Missing: The Curious Anomaly of Tiffany Whitton's Disappearance

From Esquire

Each year, approximately seventy thousand women are reported missing in the United States. This is the story of one who hasn't come back.

Look at her.

It is the last time you will ever see her, and she is committing a crime. In the surveillance video, she is pushing and sometimes pulling a shopping cart through a Walmart, filling it with clothes and then emptying it, over and over again. An untrained eye might think she's simply shopping with her boyfriend. But store security keeps an array of hidden cameras focused on her; the cameras don't leave her for the hour she's in the store, and when you see the entire tape you see something different from a young woman on a spree. You see someone who can't possibly get away with it. For one thing, she's shopping-shoplifting-at two in the morning. For another, she's clearly high; she never stops moving, and it is almost as if she is dancing or trying to stay on a horse. She throws shirt after shirt and outfit after outfit into the cart, and behaves so suspiciously that to see the tape is to wonder if she is trying to get caught-and if she is trying to get caught in order to escape.

She does both, after all. She gets caught and she escapes. She gets caught after her boyfriend pays with a roll of cash for what appears to be a portable loudspeaker and some pieces of clothing, including an outfit for his little girl. They are heading for the door, for the parking lot; she is walking a few feet behind him, like a woman from a culture of obedience, when a man grabs her. He is black, in a white T-shirt and a fedora and khakis and sneakers. He grabs her by the strap of her handbag, as he's been taught to do, and then identifies himself as a loss-prevention associate-the term Walmart uses for the plainclothes security guards trained to stop thieves. She's an inveterate thief, but now she's trapped, flanked by the guy in the hat and another loss-prevention associate in jeans and a striped polo shirt. Her boyfriend turns at the door so that his back is to the parking lot. She calls his name. He doesn't answer. He doesn't appear to know what's going on.

Does she? This is the most important moment of her life, the most important choice she has ever made in a life full of disastrous choices. All she has to do is surrender and she will escape from him, from the boyfriend standing at the door. She will go to jail, yes; but she will be safe. Instead, she escapes from them. Moving like a mustang, she runs out of her handbag and out of her black flip-flops. She does not head straight for the door; she zigs straight at the guy in the striped polo shirt, then zigs back past her boyfriend, out to the parking lot. He does not turn around to see where she goes. The loss-prevention associates do not chase her; the one in the hat stands with his hands on his hips, as if awaiting her return. He has good reason to believe she will come back; he has her handbag and her shoes are on the floor. She does not come back. She never comes back. She is never seen again once she is beyond the range of the cameras, her life apparently ending-and her long afterlife beginning-at the very instant of her escape.

"Look out the window and tell me what you see," Lisa Daniels says.

We are at a barbecue restaurant in Kennesaw, Georgia. There is a window in the back of the dining room. "Woods," I say.

"Well, that's not what I see," Lisa says. "I see a place where my daughter could be."

It is January 8, 2015. Four hundred and eighty-two days ago, Lisa's daughter Tiffany Michelle Whitton was caught shoplifting at a Walmart in Marietta, about twelve miles from where Lisa sits eating lunch. At two o'clock in the morning on Friday, September 13, 2013, Tiffany ran into the parking lot and disappeared. She was twenty-six then; she is twenty-seven now, three weeks shy of her twenty-eighth birthday, and that's still how Lisa most often refers to her-in the present tense. Tiffany is outgoing, passionate, headstrong; she loves children and old people; "she has never met a stranger." Tiffany is also a drug addict who makes a lot of bad choices. Though Lisa has been told to accept, as a probability, that Tiffany is dead, she will not believe that Tiffany belongs to the past until she turns up as a body.

But there are a lot of bodies in the world, and a lot of world in which to hide them. "You'd be surprised," she says. She reads about them in the paper. She hears about them on TV. Her friends-or total strangers-tell her about them on Facebook. A dog brings what appears to be a human bone home to its master; a skull is found with two capped teeth; a hunter unearths human remains in Paulding County. She follows up on all of them. She has no choice but to follow up on all of them. "I called Paulding County," she says. "They asked me when Tiffany disappeared. I told them and they said, 'It's not her. These are skeletal remains.'"

This is Lisa's life now. On this day-the day I meet her for the first time-she is fifty years old. She is married, and through the course of her ordeal has never stopped showing up at her job as a financial controller. She is raising Tiffany's younger sister, Summer, who is a freshman in high school, and Tiffany's daughter Addison, who is seven and starting to ask questions about her mommy. In both manner and appearance, Addison bears a disconcerting resemblance to Tiffany-"if you want to know Tiffany, just meet Addison," says a family friend. It's why Lisa's hard on her: She knows she made mistakes with Tiffany and doesn't want to make them again. Tiffany was-is-cheerleader blond and tanning-booth gold, and, as stated on the flyers advertising her absence, five-foot-three and 105 pounds. Lisa, shorter and stouter, with a slight rasp in her voice and her brown hair in tendrilly curls, resembles her older daughter primarily in her eyes, but the eyes are more than enough. They are light green, unsurprised, and in the habit of narrowing in frank appraisal; they are an avenger's eyes, and every morning, when Lisa looks at herself in the mirror, she sees her daughter staring back at her in wordless appeal.

