You’ve probably heard a little bit about this case, but two Indiana-based mothers disappeared within about five weeks of each other this summer. Joelle Lockwood was first — that was back on July 9th, and she was last seen walking in Evansville. (There appears to be “some drama” in her life.) Kristy Kelly was next — she disappeared after hanging out with friends at a local VFW until 1:30am last Friday night. The VFW was in Boonville, which is about 18 miles from Evansville. This article has most of the details, including this spooky line:
What happened to Kelley after she left the VFW is a mystery. Somewhere between the lounge and her parents’ house — a distance of less than 2 miles, according to her dad – both Kelley and her 2003 Nissan Xterra vanished without a trace.
Two miles in a car should be about two minutes, so that’s a very narrow window for any type of abduction, etc. There are a couple of facts around it of interest, though:
- She stayed about 15 minutes later than her friends did.
- Apparently it was just her, the owner and a new bartender.
- The video footage they have of the car driving in the direction of her home is grainy enough that you can’t tell who is driving.
- She left her cell phone at the bar, hence there’s no “pinging” detection to be had.
Here’s her dad on that last point:
“It’s really odd that she would had forgotten her cellphone at the VFW,” Scales said. “She’s 27, so she and her cellphone are pretty much inseparable. As soon as she realized that, she would have gone back for it, but she didn’t.”
The two women are similar-looking, as well:
Kristy Kelley is described as a 135-pound, 5-foot-5-inch white woman with long brown hair and blue eyes.
Joelle Ann Lockwood is a 125-pound, 5-foot-3-inch white woman with brown eyes, brown hair and two tattoos, a Playboy bunny on her right shoulder and a design on the back of her neck.
Both were wearing tank tops and blue jean shorts when they disappeared about 18 miles apart.
As always, WebSleuths has a couple of nuggets here — for example, Kristy’s father is apparently a corrections officer. There’s also this, rightfully mentioned as some central questions:
Finding the car is the key to the whole case. If she was abducted, there limited means by which an abductor can make a car “disappear”. While a vehicle traveling a cruising speed can travel quite a ways and be propelled into deep water, it is much harder to get a driverless car into water where it won’t be found. There are limited places where this might work (reservoirs with steep slops, piers with road access ect.) These sort of places need to be checked. Most of these places are fairly remote and the abductor would then have to deal with the problem of getting back to his own car or home. Two people could do the abduction but that is most unusual. If the car turns up 100 miles or more from Boonville, a whole lot of different possibilities open up.
There’s no direct evidence linking these two cases, and we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions — but there needs to be some deep investigation into the possible connection. 20 miles apart, similar builds, similar clothes, etc. It’s possible someone in southwestern Indiana has “a type.” Terrifying, but possible.
