The last words Rob Shafer heard from the woman he loved were her screaming his name.
Not “help.” Not “please.” Not the desperate, generalized cry of someone hoping anyone might hear. Just his name—”Rob! Rob!”—shouted through a payphone receiver with the kind of terror that carves itself into your memory and refuses to ever leave.
It was April 4th, 1991. A Thursday night in Clinton, Missouri, where the air still carried winter’s chill and the town square felt as safe as it had for generations. Angela Hammond had dropped her fiancé off at his house around 10:30 PM after a barbecue with friends, promising to call him later once she checked on a few things. She was twenty years old, four months pregnant with their baby, and wearing the diamond engagement ring Rob had given her with a promise to always take care of her.
Rob was home watching his younger brother when the phone rang just before midnight. Seven blocks away, Angela stood in a phone booth outside a convenience store on the corner of Second Street and Jefferson Street, the kind of glass-and-metal enclosure that used to dot every American town before cell phones made them obsolete. She was calling just to talk—to say goodnight, to share the small details of her day, to hear his voice before sleep.
For ten minutes, they talked about nothing important. The kind of conversation engaged couples have when they’re building a life together and every mundane detail feels like evidence of their future. And then Angela mentioned something that made Rob’s attention sharpen.
A truck. A green pickup. It had circled the block a few times.
She wasn’t worried yet. Just noting it. The way you might mention an odd cloud formation or a dog barking in the distance—something noticed but not threatening. Clinton was a farming town in the heart of Missouri, population barely over 8,000, where people knew their neighbors and trucks circling downtown were usually just someone lost or looking for parking.
But then the truck stopped. Parked right next to the phone booth.
And Angela’s voice changed.
The Call
“There’s this guy getting out,” Angela told Rob, her tone shifting from casual to alert. “He looks… dirty. He has a beard”.
Rob could hear it in her voice—not panic yet, but awareness. That primal instinct women learn to trust when something feels wrong. She kept talking, describing what she was seeing in real-time while Rob listened seven blocks away, helpless to do anything but hear.
The man walked past the phone booth. Acted like he was going to use it. Angela watched him, phone pressed to her ear, Rob’s voice an anchor to normalcy on the other end of the line.
And then everything accelerated.
A scream. Angela’s scream. So loud Rob could hear it clearly through the receiver. The sound of the phone being grabbed. Dropped. Swinging on its metal cord.
“Angela!” Rob shouted into his end of the line, adrenaline spiking, his whole body suddenly electric with the wrongness of what he was hearing.
And then, through the chaos of sounds—scuffling, movement, Angela’s voice rising in terror—he heard her scream his name.
“Rob! Rob!”
Not calling for him to help. She knew where he was. Knew he was seven blocks away. Knew he couldn’t reach through the phone line and pull her to safety. She was screaming his name because in that moment, as rough hands grabbed her and dragged her away from the light of the convenience store into the darkness beyond, his name was the last word she wanted on her lips.
And then a man’s voice. Gruff. Casual. Almost amused.
“I didn’t need to use the phone anyway”.
The line went dead.
Seven Blocks
Rob was out of his house and in his car before he’d fully processed what he’d heard.
Seven blocks. That’s all that separated him from Angela. Seven blocks in a town so small you could drive end-to-end in five minutes. His hands shook as he turned the key, his mind racing through what he’d just heard on the phone—the scream, his name, that man’s voice.
He floored the gas pedal.
The streets of downtown Clinton at midnight were mostly empty. A few streetlights. Closed storefronts. The kind of quiet that used to mean safety in small-town America. Rob’s headlights cut through the darkness as he sped toward Second and Jefferson, toward the phone booth where Angela had been standing less than two minutes ago.
And then he saw it.
A pickup truck. Green. Speeding toward him from the opposite direction.
Their vehicles passed each other in a blur, and in that fraction of a second, Rob saw something that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
A woman in the truck. Struggling. And through the chaos, through the speed and darkness and adrenaline flooding his system, he heard something that made his blood turn to ice.
Angela. Screaming his name again. From inside that truck.
“Rob!”
He didn’t think. Didn’t hesitate. He spun his car around in the middle of the street and gunned the engine. The pickup was already pulling away, taillights receding into the Missouri night, but Rob was behind it now, chasing, closing the distance.
For two miles, he pursued that truck through the streets of Clinton. Two miles of desperation, of keeping his eyes locked on those taillights, of calculating how to force the vehicle to stop without putting Angela in more danger.
He was going to catch them. He was going to pull that driver out of the truck and get his fiancée back. He’d made her a promise—to always take care of her—and he was seven blocks away when she needed him but he was here now, he was chasing, he was going to save her.
And then his transmission failed.
The Moment Everything Stopped
The grinding sound of metal on metal. The sudden loss of power. Rob’s car slowing, slowing, rolling to a stop on the side of the road while the green pickup’s taillights grew smaller and smaller and finally disappeared around a bend.
