25/10/2025
⭐️Spotlight Saturday. Today I would like to shine a light on a cold case out of Shawnee- please See and help find Sandy Pathresa Rea. Sandy was just 17 when she was last seen in Shawnee on September 19, 1984. The mystery of where or what happened to Sandy spans over 4 decades.
Sandy’s case still haunts Shawnee. There is no body and no crime scene. There are eye witnesses that have helped create a timeline for law enforcement. Over the years, Shawnee Police Department has interviewed more than 200 people and followed many possible leads, but have ultimately ended up at a dead end.
What is known for sure is that on September 19, 1984, Sandy was at the Windsor Bowling Alley in Shawnee. A cousin worked there and remembers Sandy making several calls on the pay phone looking for a ride. No one knows who agreed to pick her up or where they went…. Sandy simply vanished.
There has been speculation that Sandy was a bit of a party girl and may have gone out to a party that night, although there is no solid proof to support that theory. One possible theory is that her possibly abusive boyfriend, who she had been living with a month before her disappearance, knows more than he is sharing. One of Sandy’s cousins has shared with investigators that Sandy’s boyfriend had been abusive, which is why she moved out in the month prior to her disappearance.
Over the years there have been many stories shared and theories exchanged about where Sandy went, who she was with and what happened to her in the hours or even days after that phone call. Many searches, including numerous organized digs with cadaver dogs, have been conducted at various locations over the years in hopes of finding Sandy’s remains, but nothing has ever been found.
Sandy’s cousin, Johnny Price, has spent the last 15 years of his life doing his own research and probe into Sandy’s disappearance in hopes of finding her and bringing some peace to Sandy’s family. “When I started this 15 years ago, I never thought 15 years later we would still be trying to find her,” Price said, talking about this being the 40th anniversary of her disappearance.
While many scenarios of Sandy’s fate have been explored since 1984, he said the worst part is not being able to find Sandy’s remains for a proper burial. “I’ll never stop looking – it’s in my heart to find her and bring closure,” he said. Having a missing loved in a family leaves a void that never goes away, he added.
The Oklahoma State Medical Examiner’s office, through securing additional resources, recently completed testing on some unidentified remains that were found 26 years ago in Seminole County. As a result, those remains were positively identified as Melody Garton Jones, who was 19 when she went missing from her Earlsboro home in 1983. Her husband, Paul Richard Jones, 20, was found murdered. While the identification of Melody’s remains provide some answers, what happened is still unknown and that case remains unsolved.
There are more unidentified remains in evidence at the Medical Examiner’s office and it’s possible some could be Sandy, but investigators can’t give up looking either. DNA samples from Sandy’s family have been on file for years just in case they are ever needed to make an identification.
Sandy is also still listed in the database of The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Shawnee cold case has had many different detectives working on it over the past 40 years. Shawnee Police Cpl. Vivian Lozano told one reporter that the case remains assigned to a detective and investigators still follow leads in this case, although she said there has been nothing new in the case in quite a while.
Sandy is described as 5’2, 111 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. She has double pierced ears, freckles, and her right ear bends down, as it is smaller than her left. Sandy was last seen wearing pink jogging pants, grey half shirt with the initials 'SHS' for Shawnee High School on the front and was wearing thong shoes, size 6.5-7.5. Anyone with information about the Sandy Rea’s case can contact the Shawnee Police Crimestoppers line, 405-273-0989. Please reference case H0738. Please share and help her family.
Research:
https://www.namus.gov/MissingPersons/Case #/6559/details?nav
https://www.missingkids.org/poster/NCMC/603597/1
https://www.news9.com/story/5e3486c9527dcf49dad78958/oklahoma-case-remains-unsolved-34-years-later
https://www.news-star.com/2024/09/decades-of-questions-sandy-rea-case-still-a-mystery-40-years-later/
https://okcfox.com/news/local/family-still-seeking-answers-40-years-after-sandy-reas-disappearance
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna434521?fbclid=IwVERFWANiafBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHsUl9_A6wv1wqqpSkIFt5cCXHA755uFyPjEkti6sJQL7uv0ucXdhqi_oG1zp_aem__d663duaMtaDMy4xc4yxEA
https://youtu.be/jfQOh7_paLA?si=2UxdyqiHO3gGsUDy
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/175Ah6E3yp/?mibextid=wwXIfr
