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 the impact of such a loss on the Kingery family. See Scott Hudson’s associated story that looks at what law enforcement has done to try to locate Tammy Kingery.
For any family, the sudden disappearance or tragic loss of a loved one seems as though it would always happen to someone else or with some warning. However, most who survive such a trauma come to realize that is not the case – at least that is how the Kingery family described it.
Nine years ago, on Sept. 20, 2014, a clear, sunny day, the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Office was alerted by Park Kingery to the sudden vanishing of his wife Tammy, a seemingly everyday mother of three.
Originally from Crown Point, Ind., and born in 1977, Tamara Sue Russell, later known in the North Augusta community as Tammy Kingery, went missing from her home on Mealing Road.
With few to no leads, family members were left wondering, and neighbors turned to accusations.
For mother Carolyn Russell and daughter Caitlyn Kingery, the nightmare of “not knowing” will remain a shadow the longer the case remains cold.
According to her mother, Tammy was the sweetest child a parent could hope for.
“She was just the best little girl. She was so good and so sweet,” said Russell. “She had a really sweet disposition, and she loved baby dolls more than anything.”
Describing Tammy as a second mother to her youngest sister, Russell said she could always count on Tammy to care for her sisters.
“I remember when I was pregnant with my third child, she was about 10 years old, and she said to me, ‘Oh, thank you, Mommy! I wanted a baby,’” said Russell. “It was so sweet.”
Ever the caring person, Tammy began her career working as a neonatal nurse, but quickly learned she was best suited for attending older adults.
“It was too sad for her. The heartache it would cause her to take care of a sick baby made her change directions,” said Russell. “But being a mom was always something she wanted to do.”
Growing up, Caitlyn Kingery said her mother ensured a great childhood filled with “good food” and lovely memories of the outdoors.
“It was kind of like the childhood dream,” said Caitlyn Kingery. “The summers were always really nice. Playing in the yard, gardening and our road trips … it was really nice. Those are the core memories with her.”
Piling into the car with her two younger brothers every school break, road trips to Indiana became a family tradition, including special stops along the mountains.
“I think the reason that I am drawn to the mountains now is because that used to be our thing,” she said.
However, memories of Tammy took a turn for the worse when Park Kingery texted Caitlyn of her mother’s disappearance. Caitlyn was 15 years old the day everything changed forever.
“When I heard the news, I really didn’t know what to do. I had never heard my dad scared before when he called me,” she said. “I was kind of confused and in disbelief. Like it was just some sort of misunderstanding.”
But the panic and shock became very real factors in her young adult life, and she was never truly given the chance to process.
“It was devastating, because we were all so close,” said Russell.
Never taking a break from attending high school or being allowed reprieve from invasive forensic interviews, Caitlyn said the entire ordeal left her feeling numb and alone at times, especially when she was around peers who could not understand her pain.
“Everyone told me I was so strong, but really I just didn’t know how to react or process anything I was going through,” she said. “I truly believed she would be found soon, so I didn’t allow myself to think the worst … but my childhood was ripped away from me.”
No longer caring about school and regularly having to catch up on assignments, Caitlyn’s high school days were clouded with the fear of being told her mom was dead. As her friends worried about teenage boys and relationship firsts, Caitlyn often felt trapped in fear and like the town oddity.
“Everytime the phone would ring, I would get so nervous because I was just waiting for the day [the school] would call me to the office because the police found something,” she said. “I didn’t want to receive news like that sitting in the classroom with people I barely knew.”
For all involved, many had to step in to try and fill the void Tammy left. Since Cameron Kingery, the youngest boy, was only four years old when the incident occurred, Russell worried he would forget his mother altogether.
“There wasn’t anyone else who could watch him but me, so I practically lived there the first two years … I would ask Caitlyn to keep reminding him of his mom,” said Russell. “It wasn’t easy, and what I would say to myself all the time, because they’d have predicaments come up, is, ‘What do I think Tammy would want to happen in this situation?’”
While Caitlyn and Russell took turns being surrogate mothers to the younger boys in the household, Park Kingery juggled working to support three kids, being a father, looking for his missing wife and not losing face in the eyes of hateful “online detectives.”
“Everyone thinks they’re a Facebook investigator or couch detective,” Caitlyn said. “It probably affected my dad really badly though … after it had been about a week, he went out in public with friends to get his mind off things, like at the bowling alley, and someone called and left an anonymous tip to the police about him saying terrible things. So, he couldn’t even go out and try to enjoy himself.”
Park Kingery said he avoided reading forums or online comments, but no one has ever confronted him in person about it.
“I keep myself very busy, so I don’t think about [Tammy’s disappearance],” he said. “I had to figure out how to be the mom and dad, and try to raise three kids on my own.”
Harboring anger towards police for not doing enough investigating, members from the Russell and Kingery families felt utterly alone in their concern for Tammy’s disappearance, and felt unsupported by local Edgefield investigators.
“We were counting on them to be leading us on what to do and what questions to ask, but they never did,” said Carolyn Russell. “We felt like they weren’t helping us. It felt like I was bothering the police … after a year or two, you feel like, ‘Does it even matter now?’”
Slow going on fingerprinting, DNA collection and even checking work phone records, both families expressed hopelessness in the Edgefield County’s ability to properly handle the case and ever find conclusive results.
“A day never goes by that you don’t wonder. I used to really think that we would find her, or least by now have a conclusion to what happened,” said Russell. “You never stop looking, and I don’t want to pass on without ever knowing. It would just be a great comfort to at least know.”
Still looking for a tied-up Tammy in the back of cars while in parking lots, Russell said she was terrified of moving on and no one ever having a lead to her daughter’s whereabouts.
“I have a daughter in Indianapolis and one in Arkansas, so the one in Arkansas has really been wanting me to move there, and I’ve been wanting to, but I still have in the back of my head, ‘What if [Tammy] came home?’” she said. “For years, I used to leave the porch light on and the back door unlocked, hoping she would come home.”
While Russell worried in North Augusta, Caitlyn graduated high school and moved to Chicago for art school where she began to truly process her emotions within her creative work.
“I wanted people to know about her and my experience on a personal level, so people would care about the case more, and thinking of that outcome pushed me to do it more even though I was an emotional wreck,” said Caitlyn. “When I started the project, I got really bad anxiety over stuff that I normally wouldn’t let bother me.”
Although her artwork helped her in some ways, Caitlyn said navigating adult life entailed how to meet new people while struggling with hesitation about speaking on her mom’s disappearance.
“People would ask about my family whenever I’d make friends, and sometimes it would make me so nervous to talk about that,” she said. “I wouldn’t tell people right away at all.”
After a few years, Park Kingery and Cailtyn’s two brothers moved back to Indiana, and have remained there ever since.
But now that Caitlyn has moved back home to the CSRA, she is determined to buckle down and do everything in her power to get outside resources and the community’s help in solving her mother’s case.
“I’m so happy to be back home, and go back to the places we used to make good memories … I don’t try to hide it much anymore,” she said. “It happened here, so I feel like I can do more here.”
Today, the family is still hoping someone will come forward one day with a promising lead, rather than the strange wild goose chases and rumors they typically receive.
“I want to see justice,” she said. “Whoever, if anyone, did something, I would just want to know why they did what they did.”
Anyone with information on the disappearance of Tammy Kingery is asked to contact the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Office at (803) 637-5337.