He sat there in the silence, hands still gripping the steering wheel, staring at the empty road ahead. Two miles. He’d chased them for two miles before his car gave out. If the transmission had held for just another minute. If he’d been able to keep going. If he’d caught up.
But he hadn’t.
When he’d thrown his car into reverse to turn around and chase the pickup, he’d damaged the transmission without realizing it. And now, at the worst possible moment, that damage had cost him everything.
Rob would later tell police he often still thinks about that night. About the sound of Angela screaming his name. About seeing her in that truck. About the grinding of his transmission and the taillights disappearing and the understanding that he’d been so close to saving her and it hadn’t been enough.
He called 911 from where his car had stopped. Within minutes, the Clinton Police Department had units searching the area, looking for a green pickup truck with a woman inside. But Clinton was surrounded by hundreds of miles of rural Missouri farmland—county roads and gravel paths and endless places to disappear.
By the time dawn broke on April 5th, 1991, Angela Hammond was gone.
And Rob Shafer’s promise—to always take care of her—had shattered in the seven blocks between his house and that phone booth.
The Search
Marsha Cook received the call every mother prays never comes.
Her daughter was missing. Abducted. A witness—Angela’s own fiancé—had heard it happen in real-time and chased the vehicle but lost it. The Clinton Police Department was searching. The Missouri State Highway Patrol had been notified. Every available officer was combing the area.
But in those critical first hours, when every minute matters and hope still feels like a realistic emotion, they found nothing.
No green pickup truck matching Rob’s description. No witnesses who’d seen anything suspicious near Second and Jefferson around 11:45 PM. No physical evidence at the phone booth except the receiver hanging from its cord, swaying slightly in the night breeze.
Angela had simply vanished.
The investigation moved quickly in those first days. Police brought in search teams—volunteers from Clinton and surrounding counties who spread out across the farmland, checking barns and abandoned buildings and anywhere someone might hide a person. Helicopters flew overhead, scanning from above. K-9 units tracked scents that led nowhere.
And throughout it all, Rob Shafer sat for hours with detectives, describing everything he’d heard on that phone call, everything he’d seen during the chase. The green pickup—late 1960s or early 1970s Ford F-150. The artwork on the side—some kind of fish jumping out of water, the type of mural common among fishermen around Truman Lake. The bearded man Angela had described. The terrifying casualness of his voice: “I didn’t need to use the phone anyway”.
Detectives asked Rob to take a polygraph test. He agreed immediately. It’s a grim reality of missing persons cases that the significant other is always a suspect, especially when they’re the last known contact. But Rob had nothing to hide. He’d been on the phone with Angela. He’d chased the truck. His story was consistent across multiple interviews.
He passed the polygraph. Within a week, he was cleared completely.
“I never suspected him,” Marsha Cook would later say. “Rob loved my daughter. He wanted to marry her. He would never hurt her”.
But clearing Rob didn’t bring Angela back. And as days turned into weeks, the initial surge of community support and media attention began to fade. The search teams went home. The helicopters stopped flying. The news cameras packed up and moved on to other stories.
Clinton, Missouri returned to its quiet rhythms. But Marsha Cook’s life had stopped on April 4th, 1991, and would never start again.
The Pattern
Three months before Angela Hammond vanished, another woman disappeared under disturbingly similar circumstances.
Her name was Trudy Darby. She was forty-two years old, working the night shift at a convenience store near Macks Creek, Missouri—about forty miles from Clinton. On January 19th, 1991, Trudy called her son to report a suspicious man loitering outside the store. Her son rushed over, but when he arrived just ten minutes later, the store was empty.
Trudy was gone.
Two days later, her body was found on a riverbank ten miles away. She’d been shot twice in the head.
Then, about a month after Trudy’s murder, thirty-year-old Cheryl Ann Kenney vanished from a convenience store in Nevada, Missouri—roughly seventy miles from where Trudy’s body had been found. On February 28th, 1991, Cheryl Ann disappeared during her shift. No witnesses. No evidence. No body ever recovered.
She simply ceased to exist.
And then, five weeks later, Angela Hammond was dragged from a phone booth seven blocks from her fiancé’s house.
Detective Damon Parsons of the Clinton Police Department recognized the pattern immediately. Three women. Three abductions from public locations in west-central Missouri. All within a hundred-mile radius. All within a span of less than three months.
“We believe these cases are connected,” Detective Parsons told the media. “We believe a serial predator is operating in this area”.
The theory sent shockwaves through the small farming communities of Missouri. This wasn’t supposed to happen here. Serial killers were things you read about happening in big cities, not in towns where everyone knew everyone and people still left their doors unlocked.
But the evidence was undeniable. Someone was hunting women in Missouri. And Angela Hammond had become his latest victim.
The case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, the true crime show that captivated millions of viewers in the 1990s. The episode included a reenactment of that night—Angela at the phone booth, Rob’s frantic chase, the transmission failure. Tips poured in from across the country. Dozens of green pickup trucks were investigated.
