Heather Teague case is full of strange, complicated leads. Here are some.

EVANSVILLE – A Kentucky State policeman had just finished shopping around Christmas in 2015 when he saw “the most interesting thing.”

A homeless woman held a cardboard sign near the intersection of U.S. 41 outside the Terre Haute, Indiana, mall. Her teeth were mostly gone, and she looked like she'd been living on the streets and addicted to drugs for years.

It was sad, but that wasn’t what grabbed his attention. He recognized her. And to his shock, she strongly resembled a woman who had been missing for decades.

“She could have been a 43-year-old Heather Teague,” he wrote in an internal email to a KSP lieutenant six days later, on Dec. 28, 2015. “I know what you are thinking … but she was a year ahead of me in high school and I did have a class with her at (Madisonville Community College), so I know what she looks like.”

Teague vanished on Aug. 26, 1995, when a shirtless man with a thick beard and thicket of hair allegedly emerged from the trees on the Kentucky side of Newburgh Beach and dragged the sunbathing 23-year-old away.

An eyewitness watching through a telescope on the Indiana side of the Ohio River reported the abduction, but he waited too long to do so. By the time police arrived, the former cheerleader and homecoming queen was gone.

Investigators eventually zeroed in Marvin Ray “Marty" Dill, a 30-year-old with a criminal record who had sported a mountain-man look in the past. He also owned a red Ford Bronco that matched the description of one seen at the beach that day.

Five days later, however, he shot and killed himself as police surrounded his trailer in Poole, Kentucky.

Heather’s mother, Sarah Teague, has long said Dill was bald and clean-shaven around the time of her daughter’s disappearance and couldn’t have been the abductor the eyewitness described. His lawyer, William Polk, told KSP the same thing mere hours before Dill committed suicide.

In the almost 29 years since, no one but the people responsible can say for sure what happened to Heather Teague. The policeman's email was one of countless promising, false or maddening leads stuffed in more than 100 pages of case files obtained by the Courier & Press late last year. Provided by Sarah Teague, the pages depict a case ensconced in rumors, speculation and pain.

Police reports dryly recount stories of people who came forward years after the fact to recount overheard conversations between potential suspects – people they claim said they were there when Heather was taken, or that supposedly know her fate after she disappeared in the tree line.

The same names pop up over and over, but no arrests have ever been made.

There are print-offs from rumor-riddled and long-dead Internet message boards; an autopsy report for a woman found dead in Southern Illinois who family and authorities briefly feared could be Heather. Then there’s the long list of items Heather left behind in her car that day. Her hairbrush, her notebook: the detritus of a normal life that she never expected to dissipate on a dirty beach in late summer.

What the file doesn’t contain, however, are answers.

That’s something Sarah Teague has been seeking for almost 30 years. She had to sue KSP to obtain the case file, and she still struggles to receive updates on the investigation. To fill that vacuum, she fields tips herself, calls potential sources, and pores over records.

She’s heard terrible, graphic rumors about what could have happened to her daughter. But she still keeps going.

“All these horrible stories we’ve heard,” she said. “… But someday we’ll have Heather back. And the answers.”

Here are some of the lesser-known leads that appear in police case files.

The homeless woman

The policeman’s account of the homeless woman appears late in the file. It was collected a little more than two years before a judge ordered investigators to disclose their records to Sarah.

In the email, he “wondered” if Terre Haute police might be able to obtain surveillance footage of the intersection to see if he could get a better look at the woman.

“One would think if she was homeless that odds are law enforcement would have had some contact with her,” he wrote. “Unless she is really good at staying off the grid.”

According to a handwritten note scrawled by an unidentified investigator, someone at KSP contacted a Terre Haute police officer a little more than a month after the policeman sent the email. But there’s no account of what that officer said.

The Courier & Press reached out to the officer listed in the files. He never responded.

Sarah Teague said KSP never told her about the homeless woman. She found out about the sighting after reading the case file.

“When you hear a description like that, you kind of put a picture in your mind and heart and soul of what it could be,” she said. “That one was really tough, to think that she was out there and had maybe been hurt and didn’t even know who she was or where she was.”

More: Mother, attorney seek call to police in Heather Teague case. KSP has said it doesn't exist

Someone allegedly used Heather’s social security number after her death

In November, the Courier & Press filed a records request with KSP for “audio of all calls made to KSP Post 16, as well as any 911 audio the KSP has in its possession related to the disappearance of Heather Teague.”

KSP eventually provided 10 files. In one, a woman calls a dispatcher with an urgent message.

Woman: I’m calling to let you know Heather Teague is OK. Will you please let her mom know that?

Dispatcher: No ma’am, ’cause I don’t know that. Just because you tell me that don’t mean I know that.

Woman: I’m OK.

Dispatcher: You’re not Heather Teague, ma’am.

Woman: You think I’m joking?

