On December 2, 1976, 14-year-old Crystal Donita Parton vanished from the Fairview Estates neighborhood of Russellville, Arkansas, along with friends Teresa Williams, 13, and Cynthia Mabry, 13. The three girls were last seen together; early on their disappearances were treated as possible runaways but no word ever came.

On Thanksgiving Day 1986 a deer hunter found human remains in a remote area near the Pope–Newton County line. Dental comparison identified the skeletal remains of Crystal Parton and Teresa Williams. Both had been stabbed in the neck; Cynthia Mabry’s remains were not recovered.

In 1998 an incarcerated man, James B. Grinder, confessed to luring the three girls into his vehicle on the outskirts of Russellville, taking Crystal and Teresa to Brock Cemetery where he sexually assaulted and then strangled and stabbed them, and taking Cynthia to a separate site in the Ozark National Forest where he said he raped and beat her to death with a tire iron. In 1999 Grinder pleaded guilty and received a life sentence. He died in 2010.

Did anyone in Russellville or the surrounding area know the girls’ habits or where they were heading that day?