People go missing every day. Disappearances sometimes remain unsolved for decades. But there’s something unusual about Carey’s case. After years without answers, family members made a shocking discovery in 2010: Police never opened an investigation. For nearly 20 years, no search was conducted, and no one was questioned. And Carey isn’t the only one missing.
From radio reporter George Hale in partnership with KETR public radio in northeast Texas, Buried follows Carey's family as they pursue the truth about her disappearance, and about some of the people who let it happen. You can subscribe to Buried on the NPR One app or wherever you listen to podcasts.
In 2018, Buried earned two First Place awards from the Texas Associated Press Broadcasters in Austin, TX, for best investigative report and best use of actuality-production in the Radio II division.
In Episode 01, Carey's older brother Glenn recalls last seeing his sister at a convenience store in Quinlan, TX. He says she was crying, after an incident with her ex-boyfriend Cody.
Glenn and others say Carey's father Howard sought help from the local constable, Cullen Smith, to file a missing person report. Carey's son Brian was about to turn six in March 1991. He remembers seeing his mom walk out the door with a laundry basket, promising to return for his birthday.
Brian says that in the years to follow, his grandfather Howard would claim that people warned him to stop searching for Carey and threatened her children.
After two years without help from the Hunt County Sheriff’s Office, Episode 02 explores the family’s decision to launch its own investigation.
Carey’s sister Patricia Gager tracks down a mysterious hitchhiker who told Glenn she knew what happened to Carey. In letters from prison, the woman offers to help and draws a map of Carey’s ex-boyfriend’s family property.
Meanwhile, Carey’s second child Brandy Hathcock contacts the Texas Department of Public Safety to intervene with the sheriff’s office. A Texas Ranger discovers that Carey’s name isn’t in the Missing Person’s Clearinghouse. Her sisters spend months trying to submit DNA to Hunt County. Then a detective threatens to shut down the investigation over a dispute about forensic hypnosis, a controversial investigative technique.
Brandy and Brian remember in Episode 03 what they can about their mother, and how her disappearance shaped their childhoods and the adults they became.
Brandy's father Leonard dies suddenly in Dallas, under circumstances that Carey's younger sister Patricia views as suspicious. Carey was surrounded by friends and family who struggled with substance abuse problems, but few of them remember seeing her use hard drugs. Along with many on Leonard's side of the family, Carey's sister Patricia is skeptical that he died from an overdose or su***de.
According to Leonard's ex-girlfriend Shirley, there was a su***de note at the scene. She believes the Dallas Police Dept. overlooked it. This could explain why Leonard's death certificate lists the cause as accidental.
In Episode 04, Carey's family explains that the Hunt Co. Sheriff’s Office didn't interview her ex-boyfriend Cody in the years after they filed a missing person report, in 2010. One day in 2014, her son Brian takes matters into his own hands.
In a 7-minute call, Brian asks Cody about some of the things his grandfather told the family before passing away: rumors of a party and a fight in a place called Hawk Cove.
Cody tells Brian that’s what he remembers, too, the last time he saw Carey.
They were at a party, and so was a woman known as Cactus. Carey approached him and asked if he intended to sleep with Cactus that night. When he replied in the affirmative, she threw her drink in his face.
Everything cooled down after that, he says.
An east Texas woman named Janice explains in Episode 05 that she dated and lived with Cody for a year in Oklahoma.
Janice says that Cody told her a virtually identical story to the one he told Carey's son Brian on the phone the same year she met Cody: They were at a party, a woman named Cactus was there, and Carey ended up throwing a drink in Cody's face. And then she left.
Carey's sister and others find it difficult to believe Cody's description of having a drink thrown in his face, and then everything being fine afterwards.
But Janice says that sounds just like him. Despite her suspicions about what Cody might know, she finds it difficult to believe he was capable of murder. To the contrary, she says, Cody tended to deescalate arguments.
"He was so docile. Even our little arguments that we would get into ... it was over as quick as it started. And it was not mentioned again," she says.
In Episode 06, we learn what Cody told a detective about the last time he saw Carey. In the interview, Cody goes into detail about what happened at a party that he says took place in an area of Lake Tawakoni known as Hawk Cove.
Cody was speaking to Sgt. Jeff Haines from the Hunt Co. Sheriff's Office in an interrogation room at the Tishomingo Police Dept., in Tishomingo, OK.
Cody expands his list of people who were at the party to include someone with the last name Jones. Cody also says someone with the last name Reed was there; he says Reed was possibly dating Carey at the time.
In prior conversations, Cody had said that Jim, the host of the party, a woman known only as Cactus, his best friend Todd and a guy who was always pulling on his mustache were there.
Cody adamantly denies involvement in Carey's disappearance and tells the detective that she left the party in a brown Chevy Camaro.
In Episode 07, a Hunt County detective identifies a person of interest in Carey Mae Parker’s disappearance: Her dad.
In June 2013, Carey Mae Parker's sister traveled to the Hunt Co. Sheriff's Office to retrieve documents related to her sister's arrest in February 1991.
During Patricia's visit, the detective assigned to Carey's case, Sgt. Jeff Haines, conducts an extensive interview that touches upon rumors about Howard, Carey's father.
Haines relates a source's claim that Howard murdered Carey and buried her in a cemetery plot reserved for her mother and children. Patricia uncovers records showing that Howard didn't own any of the plots until 1995.
Patricia also tells Haines that her father admitted to killing at least one person and burying him in an unfinished well near his home in the Waco Bay area of Lake Tawakoni. Neighbors say the area has never been searched.
Carey's son Brian reveals in Episode 08 that his grandfather Howard admitted to killing someone decades earlier in a foreign country.
He says this happened after a fight at a bar during Howard's deployment to Germany during the Vietnam war.
Brandy, Carey's daughter, says that Howard told her about being attacked in Germany. But she says he never mentioned killing someone later.
Carey's sister Patricia, meanwhile, contacts a man who Howard claims was present before he killed at least one person and buried him in a well.
Mike, the son of Howard's neighbor Shorty, who owned the well, says the police have never searched his property. But others in Carey's family say the Hunt Co. Sheriff's Office has approached Mike in the past.
Carey isn’t the only missing person with ties to Waco Bay. Episode 09 focuses on Sarah Elizabeth Kinslow, who was 14 years old on May 1, 2001, when her father dropped her off at middle school in Greenville, TX.
Friends say she intended to skip school and meet at a cemetery. They say she never arrived.
Her family suspected an 18-year-old named Curtis Bell from the Quinlan area might have had a role in her disappearance. He was later arrested for sexually assaulting a different minor.
In 2009, Bell pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a child and received a 10-year suspended sentence. In 2012, his probation was revoked.
Meanwhile, searches with cadaver dogs in an area of Lake Tawakoni called Waco Bay have not resulted in any new evidence. Sarah's parents both suspect that her disappearance is connected to the Lake Tawakoni area, and Waco Bay in particular.