When Tiffany first went missing, Lisa looked for her in the bars and seedy hotels she used to haunt. She doesn't do that anymore. What she still does is wake up early in the morning and go to sleep late at night, exchanging messages with anyone who might know Tiffany or what has happened to her. Her phone, set on the table, pings continuously, and she never fails to respond to the sound, for she never knows which vibration or bell tone might end her agony. She has created a Facebook page, Find Tiffany Whitton; has friended many of Tiffany's friends and associates; and has discovered that "drug dealers use Facebook too." Mostly, she hears rumors and receives tips, some about Tiffany's present whereabouts, some about how she was done in. She has been told that Tiffany is a housewife in South Dakota; she has also been told that Tiffany is entombed in a suburban crawl space or stuffed in an old well where she will never be found. What she hears is often fantastic and sometimes cruel; nevertheless, she promises on the Find Tiffany Whitton page that if you send her a message, she will respond "within minutes"-and that's exactly what she does. Because she can't dismiss anything, she is vulnerable to everything, even the entreaties of psychics, and if in the end she fails to find Tiffany, she refuses to fail in her more essential mission:

"I want her to know that she is loved."

When a child dies, a void arises within her parents. When a child goes missing, the void extends to the world itself, transforming it, redefining its every place of refuge. Tiffany Whitton did not simply disappear into it; it grabbed her, and what Lisa Daniels has learned since then is how many forms the void can assume, and how many woods there are between wherever it is she happens to be and the Walmart Supercenter on Highway 41.

Jaimee Mendez, 25. Chelsea Bruck, 22. Theresa Benn, 42.

In 2013, according to FBI statistics, 68,504 women over the age of eighteen were reported missing in the United States. In 2014, the total was 69,668; in 2015, 71,618. Many-most-returned. Many did not, or had their status changed from missing to murdered. At the end of January 2016, there were 21,894 active cases of missing women and almost as many of men and minors of both genders. Every year, then, a stadium's worth of women go missing; every year, a stadium's worth of people stay that way, entering the American ether.

Christina Morris, 23. Amanda De Guio, 24. Jayme Bowen, 22.

It is, if nothing else, an education to have a loved one go missing, and the first thing you learn is that everyone has the right to disappear. There are no laws against walking out of your life and not revealing to anyone where you are. The police will tell you this at the same time they tell you, in the absence of any clear evidence of foul play, to wait for your loved one's safe return, thereby encouraging you to confuse ignorance with hope.

Jessica Heeringa, 25. Kara Nichols, 19. Brittney Wood, 19.

You will also learn that while the staggering number of people who go missing each year is a national problem, it is generally a problem treated locally, by competing jurisdictions, with little coordination among them. The Department of Justice funds a national database of missing persons and unidentified bodies called NamUs, but NamUs officials say that local law enforcement is often reluctant to use it. There is no central authority to which you can turn; there is not even an accepted body of knowledge from which you can draw. "Once you're in the land of the lost, it's too late to buy a road map," says Todd Matthews, one of the creators of NamUs. "You're here. That's it. Your neighbors go to work as if nothing happened, and even law enforcement moves on. But you have no choice but to keep looking for a fugitive among the dead."

Lauren Spierer, 20. Athena Curry, 20. Christina Voltaire, 22.

Of course, missing persons-missing women-are staples of local television news programs, and occasionally they cross over and receive national attention, even to the point of becoming objects of tabloid frenzy. But media outlets are ruthlessly selective, and they tend to prefer women who are white, pretty, and, above all, innocent. Nancy Grace rarely shifts into prosecutorial mode for women who have already been prosecuted; Kelly Siegler rarely goes into high dudgeon over women who have put their souls at risk by getting high. "You have to audition for those shows," Lisa Daniels says, and they're not particularly interested in women like her daughter. What's striking, however, is how many missing women are so very much like her daughter in terms of their ages, their looks, their identifying piercings and tattoos, their difficult histories, their addictions, their dodgy boyfriends, and, ultimately, their fates. I considered thirteen women from across the country as subjects for this story; they came to my attention randomly, through media reports or pages devoted to them on Facebook. They were reported missing between 2011 and 2014. Since then, three have been found dead. Ten are still missing, with several presumed dead. In only one case has anyone been arrested for murder. None have come home.

Tiffany Whitton, 26.

It is one of the cruelest phrases in the language: "presumed dead." It is a phrase of convenience, after all, and an admission of defeat. But that's what Tiffany is, along with so many others. "As far as we know, Tiffany's life ended that night," says Marietta Police Department detective Jonnie Moeller, who was the lead investigator on the case in the first year after Tiffany disappeared. "I don't believe she's missing on her own accord, and I don't believe she's going to come walking through that door." The case is being investigated as a homicide, but that, too, is something of a presumption. There is, in fact, very little evidence except the overwhelming argument of absence; the most important piece of physical evidence remains the videotape showing Tiffany sprinting barefoot past her boyfriend, Ashley Caudle, to a place where she left no tracks and nobody could find her.

For all of her determination to track down seemingly everybody who has ever known either Tiffany or Ashley, for all of her willingness to visit every trailer park or motel Tiffany ever inhabited, no matter how squalid, Lisa Daniels has never been here. She has never walked into the place from which Tiffany ran; never shopped at the place from which Tiffany shoplifted; never been to the Walmart Supercenter where her daughter was last seen and then fell off the face of the earth.

Perhaps the name "Walmart Supercenter" conjures an image of suburban plenty. It shouldn't. This store, for all the triumphalism of its name, marks the beginning of the largely white and largely working-class swath of modest homes stretching from Kennesaw, where Tiffany is from, to the western part of Marietta, where Ashley Caudle grew up, to Powder Springs, where Tiffany lived with Ashley and a rotating cast of heavy drug users right before she disappeared. West Cobb, as it's known, has always been one of the areas that make the Atlanta metroplex most Southern in look, feel, and attitude; now it's one of the areas being transformed by methamphetamine and cheap heroin. Beneath its veneer of tradition, it's been afflicted by a desperate internal transience-and the Walmart Supercenter is its teeming port of exchange. Open twenty-four hours a day, it's lit like a jailhouse and as gritty as an ashtray; its checkout lines grumble with poverty as often as they ring with commerce, and its parking lot serves as a haven for opportunists of all kinds. The Walmart Supercenter is where Tiffany often came to shoplift, and it's where Ashley came to do business.