Dispatcher: If you say you’re Heather Teague, yes ma’am I do.

The conversation deteriorates from there. The woman insists she’s Heather. But when the dispatcher asks her to speak to a detective – or just say where she is – she gets angry and hangs up the phone.

Another phone call, however, carried more weight. Sarah Teague calls it the “only lead we’d ever had that Heather was alive.”

Sometime in 2002, another daughter of Sarah's received a collect call. When the recording prompted the caller to identify themselves, the voice on the other end simply said the daughter's name.

“That’s when she thought it was Heather,” Sarah Teague said.

They reported the call to the FBI and asked them to put a trace on the number, she said. And that same year, in May, something strange happened.

According to a file provided by Teague, an FBI crime analyst ran Heather’s social security number through the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and found that Heather’s SSN had been used "several times" since her death.

The report came back to an address in Newport, Kentucky. A KSP detective eventually got in touch with the analyst, who suggested investigators speak with neighbors who lived near the home. Even more importantly, they should see if anyone had filed for a new driver’s license using Heather’s information.

No one ever tried to get a license, the file says. But a subsequent subpoena to a credit reporting agency reportedly turned up two names associated with the Newport address. One was a woman named Tammy. The other was Heather’s sister.

Once the sister’s name came up, Sarah says, KSP must have figured it was a mistake and “didn’t do anything else” with the lead. She’s since called and sent KSP multiple emails about it, only to get no answers in return.

The Courier & Press asked KSP if they could explain how they followed up. Spokesman Trooper Corey King said he’d forward the question to the detective sergeant assigned to the investigation. There was no response as of Wednesday morning.

Dead bodies

There are millions of unbearable aspects to a missing person case. And one of them shows up multiple times in the files: anytime human remains were found – either locally or across the country – investigators had to see if they belonged to Heather.

And mere months after she disappeared, a horrifying discovery was made.

On Dec. 2, 1995, a 22-year-old man was target shooting in a wooded area in Lawrence County, Illinois, when he saw a skull lying on the forest floor. At first, he thought it was a remnant of a Halloween hayride. Then he saw the rest of the body wrapped in a sleeping bag.

Police later said the state of the remains indicated they had been kept inside – away from outdoor scavengers – before being placed in the woods.

The remains were soon shipped to the Vanderburgh County Coroner’s morgue for tests. A dental comparison ID’d the person as 44-year-old Pamela Foddrill, a special-needs woman from Linton, Indiana.

She'd last been seen standing outside the grocery store in her hometown, on her way to buy some Carnation Instant Breakfast powder.

Her exact cause of death remained a mystery for years. But in 1999, after Foddrill’s mother did an investigation of her own, four people were convicted in Pamela’s death. That included Roger Leon Long and Jerry Russell, who are both serving life sentences for murder, prison records state.

Foddrill’s postmortem records take up a sizable chunk of Teague’s files. And it wasn’t the last time another tragedy inserted itself into the case.

In 2021, the Kentucky Medical Examiner’s office ruled that a skull found near the Ohio River didn’t belong to Teague. That followed a similar occurrence in 2018, when remains discovered in a remote spot in Corydon, Kentucky turned out to belong to Dianne Henry, a 64-year-old woman with dementia who had wandered away from her home 10 years earlier.

Heather Teague would be turning 52

“This is what 28 years looks like.”

That’s how Sarah Teague sums up the piles of rumors and leads that cloud her daughter’s case.

But to her, the confusion started well before the files grew fat. She criticizes KSP for focusing on Dill – and for ignoring Polk, who told investigators five days after Teague’s disappearance that Marty couldn’t have been the man the eyewitness saw on the beach that day.

In a previously unreleased recording the Courier & Press first reported on last year, Polk met with investigators hours before they planned to surround Dill’s home that night.

“He does not fit the description. At least the description that’s been released,” he told them. “He’s shorter. He’s lighter. He does not have a bushy beard. He does not have bushy hair. His beard is very short. And his hair, I’m told, is now very short.”

He also cautioned them against raiding Dill’s trailer. If you go after dark, Polk said, he might commit suicide. KSP went ahead with their plans anyway – a daytime raid could be dangerous for law enforcement, they said – and Dill reportedly shot himself while he holed up inside the trailer.

Teague believes the police sketches of the suspect released right after Heather’s abduction were cobbled together using Dill’s driver’s license photo – which showed him with a beard and long hair – and the body of another man. She believes that other person could be a man who grew up in Henderson and was later convicted of killing a woman in Ohio. According to authorities there, that man was in Henderson around the time of Heather’s disappearance.

Now it’s almost 29 years later, and Sarah keeps working. She started a petition to get KSP to redact a file she says contains names of suspects in the case.

She wants to collect signatures in honor of Heather’s birthday. She would turn 52 on April 25 – meaning she’s been missing almost six years longer than the time she spent here.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Heather Teague case is full of strange, complicated leads