Karen Denise Steed was 29 and a certified nursing assistant when she was last seen at her home in Piedmont, Alabama, on November 25, 1997. She left behind a young daughter. Weeks passed with no sign of Karen; on December 18, 1997 her beige 1982 Ford Fairmont was recovered abandoned along Interstate 20 in Cleburne County near Heflin. The car showed no evidence of foul play, but Karen herself was not found and her whereabouts remain unknown.

Authorities long considered her husband, Jimmy Steed, a person of interest. In December 2014 he pleaded guilty in an unrelated 2009 murder and received a lengthy prison sentence; investigators have said he is also a suspect in Karen’s disappearance and in the earlier disappearances of two men, James Patrick Burrows and Jeffery McFry, who vanished in 1990 near the Steed residence. Karen’s case is listed as an active endangered missing person investigation.

Did anyone in or near Piedmont in late 1997 notice Karen, her Fairmont, or anything unusual around Interstate 20 in Cleburne County?