Now Lisa stands near one of the store's exits and wobbles. It is January 20, 2015-494 days since Tiffany disappeared through this very door. Lisa might as well be looking into an abyss, one that hums with not only the sound of the void but also the grinding machinery of hidden cameras and loss-prevention associates. "I think I'm going to throw up," she says, heading outside in the direction of the Sam's Club on the other side of the parking lot. There is a strip of pine trees behind it, where, according to some initial reports, Tiffany went to hide right after she broke free. "They searched these woods," she says, not daring to advance into their shadows herself; then she walks across the street to the IHOP Tiffany used to work at before she got fired.

"Tiffany couldn't keep her hands off things," Lisa explains after she orders her coffee. "She began stealing when she was two. I'd find things in her toy box that didn't belong to her. She was stealing from daycare. I'd ask about it. She'd say, 'Someone gave it to me.' She was also a pathological liar. She just got better at it over the years."

Not that much better: In August 2013, a little more than a month before she was caught stealing by security cameras at the Walmart, she was caught stealing by the security camera at the IHOP. She was already precariously employed; addicted to both heroin and methamphetamine, she was often sent home for coming to work high or even with fresh track marks. It was no surprise that she was fired; it might not even have been a surprise that Lisa cut off all contact with her, saying, "Tiffany, I will always love you. But you're killing me."

The surprise came later, much later, when that conversation turned out to be the last one Lisa ever had with her daughter. She was doing only what she thought was right, for herself and for Tiffany; she was doing only what the parent of every addict is told to do, and refusing to die along with her sick child. She didn't know that she was making a vow and at the same time a prediction. "I will always love you," Lisa said then. What she could never have imagined was that she would have to not only keep on saying it but also keep on proving it, by sharing a portion of her fate.

Before she could become a body, Tiffany became a ghost; now her mother has too, haunting the places Tiffany haunted, walking the paths Tiffany walked, in the hope that they will somehow allow her to see beyond the moment Tiffany disappeared and learn how she died. It is why Lisa is here. It is why Lisa endures the pain of being here, first at the Walmart and then at the IHOP. At two o'clock in the morning on September 13, 2013, Tiffany ran past Ashley Caudle at the door of the Walmart Supercenter on Highway 41. She did not cross the highway and go to the IHOP; she did not, as was sometimes her custom, visit the restaurant that fired her. But Ashley did. Sometime after two o'clock, he showed up at the IHOP. He went where Lisa has now forced herself to go and asked, "Hey, has anybody seen Tiffany?"

A month before she went missing, Tiffany posted a photograph of Ashley, shirtless and gesticulating, on Facebook. He's clean-shaven; short-haired; lavishly tattooed; wiry; wired, his face almost brick-colored in apparent anger and contorted in apparent threat. As a caption, Tiffany wrote, "Kissy face?? Love you baby!" Around the same time, Tiffany's grandmother Anita Boyette went to pick up Tiffany for lunch and saw Ashley for the first time. "When I looked at him-well, you've seen his picture," she says. "I thought, My granddaughter is mixed up in this?"

He does not look like that anymore, not quite. He still has short hair, combed forward and clinging to his scalp, and, of course, the ink will never go away. But he's filled out now thanks to the prison food, and he's pale under the lights of the prison conference room. He's a shade under six foot, and in his prison scrubs, there's nothing prepossessing about him, or even forceful. He has a waddling walk in his white socks and prison sandals, and both his face and his body language are affable, even sheepish, drained of any trace of anger. His scruffy beard is red; his teeth, on the couple of occasions he shows them in a full smile, are methamphetamine brown; and he looks very much like a country boy-Opie from Mayberry, all grown up after spending half his life in jail and the other half getting high.

"My mother is so against me doing this interview," he says. "She thinks that if y'all want to know anything about it, y'all can go to the police and talk to them about it. But see, here's my thing: A person that did something would have something to hide and nothing to talk about, okay? I'm the type of person I don't have nothing to hide."

It is March 7, 2016-906 days since Tiffany disappeared and just over a year since Ashley pleaded guilty to selling methamphetamine in Cherokee County. He was sentenced to twenty years, with a minimum of ten to serve-the sentence harsher, he says, on account of the judge's belief that "I'm not working with law enforcement on an ongoing missing-persons investigation." He has recently been transferred from Rutledge State Prison to Carroll County Correctional Institution, where he's on a work detail, cleaning gutters and storm drains, and where he is able to give a face-to-face interview without restraints or even a guard in the room. He sits down at the conference table with a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup-"state stuff," he says after tasting it-and begins to talk. ("He's a talker" is what Jonnie Moeller, the detective, said about him, and she's right.) His voice is either soft or softer; his hands, so pale they're almost blue, are always on the table, except when they're pointing emphatically to his broken heart; and his eyes-well, his eyes are arresting, because they're mismatched and cut his face in two. His right eye is open, intense, and always vigilant; his left eye droops almost shut, as if he's fighting off the urge to sleep. The more emotionally charged the subject matter, the droopier his eye, and the effect is disconcerting, since it's hard to tell which of his eyes he wants you to look at, or which of his eyes is truly looking at you.

The discrepancy is suggestive, because there are not just two sides to Ashley Caudle's face. There are two possible Ashley Caudles. There is the Ashley who knows no more than anyone else knows and watched Tiffany run past him in bafflement and confusion; then there is the theoretical Ashley who knows exactly what happened to Tiffany and won't reveal his secret. There is the Ashley who is guilty of possessing and selling methamphetamine but not of murder; then there is the improbable Ashley who is guilty not only of murder but also of hiding Tiffany's body with sadistic efficiency and nearly miraculous competence. As it happens, both Ashleys showed up at the IHOP after Tiffany disappeared; that he did so and that he asked about Tiffany are among the only confirmed facts in the case. So that's where he starts after he sits down across from me.

