Editor’s note: Nine years ago today, Tammy Kingery disappeared from her family home in Edgefield County. Tammy Kingery is the mother of Augusta Press photography stringer Cat Kingery. This story examines what law enforcement has done to try to locate Tammy Kingery. See Liz Wright’s associated story that looks at the impact of such a loss on the family.
It has been a long nine years for the family of Tammy Kingery and law enforcement who have devoted a decade trying to discover the fate of the woman who disappeared on this date in 2014.
According to Edgefield County Sheriff’s Investigator James Morgan, his office continues to place a priority on finding out what happened to Tammy Kingery, aged 37 at the time, who vanished from her Edgefield, S.C. home after leaving a note saying she’d gone for a walk.
While the case has been long cold, new clues have emerged that might eventually lead to a person of interest.
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According to the family, Kingery, a registered nurse, suffered from depression.
That morning, she called her husband, Park Kingery, and asked him to pick her up from work as she was not feeling well. Kingery had checked her blood pressure several times that morning at work and decided to go home and rest.
According to Park Kingery, he picked his wife up at 8:30 a.m., dropped her off at home where she put on her pajamas. He decided to take their two boys, aged 4 and 13 at the time, with him to run errands to give Tammy some peace and quiet while she rested.
Kingery says he dropped the older boy off at his grandmother’s house to cut her grass, then went shopping with the four-year-old at Walmart, Lowes and CVS. The family arrived back home sometime between 10:15 a.m. and 10:30 a.m.
Park Kingery has never been totally eliminated as a suspect, according to Morgan; but security camera footage backs up his alibi that he was nowhere near their home when Kingery disappeared.
It is also important to note that the aftermath of the disappearance caused Park Kingery total financial ruin.
“Suddenly, I was trying to raise three kids on one salary, and the house and cars were in Tammy’s name. There was nothing I could do. I ended up living in my parent’s basement at almost 50 years old,” Kingery said.
When Park Kingery returned home with his sons in-tow, he could not find his wife in the house. On the kitchen table along with her car keys, cell phone, wallet and ID, Kingery had left a note that read, “Honey, Went for a walk. Be back soon. I Love you.”
Park Kingery said he immediately sensed trouble since his wife was not prone to strike out on a walk in the hot temperatures.
“As soon as I saw the note, I knew something was wrong, and I went looking for her,” Kingery said.
The area around the home was heavily wooded, and Tammy Kingery was nowhere to be found.
Once the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Office was notified, a search of the area was coordinated using bloodhounds. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division was notified and a helicopter began scouring the woods from above.
The bloodhounds were unable to pick up a scent, leading many to believe that Kingery had been picked up by someone in a vehicle.
According to Weather Underground, the temperature reached a high of 98 degrees, about 20 degrees over normal. There had been no rain for many days, and the wind speed was a median of 10 knots, or about 12 miles per hour. Deputy Jonathan Adams, a bloodhound trainer with the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office says those are “challenging” conditions for bloodhounds to operate.
“The hotter the weather, skin cells will diminish, and the UV rays tend to kill off the human scent,” Adams said.
However, Adams states with almost certainty that if a body were decomposing in the woods in that degree of heat, the dogs would have found it. In fact, the dogs did find a dead dog in a plastic bag in a shed in a nearby area of the woods.
Over time, tips were sent in of possible sightings of Kingery, but none panned out.
In 2016, cops in Spartanburg, S.C. thought they may have found a promising lead the case when hunting for Kala Brown and Charlie Carver, a couple that had mysteriously disappeared. Brown was found chained up in a shed on property belonging to Todd Kohlhepp, and Carver’s body was found buried in a shallow grave.
According to NBC News, other bodies were found on the serial killer’s property, but none matched the DNA of Kingery.
“That lead was a total dead end,” Morgan said.
Six years after the disappearance, when it seemed that the case would remain cold forever, Caitlyn Kingery, Tammy’s daughter who was 15-years-old at the time of the disappearance, received a Facebook message from someone claiming to be “Chris Slade,” someone unknown to the younger Kingery.
The person offered to share information on the disappearance if Caitlyn Kingery would agree to spend an “intimate moment with him.” When Kingery asked if he was soliciting sex for information, he responded, “Your (sic) smart enough to know.”
Kingery continued to engage the stranger even after she noticed one of the images on the Facebook account was that of a cartoon rabbit in a sexually suggestive position chained to a bed.
“It was really creepy, but I just kept letting him talk,” Kingery said.
Over time, the stranger claimed he had “memories of NJROCT,” referring to Navy Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps; both Caitlyn and her younger brother Carter were in NJROTC at Strom Thurmond High School.
The messages then became more threatening.
The stranger began to relate that he knew what type of vehicle her father drove and that he accused Caitlyn and her father of having a sexual relationship. He told her he would expose her if she didn’t agree to have sex with him, writing: “FYI, I remember that encounter when I followed you and Daddy in the little black car…after njrotc.”
The stranger also stated, “In some way your dad and I have similar tastes but mine are of legal age, so I will honor my initial offer.”
“What he was saying was so ludicrous. It was crazy, and I began to get scared,” Kingery said.
Kingery says that she compiled all the texts including a profile on an instagram account she discovered with the same user ID that listed the person as having “combat training,” and took the information to the Sheriff’s Office; however, she says that she never heard back from the cops.
When this was mentioned to Inv. Morgan, he replied that there must have been some sort of inter-office snafu as he had never been made aware of the messages.
“I had no idea that those messages were out there, but I do now, and we are definitely going to follow up,” Morgan said.
Anyone with information on the disappearance of Tammy Kingery is asked to contact the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Office at 803-637-5337.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
