Carlene Sessions Tengelsen was 16 when she disappeared from Macon, Georgia, in the summer of 1972. Having just received her driver’s license, she was allowed to use the family’s 1963 white Pontiac station wagon to pick up her younger sister Joanette from a Mercer University summer camp field trip after a stop at a local shopping plaza. Joanette called home that afternoon to say she had not been picked up, and the family’s concern grew as evening passed with no word from Carlene.

In the early hours of the next morning the station wagon was found unlocked in the Westgate Shopping Center parking lot with the windows rolled down, which the family said Carlene would not have done. Macon Police initially treated her as a runaway; the family believes that assumption delayed a serious investigation. Fingerprint processing of the vehicle produced no usable results, and despite fliers, a reward, and the family leaving a phone on at their old house in hope of a call, Carlene was not found.

The family relocated to North Carolina a year after the disappearance, and Carlene was declared legally dead in 1981. Both parents and an older sister later died without learning what happened. Who remembers seeing the 1963 white Pontiac in Macon that summer of 1972, or has other information about Carlene’s movements that day?