"I was outside in the truck charging my phone, okay? And when I come in the store to get her, I was like, 'Look, we got to go, c'mon.' When we went to the checkout, I was getting some shirts to leave with, I was checking out, and she was in her purse pulling stolen items out, and there's all these Walmart workers in the front. Okay, so we go to leave. I guess I was on my phone and the loss-prevention people come out, but they didn't identify themselves as loss prevention, right? And she said, 'Red'-that's what people call me, they call me Red-and I didn't answer. Then she said my first name; she said, 'Ashley,' and I turned around and looked and they got her by both arms, and another black dude has got her purse and there's three black guys. So I pulled a knife out. They didn't see it; I had it by my side. I'm like, 'Look, let her go.' And she's struggling with them. I'm like, 'Look, let her go.' They let her go and she took off running by me."

In the Walmart security video, two loss-prevention associates apprehend Tiffany, not three, and Ashley watches them passively instead of pulling a knife. The video ends with him standing at the door, talking to the loss-prevention associate in the striped polo shirt. In Ashley's account, however, he goes to his truck, but because there are drugs inside and he's afraid of getting busted, he doesn't get in. Instead, he goes on foot across Highway 41, taking a circuitous course in search of the girl he loves. "But everywhere I went, my actions can be accounted for," he says. "There's a strip mall right here, next to the exit I came out of at the Walmart. There's got to be cameras there, right? And then the drive-through at Krispy Kreme has got cameras in it, right? The Metro lodge [the extended-stay motel behind the IHOP] has cameras in it; the IHOP has cameras in it-you see what I'm saying? And they show I'm right there; I didn't ever deviate my path from sitting there and trying to figure this out."

Of course, no cameras show any of this. And he never figured it out; Tiffany is still missing. But then, neither did Lisa Daniels nor Jonnie Moeller nor any of the other investigators trying to find her. And that's what both Ashleys know: that where it began is also where it ended. "What happened to Tiffany that night?" I ask.

"She just ran. I don't know what happened to her."

"If you knew, would you say?"

"By all means, if I knew what happened, I would tell you, okay? But I don't. And the more that I try to figure it out, the more aggravated I get. The more they"-Tiffany's family, the investigators-"try to figure it out, the more aggravated they get. And it all ends at that Walmart, that night, it was me and her. That's where it ends."

"It does," I say.

"Nobody knows nothin'," Ashley says, his left eye nearly closed as if in a frozen wink. "Okay? Not even me."

Lisa Daniels stopped talking to Tiffany the month before she disappeared. But Lisa's mother-Tiffany's grandmother Anita Boyette-didn't. When Tiffany went to prison in 2012 for violently invading the home of a woman she thought had ripped her off in a drug deal, Anita wrote letters to her about Scripture and received long letters in return, with greetings to her "Meemaw." When she was released, Anita drove to south Georgia and picked her up. Anita found a rehab center for her, and when Tiffany decided to leave after a month-"it was always a month with Tiffany"-and began using again, Anita still took her phone calls and responded to her texts. "I am always going to keep the lines of communication open," she says, using, like Lisa, the present tense. "I have to. It doesn't matter whether she's using drugs or not. I'm her grandmother."

Anita, then, was the first person in Tiffany's family to meet Ashley Caudle, and the last of them to see her before she disappeared. On September 8, 2013, she turned off her phone before going into church. When she turned it back on after the service, there was a message from Tiffany: "Meemaw, where are you?" At the time, she was living with Ashley and Ashley's young daughter, Charlie; Anita called her back immediately. "She wanted to know if I could get them something to eat," Anita says. "They'd had nothing. I went and got her and took her to McDonald's. She said, 'I have money; I just don't have transportation.' I dropped her off and later that evening she called and asked if I could wash her clothes. I asked her how many. She said, 'Everything we own.' I met her and the little girl at a Laundromat, then I took her home and hugged her tight. I said, 'Honey, why don't you come home?' She said, 'I wouldn't go without Ashley.' I said, 'Doesn't he have a home?' She said, 'He wouldn't go without me.' "

Two months later, she received a letter in the mail from a lawyer in Florida who claimed to be representing Walmart. He informed Anita that her granddaughter Tiffany Whitton had been caught shoplifting from the Walmart and that if she sent a check for $150 she could settle the matter legally and end the threat of a civil suit. The shirt Tiffany was caught stealing cost less than fifteen dollars. The letter was a so-called "civil-demand letter"-a sort of collection letter for thieves-but it provided Tiffany's family with the first indication that something had happened to her. True, she had not posted on Facebook since September 1, and neither Anita nor Lisa nor Tiffany's sister, Summer, had been in touch with her. But Tiffany was a drug addict, alienated from nearly everyone she had ever known-they expected absences. They had even received civil-demand letters before. But now they felt the twinge of a new kind of alarm.

"That's when I picked up the phone and called Ashley and said, 'What is going on?' " Anita says. "I had his number. He answered the phone 'Red.' I asked, 'Who is this?' He said, 'Red.' I said, 'Ashley?' He said yes. Then he said she disappeared that night. I said, 'You didn't call us and let us know that she was gone?' One of his comments was 'I wish I had that purse I bought her. It was a Coach purse, and it was really expensive.' I said, 'You can't afford transportation, but you're buying Coach purses?' I just said it. I couldn't believe it, but I did."

