancé Rob attended a barbecue at the home of Angela’s mother Marsha. Though the couple rented a home together, Rob intended to spend the night at his parent’s house where he was babysitting his little brother. Angela either dropped Rob off or he left the barbecue (sources conflict on this detail) about 9 -10 pm, with the expectation that she would join him later. Later that night, about 11:45 pm, Angela would phone Rob from a local payphone to explain that she was too tired to come to his parent’s house that night, which he understood. As they spoke, an old green pickup truck circled the parking lot where the payphone was located. It left, but soon returned, parking this time and making Angela nervous and prompting her to describe the truck to Rob. Soon, a man emerged from the truck and made his way over to the payphone booth beside Angela’s before leaving the booth shortly thereafter and appearing to look about his truck with a flashlight, as if he was trying to locate something. While this greatly alarmed both Angela and Rob, nothing could have prepared them for what came next, as Angela let out a blood-curdling scream. Rob bolted for his car and raced down the road to the payphone booth, which was only a several minute drive away. As he barreled down the road, Rob spotted a pickup truck matching Angela’s description going the opposite direction. He noticed a man driving and saw what appeared to be Angela in the passenger’s seat crying out his name. Rob threw his car in reverse, wrecking his transmission, and pursued the kidnapper down a dirt road before his error caught up to him, and his car died. Desperate and panicked, Rob leapt out of his car and began pursuing the vehicle on foot, but it was too late. Shortly after realizing that he would be unable to catch up to the truck, Rob flagged down a passing vehicle, and the driver took him directly to the police station, where he told Clinton police about what had happened and provided them with a description of the man and the truck. Police launched a search for both and provided a composite sketch of the suspect (which notably looks nothing like the description provided by Angela and Rob), but nothing was discovered. Understandably, as tends to be the case in such investigations, police turned their attention to Rob as a potential suspect, considering the possibility that he had fabricated the story as a means to cover up Angela’s death at his own hands. However, neither Marsha nor Chris, Angela’s parents, suspected Rob, and he gladly took and passed a polygraph (pseudo-science but an important detail nonetheless). Furthermore, Rob’s car was found precisely where he’d said it was, dead on the side of a dirt road, and its condition seemed to corroborate his story. Soon, two witnesses came forward to say that they had driven by that parking lot the night of Angela’s disappearance and confirmed Angela’s being there along with the green truck and the unidentified abductor. Thus, it became increasingly unlikely that Rob had actually been involved in his fiancé’s disappearance. Police then began looking into possible connections between Angela’s abduction and two other nearby abductions earlier that year, that of Trudy Darby of Mack’s Creek, Missouri in January 1991 and that of Cheryl Ann Kenney of Nevada, Missouri in February 1991, who both disappeared from the convenience stores at which they’d been working. However, a pair of half-brothers would later be charged with Darby’s abduction, rape, and murder, making it unlikely that they were responsible for the abduction of a woman, Angela, whom by all accounts they did not know. Furthermore, while Mack’s Creek and Nevada aren’t too far from Clinton, they are each approximately a 70-mile drive away, a little more than just down the road.