Jennifer Long was 16 when she was last seen on a cold January morning in 1998 after leaving East High School in Kansas City, Missouri following an altercation with other students. She had attended a couple of classes that day and left school around 9:30 a.m.; her family says she was looking forward to an upcoming driver’s license test and would not have run away. She had recently transferred schools and felt unsafe at home.

Witnesses believe she went to a nearby grocery store and was seen getting into a white pickup truck driven by local handyman Wesley Ira Purkey. Jennifer never returned and her family searched as far afield as California and listed her with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

In December 1998 Purkey, then jailed on an unrelated murder, admitted to abducting, sexually assaulting, and killing Jennifer, and described dismembering and burning her remains before disposing of ashes; her body has never been recovered. Does anyone in the Kansas City or Lansing area have information about Jennifer’s last movements or the white pickup truck that could still help clarify what happened?