Lisa called Ashley before Thanksgiving, all the while still hoping that Tiffany would emerge for the holidays, as she had in the past. He told her that he had called hospitals and jails-and old boyfriends-in his search for Tiffany. He told her that he loved her and always would. The holidays passed, however, with Tiffany's decisive silence, and on January 10, 2014, Lisa went with her mother to the Marietta Police Department and filed a missing-persons report. A detective was assigned to her-a detective who fulfilled all of Lisa's forebodings: that no one would think her lost child worthy of love or care. Weeks passed, and he told Lisa only that Tiffany was a junkie, bingeing, or a parole violator on the run, and that she would either show up or get herself arrested before long. "I told him my daughter might be a drug addict, but she wasn't born a drug addict-I held her in my arms. I told him, 'You have two daughters, and she's worth as much to me as they are to you.'" Finally, at the end of January, the case was reassigned to Detective Moeller, a soft-spoken woman with watchful eyes and hair that's always pulled back into a tight bun. "I called Lisa," she says, "and I knew right away that something wasn't right." She sensed from the start that Tiffany wasn't coming back; she also knew from the start that whoever might have done her harm was way ahead of her. "Time is not to our benefit; it's to the bad guys' benefit. You've heard the first forty-eight hours are critical to solving any crime, right? Well, this case was four months old. It was already a cold case when it came to us."

It wasn't simply that the homicide detective didn't have a body. She had nothing except the civil-demand letter that had been sent to Tiffany's grandmother. She had no evidence at all until she called the Walmart Supercenter about a theft that had occurred the previous September and found that loss prevention had preserved the security video for the purposes of possible prosecution. She obtained it on January 27 and saw, for the first time, Tiffany Whitton and Ashley Caudle together, an hour and then an instant before they split up forever-or, as Ashley says, "she left me." Not long afterward, Detective Moeller called Ashley, and, she says, "once I talked to him, I knew."

Ashley and Tiffany had met earlier in the summer, a few months after he had been released from prison and just before she got kicked out of the place she'd been living for stealing. She'd been clean in the spring; she'd been living with a landscaper who bought her a car and a phone and introduced her to his parents. But she cheated on him at the same time she began using again, and when she met Ashley she saw in him another and perhaps last chance for fulfilling both parts of her irreconcilable dream: hard drugs and enduring domestic bliss. "The first day we met, she took my daughter swimming," Ashley says. "I've never been accepted by a female with my daughter that way. She was the first woman that was like, 'Aww, your daughter's so beautiful-let's go swimming.' You know what I mean? Her and my daughter playing in the pool, and it really tickled me pink and it made my day to see them that way."

He knew that she had a daughter of her own, Addison, whom she had not seen since Christmas and whom her mother would not allow her to see until she got clean. He did not know that when she'd become pregnant in high school, she'd been induced to give up the child-her first daughter-for adoption and had, by all accounts, "never been the same." She never talked about that, to him or to anyone else. All Ashley knew about Tiffany was what he saw: "Charlie called her Mom, because Tiffany taught Charlie a lot of key things that a little girl is going to need in her life: Yes, sir; no, sir; yes, ma'am-you know, just basic things." He also saw that she was "still employed. She had her shit together." Yes, they lived on the brink of vagabondage, moving, in short order, from motel to trailer to drug house. But they also lived an approximation of family life, until the manager of the IHOP caught Tiffany on videotape, stealing money from another waitress.

"When she lost her job, she became really dependent on me," Ashley says. "You see what I mean? And so me being a single dad, trying to do what I could to take care of my daughter, having an extra responsibility-that's what really catches up with you. I went from petty drug dealing to really trying to move drugs to support me and her, you see what I'm saying? Food. Clothes. Diapers. I didn't know she had a real hard addiction until she came to me one day and said, 'Look, I'm sick.' I'm like, 'What do you mean you're sick?' That's when she told me she was doing heroin. She called it Boy. I didn't know that she was using heroin like that until she actually asked me for money."

They argued then, he says. They argued over the nature of her addiction-"I've always been addicted to methamphetamine, but I'm totally antiheroin"-and they argued over her spending and they argued over her shoplifting. "We had maybe two fights," he says. "But they were always verbal arguments. I mean, I'm about the least kind of violent person ever in this world."

Tiffany is clearly high in the Walmart videotape. She is also clearly shoplifting and in the process of spending too much of the money Ashley is flashing in a thick roll. When they argue, however, there's something touchingly familiar about it-about Tiffany rolling her eyes and Ashley striding forward in exasperation. "Oh, she wouldn't come out of the store. She was like, 'I'm shopping,' and I was like, 'Look, let's go. I've got somewhere to be, c'mon.' She's like, 'Fine!' And that's when she went storming to the checkout. But it wasn't nothing big, you know what I'm saying? I was like, 'Look, these people are watching you. You need to bring your ass on out and come to the car.' She's like, 'I'm coming.' And that's when they come up behind her."

He does not know that she's been shoplifting until she's caught, and so when he sees them grab her, he gets angry. "I had some things going on, you know what I mean? There were wrong things going on that I was doing, you know what I'm saying? So I mean I had four, five hundred dollars in my pocket, and she's wanting to steal makeup and little stuff. It didn't sit right with me; I was mad at the beginning. I mean, not that kind of mad. I was disappointed in her more than anything. I don't go and bust my ass-because believe it or not, it's not easy to go out and do that shit. It's really stressful and it's dangerous, and you take a big risk."

When she runs, he does not run after her. She jeopardized him; he lets her jeopardize herself. It's what bothers him now, he says as he sits at the table in the conference room of the Carroll County Correctional Institution, with his voice soft and even and his left eye succumbing to the pull of some personal gravity. It's what keeps him up at night. No, not that he killed her, as Lisa Daniels and Detective Moeller believe. "My conscience doesn't eat at me about something I didn't do. It eats at me because I feel like I didn't do enough to protect Tiffany. That's what really gets to me. When she ran, I should have ran. I should've followed her and made sure she was safe. I should've known where she was going."

