In the almost three decades since her daughter vanished, Sarah Teague has never been filled with more hope.
Just last year, she unearthed previously unreleased audio in case files that cast serious doubt on the Kentucky State Police’s main suspect. It helped spark her decision to file a $29 million federal lawsuit against KSP and the FBI, accusing them of civil rights violations, wrongful death and negligence, among other charges.
She’s also fielded interest from podcast hosts and film producers. It all represents movement in an investigation where movement had been a rarity.
But one thing remains the same: the pain of missing her daughter.
Monday marked 29 years since Heather Teague vanished while reportedly sunbathing on Newburgh Beach in Kentucky. In a call to KSP Post 16, a man looking through a telescope from his home on the Indiana side of the Ohio River told a dispatcher he saw a shirtless, bearded man with wild hair emerge from a ragged grove of trees and drag Heather away.
The 23-year-old Webster County woman, who filled notebooks with poetry and spent her high school years as a popular cheerleader, hasn’t been seen since.
Sarah believes KSP botched the investigation by focusing on Marvin Ray “Marty” Dill – a man who, at one point in his life, matched the description of the supposed abductor. But she’s long said Dill was clean-shaven and bald at the time of Heather’s disappearance – and she has photos to prove it.
In that unearthed audio, Dill’s attorney, William Polk, said the same thing. Mere hours before authorities would surround Dill’s trailer in Poole, Kentucky, Polk told KSP his client didn’t match the man they were looking for.
Officials went ahead with the raid. And around 1 a.m. on Sept. 1 – five days after Heather disappeared – Dill reportedly shot and killed himself.
“Had there been honesty and integrity in this search for Heather, there would have been an alternative to ‘case being closed with Dill's death,’” Sarah Teague said.
She believes her lawsuit is rock solid. If things go her way, she thinks it could lead to a flood of new information – and maybe an answer to the awful question of what happened to her daughter.
“Knowing what I know now – that we could have had Heather back on Day 4 – it’s put a whole different light on everything,” she said. “Because I know without a doubt, even though it’s been 29 years, there’s so much that God wants to do with our story.”
Mysteries in the Heather Teague case
KSP spokesman Trooper Corey King forwarded the Courier & Press’ request for comment to investigators. As of Tuesday, no one had written back.
The KSP legal department also didn’t reply to questions about the lawsuit in July. The U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of Kentucky, meanwhile, declined to comment.
It’s the same silence that’s ensconced the Teague investigation for years. In May, Sarah hoped that would change when Commonwealth Attorney Herb McKee said Ramsey Dallum – an officer with the special prosecutions division of the state attorney general’s office – would handle any prosecution that comes up in the case.
But Teague said the only reply to the multiple emails she’s sent Dallum has been an out-of-office message. So last Friday, she sent summons to KSP, the FBI and the attorney general’s office. They have 20 days to respond.
In that absence of answers, mysteries have blossomed.
Take that phone call KSP fielded the day of the disappearance. Its file name in official records – or at least one of them; Teague said the audio was labeled six different ways – contains “13.07.59 – 13.15.49.” Teague believes that’s the duration of the call, listed in military time. King told the Courier & Press that was his guess, too.
That would mean the call to KSP came in around 1:08 p.m. and ended just before 1:16 p.m.
At the beginning of the call, however, the man tells the dispatcher “I just called Indiana State Police.” That doesn’t jibe with FBI records Teague forwarded to the Courier & Press. Those say ISP took a call at 1:15 p.m. – after that call to KSP, not before.
Then there’s the call Teague and her then-attorney, Chip Adams, say they heard at KSP headquarters in 2008. It was supposedly placed on Aug. 26, 1995, as well. In it, the dispatcher is female – not male like in the call that was released – and the reported eyewitness tells officials the abductor could have been wearing a wig or mosquito netting: details that appear nowhere in the official call and that could, if true, explain the discrepancy between Dill and the wild-haired abductor.
KSP has said the second call doesn’t exist.
“They maintain there’s only one. So the explanation is you fabricated the first one to bolster or validate the story they were trying to sell Sarah Teague from day one. Or two, there were two calls, but you lost one,” Adams told the Courier & Press last year. “That’s also a possibility, to just be objective about it. … And then the third possibility is we’re wrong. But I’m not.
“I’m 1,000 percent sure. That first call I heard had mosquito netting and wig, and the sexes between the two dispatchers were different,” he said.
Last year, KSP told the Courier & Press they didn't have anything in the case that hadn't been handed over to Teague and Adams.
'Our story is supposed to be told'
Those are just two of the countless mysteries stuffed within Heather's case file.
Obtained by the Courier & Press through Sarah Teague last year, it contains more than 100 pages of maddening leads. There are people who claim to have overheard confessions from potential suspects, and autopsy reports of other women found dead in the area. There’s even a 2015 email from a KSP officer who says he saw a homeless woman in Terre Haute who looked so much like Heather Teague that he had to report it.
In 2002, investigators discovered Heather's Social Security number had been used "several times" since her death. That realization came not long after her sister fielded a collect call from a person who identified herself only as "Heather."
The disparate information, along with a persistent lack of answers, led Sarah Teague to file her lawsuit. And it's left her with a sobering conclusion: no one truly knows what happened the day Heather disappeared.
All she knows for sure is that another person in the area that day saw Heather cross a dirt road. She was wearing her "John Lennon sunglasses." Later, she propped a blue lounge chair by the water – a seat still warm in a case gone cold.
Now, after all these years, her mother hopes it’s heating up.
“I just know our story is supposed to be told. It’s supposed to last this long. And I just want her back,” Sarah said. “It’s so cruel to not know what happened. But once again, I know, just like Alison Goodman wrote, ‘Once this is done it will be a wonder to all mankind.’
“And it is. That’s why Heather was born. That’s why I was born. And I believe with all my heart this will be the last Aug. 26 without knowing. I may have said that in the past. I probably have. But I still believe it.”
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Kentucky woman Heather Teague has been missing for 29 years