The videotape wasn't the only advantage that Detective Moeller possessed. She also had Lisa Daniels, who had investigated her daughter's disappearance in the absence of official concern. Early on, Lisa had received a message from the waitress who had kicked Tiffany out of the motel room they were sharing when she caught her stealing, and who had later encountered Ashley at the IHOP on the morning of September 13, 2013. Her name is Sheila Fuller, and, ruing the day that she evicted Tiffany as the day that she drove Tiffany into Ashley's arms, she became what investigators would consider the one steadfast witness in a case marked by opportunistic, fungible, or nonexistent testimony.

"I had gone to the Walmart to get some cigarettes," Sheila told me when I talked to her last spring. "I had seen Red's truck in the parking lot-I called him Red. Now I came back to the IHOP and Red's sitting on the bench outside. He said, 'Have you seen Tiffany?' I said, 'Why should I have seen Tiffany? I'm the last person Tiffany would want to see.' He said, 'She got caught shoplifting in the Walmart and ran away, and I don't know where she is.' I said, 'Call her on her cell phone.' He pulled her cell phone out of his pocket and said, 'I'm charging it.' He said, 'I'm looking for her.' I said, 'Then what are you doing sitting here at the IHOP?' He said that his friends were going to come get him in a few minutes. It took an hour and a half. Then an SUV pulled up with a guy driving and two girls inside. Red got in the backseat with one of the girls and they drove off."

The man who picked Ashley up at the IHOP was Stephen Weinstein, who lived nearby. Tiffany and Ashley had gone to his apartment to get high before they took a borrowed red truck to Walmart; Weinstein had stayed behind when a friend of his, Jason Zuccarini, stopped by. A big, unstable drug user who briefly dated Tiffany before she lived with Ashley, "Zucc" does not show up in Sheila Fuller's account of the night, but he figures prominently in Stephen Weinstein's.

"Ashley called from the IHOP and said, 'Come get me,'" Weinstein told me when he was in the Cobb County jail late last year on charges unrelated either to Ashley Caudle or to Tiffany Whitton's disappearance. "Zucc brought me over there. When we got to the IHOP, Ashley was sitting out front. He told the story of Tiffany getting caught stealing and running off. He said he didn't know where she was but was afraid to go back to the truck. I believed that part. Then he told a bullshit story about how the guards wouldn't let Tiffany go until he pulled a gun on them. Ashley's a charismatic guy. He's full of shit and a piece of shit, but people enjoy his company because for a lying piece of shit, he makes them laugh. After we went back to my house, we rode around for a while, me and Zucc, looking for her. Ashley didn't want to go because he was afraid of being picked up by the police. He said, 'She's going to show up. She's going to show up at the house.' I felt that he was telling the truth, other than the lying part."

Look at him again. There's another video, recorded while he's talking over videophone to a woman visiting him in prison. He's talking about Tiffany, and in it, he's an entirely different person from the one I met in the conference room-he's an entirely different Ashley. This Ashley is canny and cagey and cruel, pleased with himself. His voice is different; he speaks rapidly and expansively, without a hint of courtly softness. And his eyes are different, in that they are the same: The left eye doesn't droop, and both of them are equally skittish and wired and stone-cold. He says, "You're going to like this-I'm going to show you this fucking piece of paper this bitch brought me. That detective lady [Jonnie Moeller]? You'll like this." He laughs, and he waves a flyer imprinted with the photo of a blond young woman in front of the camera. "What the fuck is that?" his visitor asks, and Ashley says, "That's fucking Tiffany's missing-persons report! They think I killed that bitch for real!" Then he nearly giggles, a sound that, when Lisa Daniels first saw the video, made her weep.

It is what Detective Moeller and the other investigators have on him. They don't have a body, so they don't have the moment-the moment of Tiffany's death. What they do have is what preceded what they think is the moment and what followed. What they have are accounts of Ashley's volatility and callousness. What they have, most of all, are Ashley's lies. But that doesn't mean they have Ashley.

Ashley tells the story of the summer of 2013 as a tragic romance in which he and Tiffany meet, fall in love, struggle, and are irrevocably parted by mysterious circumstances. Friends of both Tiffany and Ashley tell a different story entirely. They fought. When they lived at the motel, they once fought with such intensity that police were called-but, as Ashley says, "they come in, looked at the room, checked her arms, and we were all fine." And when they lived in the trailer, they fought with such intensity that, according to Rachel Griner, who lived with them, they were eventually evicted. "Some nights, after they fought, she'd come into my bed and sleep like a little sister."

Of equal interest to investigators is what Stephen Weinstein calls "the lying part" of Ashley's statements-the statements that are not only untrue but easily proved false. For instance, Ashley told me he pulled a knife at Walmart, and he told Weinstein he pulled a gun. He did neither, according to the video. He told me he called Tiffany's cell phone from the IHOP. He didn't, according to investigators reviewing his phone records. What's more, he couldn't have. Sheila Fuller remembers him showing her Tiffany's phone; Ashley himself remembers that Tiffany had her phone in the handbag seized at Walmart before she ran. He is a person who lies when he doesn't have to, either because he is heedless of the consequences or because he knows that there are no consequences-because he knows that proving him a liar is different from proving him a killer. "I mean, if people point fingers and it comes to a day when I have to go to court on it, we will have to go to court, you see what I mean? And I will have to put it on a jury of my peers to decide whether or not I did something."

Which is what makes the video of him belittling Tiffany in front of a female visitor so different. I mention it to him after one of his professions of concern for Tiffany. "You don't sound in that tape the way you do now," I say. "You don't sound like, you know, the caring guy." And it is the one thing, in a nearly three-hour conversation, that seems to unsettle him. It is the one thing that seems, indeed, to embarrass him-that causes his pale cheeks to redden, his hands to disappear from the table, his wide-awake right eye to become more arresting than his sleepy left one. "Yeah, well, you got to think about this too," he says. "We're going to sit with other people and have different conversations, and yeah, my tone of voice may change, but sometimes words can be taken out of context. You understand what I'm saying? And yeah, sometimes Tiffany could be a bitch, okay? But never like that, okay? Sometimes you have to make a persona while you're in places like this, okay? And it's not that I did it to try and be cute or funny; it's just a way of me trying to push it off of me like it's not something that bugs me. But in turn it really does. You see what I mean?"

I do. What he is saying is that he is performing on the tape-that in prison he is acting like a hard-ass to cover the dangerous fact that he is heartbroken. But all that does is let me know that he is performing for me right now, brilliantly, consummately, right down to the sleepy eye.

On the early morning of March 13, 2014-exactly six months after Tiffany's disappearance-a multi-jurisdictional drug-enforcement task force knocked down the door of the house in Powder Springs that turned out to be the last house Tiffany ever lived in. They found, in Jonnie Moeller's words, "dog poop and needles everywhere." They found firearms, meth, and a few bags of weed. They found two children living in squalor, one of whom was Charlie Caudle. And they also found her father, Ashley.

They wound up arresting eight people and remanding the two children to the temporary custody of social services. The arrests were beside the point, however, or at least incidental to the larger cause of finding Tiffany Whitton. "I orchestrated that," says Detective Moeller, working in cooperation with the major-crimes prosecutor of Cobb County, a rigorous straight arrow named Jesse Evans. The raid was the culmination of the faith that every single investigator on the case has shared from the start: that someone knows what happened to Tiffany Whitton. Someone knows but is too scared-or too loyal, or too uncaring, or maybe just too damned high-to speak up. All of the people arrested in the house in Powder Springs knew Ashley; many had known him since childhood. They had to know … and so the prosecutor and the detective formed a collaboration intended to get them to talk, with the detective making arrests and the prosecutor offering special consideration to anyone willing to talk to the detective.

Four months later, the strategy had provided enough information for the police to execute a search warrant on a house in Marietta whose mailbox has a flame design-the house where Ashley grew up and where his mother, Peggy Bailey, lives still. They came in force; they came with cadaver dogs and shovels; they dug in the yard and they dug in the crawl space; and when Peggy Bailey resisted too vigorously, they restrained her. "They put my mother in handcuffs," Ashley says, "right in front of my daughter." They found a few things they sent to the crime lab of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but they didn't find Tiffany, and then, for a long time, they found . . . nothing.

"It all kind of died off for a while," Jonnie Moeller says. "We weren't getting a lot." And yet Tiffany was still out there, and so was Ashley, and so was the implacable figure of Lisa Daniels. As long as Lisa couldn't rest, neither could Detective Moeller. After a year of trying to find Tiffany Whitton, she left the case and went to teach at Marietta's police academy. "I felt guilty about leaving," she says, "but I've never had a case like that in my ten years as a detective. Not being able to bring it to a resolution … well, that was very stressful for me."

She was replaced by a taciturn, shiny-headed detective named Mike Freer, and in the summer of 2015, he seemed to get a break through the auspices of the prosecutor, Jesse Evans. Cobb County was prosecuting what Freer calls "a big-time meth trafficker"; the trafficker had information about Ashley Caudle. It wasn't direct information; the trafficker wasn't a witness. But he'd heard that Ashley and some associates had driven to Lake Allatoona, an hour north of Atlanta, and thrown a barrel filled with concrete off the side of the Bethany Bridge. He'd even heard that the weight of the barrel had damaged the bridge, and when Detective Freer drove up to Allatoona, he found the spot the informer had described. Using sonar, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources targeted a large, heavy object forty feet under the water, and on September 25, 2015, two divers from the Georgia State Patrol went to find it, with Freer watching from above.

Lisa knew the spot. She knew it indeed, all too well. "That's where we slip our boat. When I found out that that's where they were diving, I almost lost my mind. Do you know how many times I go over that water in the summertime? And you're telling me that she's been there the whole time? Are you kidding me?"

The divers found the object that the DNR had targeted. It was not a barrel containing Tiffany. It was a piece of concrete, left over from the construction of the bridge. The dive was the last search conducted for Tiffany Whitton, and in January 2016, the Marietta Police Department referred her unsolved homicide-her presumed death-to Cobb County's newly formed Cold Case Unit.

Three months after Tiffany disappeared, her former boyfriend Jason Zuccarini began banging on the door of a woman living in his neighborhood. It was four o'clock in the morning and he was psychotic, raving that he was being pursued by men with guns out of revenge for a crime against a woman that Zucc swore he didn't commit. When she wouldn't let him in, he kicked down the door in a rage, and although he called 911 himself and allowed her to bandage his hands, he terrorized her and her children until the police arrived. An hour after he was taken away, one of the children came downstairs from the bathroom in which Zucc had been hiding. In his hands he held a butcher knife wrapped in a towel. "Mommy?" he said. "Why did you hide a knife in the bathroom?"

By the account of Stephen Weinstein, Jason Zuccarini was one of the last people who saw Tiffany the night she disappeared. He got high with her at Weinstein's; later, he drove with Weinstein to pick up Ashley at the IHOP; he searched for her and waited for her to return. Three months later, hearing baleful voices, he broke down a woman's door and menaced her and her family. Neither Jonnie Moeller nor Jesse Evans has ever considered him a person of interest in Tiffany's disappearance, but Ashley Caudle has. When I met him in prison, I asked what he, Weinstein, and Zucc had done when they left the IHOP; he told me that he and Weinstein had gone back to Weinstein's apartment and gotten high.

"Where was Zucc?"

"Zucc was in his car in the parking lot."

"He didn't come inside?"

"Uh-uh … it's a new possibility to look at," Ashley said, leaving no doubt about one thing: If Jason Zuccarini had done harm to Tiffany Whitton, Ashley would have ratted him out long ago.

Ashley has been the only suspect from the moment Detective Moeller spoke to him, and he remains the only suspect today. Has the fixation on Ashley been detrimental to the investigation? Has it led investigators to ignore the possibility that as Tiffany ran barefoot across the parking lot, a stranger offered her help and then carried her to either a new life or an awful death? They do not believe so, and Lisa Daniels is among many who refuse to believe so, and who think that Tiffany-known for her vicious temper and for fighting, in her mother's words, "like a man"-would never have acceded to her own demise. Here is what they do believe:

That Tiffany, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist on the morning of September 13, 2013.

That it is hard to disappear, but that she did so completely, leading to the presumption of her death.

And that whatever happened happened then, happened that morning, sometime after she ran out of the Walmart and sometime before Ashley drove the truck back to the house in Powder Springs, not long after sunrise. Did he in fact begin calling jails, hospitals, and even old boyfriends in search of Tiffany, as he insists he did? Yes. Did he tell his probation officer that she was missing two weeks after she ran out of the Walmart? It appears, from records, that he did. Did he also clean the truck, as investigators insist he did? Yes-but he explains that he always cleaned the truck, nasty and full of junkie paraphernalia as it was.

It is a narrow window for a murder, especially for a murder artfully executed, with no real evidence and no telltale corpse left behind. And that's what Ashley has on his side, what he knows he has on his side: the question of how he could have possibly pulled it off. When I asked him if he thought Tiffany was dead, he pointed at his heart with his pale fingers and gave this answer:

"You know, I'm always going to say she's not. To me, Tiffany is that one person that I care about. She's my best friend and my everything. I'm not gonna-I refuse to believe that she's dead. You see what I mean? In my heart, she's still alive with me. You see what I mean? Until somebody can come to me and be like, 'This is what happened'-that's when I will have to believe that something terrible happened to Tiffany. You see what I mean?"

It is the great irony of Tiffany's afterlife: Of all the people I interviewed, the only one who insists that Tiffany is still alive is the primary "person of interest" in her presumed death.

Look at her now. She has just moved with her husband and daughter and granddaughter-Tiffany's daughter-to a new house. She sits at the kitchen table, one of the few pieces of furniture in a house for now bereft of both furniture and memories. "I was sad when we moved here," Lisa says. "There are no memories of her. We've moved to a place where Tiffany has never lived." There is the smell of new paint, as insidious and remorseless as the smell of rot, and there is her voice, echoing in the emptiness like the slamming of a door.

It is February 23, 2016-893 days since Tiffany disappeared. Yesterday ended the way all of Lisa's yesterdays end, with Lisa saying goodnight to Tiffany and asking for help in finding her; this morning unfolded the way so many of her mornings do, with a message about Tiffany reaching her on Facebook. This time, somebody claimed to have seen her panhandling off an exit ramp just north of downtown Atlanta-Tiffany dressed like a hippie with a man dressed like a bum. Lisa knows it is not Tiffany, knows it can't be. She also knows that before long she will get in her car and drive to the exit and check to see if it is Tiffany, knows that she has no choice.

How long can this-she-go on? There is no answer; there is only absence, as endless as the void. She watched a TV show the other day on which the body of a missing woman was found after forty-one years. "I lost it," she says. "Forty-one years! I'm going to die without knowing what happened to her. My mom's going to die without knowing what happened to her."

She has been, from the start, almost as haunted by Ashley's presence in her life as she has been by Tiffany's absence; she has been obsessed with making sure that he knows she is out there, in the void along with her daughter, and that he never thinks of Tiffany without seeing Lisa's face. In the end, though, she is almost protective of Ashley; when she prays at night she hears herself praying for him: that he doesn't get sick; that he doesn't get killed; that he doesn't die in prison. "Do you know how close I've come to offering Ashley money?" she asks, sickened by the sound of her own sentence. Now she finds herself dreading the prospect of justice being done without Tiffany being found, because "if there's a conviction, it's over-nobody's going to be looking for her anymore." Of course, she is not quite right; there will always be one person still looking for Tiffany Whitton.

But she will be all alone.

From the first time I met Lisa Daniels, in January 2015, she made me aware of a curious anomaly in her daughter's disappearance, which is that all activity from Tiffany ended as of September 13, 2013, except a birthday message she sent on Facebook to her half brother, Blake Whitton, on or around January 5, 2014. Lisa regarded it as evidence that Ashley still had Tiffany's phone and was using it to throw people off his trail. Investigators agreed; indeed, they never called Blake Whitton. But I did, on March 19, 2016, and asked about the time Tiffany seemed to contact him.

"Yes," he said, "she called me about five days after my birthday."

"She called you?"

"Yes, on one of those calling apps, with a weird return number. I wasn't going to answer it, but I did, and it was Tiffany, apologizing for calling late."

"Are you sure it was her?"

"Well, she called me by my nickname. She said, 'Hey, Mudbug, how are you?' She always called me Mudbug."

"Have you ever told this to the police?"

"No, they never called me."

It is doubtful that he is lying; as Lisa says, he has no reason to. But it is also doubtful he is telling the truth. He's probably misremembering, mixing up a previous conversation with the birthday message he received on Facebook. After all, his half sister, Tiffany Whitton, stepped into the void on the morning of September 13, 2013. She ceased to exist. But Jesse Evans, the prosecutor, now has no choice but to try to obtain phone records, to see if it's possible she simply ran away and never came back, numbered among the missing but not among the dead.

Additional reporting by Julia Black.

From the MAY 2016 Issue of Esquire.