None of them were the right one.
Years passed. Angela remained missing. Cheryl Ann Kenney was never found. Trudy Darby’s murder went unsolved. And the serial killer theory, while compelling, led nowhere.
Until thirty years later, when a Clinton police captain named Paul Abbott was reviewing the case files and found something that everyone had missed.
The Letter That Was Always There
Captain Paul Abbott had spent decades in law enforcement, but in April 2021—exactly thirty years after Angela Hammond vanished—he was still haunted by the case.
It was the kind of mystery that burrows into a detective’s mind and never leaves. The real-time witness. The phone call. The failed car chase. The pregnant victim who’d been planning her wedding. Abbott had reviewed the case file countless times over the years, reading through witness statements and evidence logs and investigative reports that all led to the same frustrating conclusion: dead ends.
But on this particular day, as Abbott sat at his desk preparing for the thirtieth anniversary of Angela’s disappearance, he decided to go through the file one more time. Not because he expected to find anything new. Just because after three decades, the case deserved that attention.
That’s when he saw it.
A piece of evidence that had been documented in 1991 but never fully investigated. A report about a threatening letter sent to a young woman in the area—a letter postmarked April 4th, 1991.
The exact day Angela Hammond was abducted.
“It was pretty incredible,” Abbott would later tell reporters. The letter had been sitting in the case file for thirty years. Dozens of investigators had worked this case. Hundreds of tips had been followed. National television had featured the story. And through it all, this piece of evidence had been noted but dismissed as unrelated.
But Abbott saw something others had missed.
The letter hadn’t been sent to a random woman. It had been sent to the daughter of a Confidential Informant—a CI who’d testified in a major drug case shortly before the letter arrived. And that daughter’s name was Angela.
Another Angela. Same area. Same age range. Same time period.
And according to the CI’s testimony, the people he’d informed on had found out his identity. Had made threats. Had said they were coming after his family.
Abbott leaned back in his chair, the implications washing over him. For thirty years, everyone had assumed Angela Hammond was the intended target of her abduction. That she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, spotted by a predator who’d seized an opportunity. That theory had driven every investigation, every lead, every sleepless night spent wondering why someone would target a pregnant twenty-year-old in a phone booth.
But what if it wasn’t random at all?
What if Angela Hammond had been taken because someone thought she was someone else?
The Other Angela
Her name was never publicly released—police still protect her identity even today. But the story Captain Abbott uncovered would change everything investigators thought they knew about the case.
The CI’s daughter—let’s call her Angela X—lived in the same general area as Angela Hammond. She was roughly the same age, with similar physical characteristics. Both were young women with brown hair navigating life in small-town Missouri in the early 1990s.
And in April 1991, Angela X’s father received credible intelligence that people connected to his drug case testimony were actively looking for ways to hurt him. Going after family members. Sending messages through violence.
The threatening letter arrived at Angela X’s address on April 4th, 1991. The postmark confirmed it had been mailed that same day. The contents were chilling—specific threats against her safety, references to her father’s cooperation with law enforcement, promises that she would pay for his betrayal.
But Angela X didn’t receive the letter until days later, after it had been processed through the postal system. By then, Angela Hammond had already been dragged from a phone booth and driven into the Missouri night.
“There were striking similarities,” Captain Abbott explained in a 2021 interview. “Very much so. The two Angelas looked similar. They were in the same geographic area. And the timeline—that letter being postmarked the same day Angela Hammond was abducted—was too significant to ignore”.
The theory coalesced into something both horrifying and logical: Angela Hammond had been a victim of mistaken identity. Someone hired or motivated to hurt the CI’s daughter had been searching for an Angela matching the general description they’d been given. And on the night of April 4th, 1991, they’d found a young woman alone at a phone booth.
The wrong Angela. But an Angela nonetheless.
That would explain why the abduction felt so targeted—the circling truck, the deliberate approach, the confidence with which the man grabbed her. It wasn’t opportunistic predation. It was a hit gone wrong.
“We never connected those dots,” Abbott admitted. “The letter was in the file. But because we couldn’t connect it to the green truck Rob saw, we didn’t pursue it as a viable lead. We were so focused on finding that specific vehicle that we missed the bigger picture”.
The Anonymous Call
In April 2021, as news of Captain Abbott’s discovery spread through law enforcement channels and eventually to the media, the Clinton Police Department received a phone call that made everyone in the department stop what they were doing.
The caller was anonymous. Male voice. Wouldn’t give his name. But he had information about Angela Hammond’s case.
He’d called to echo the mistaken identity theory. Said he’d suspected it for years. And then he did something that made detectives grab pens and start writing as fast as they could.
He named a name.
“That one name that we have investigated before,” Captain Abbott would later tell reporters, careful not to reveal the identity. “This caller knew details about the case that weren’t public knowledge. And he specifically mentioned someone we’d looked at in our original investigation”.
The call lasted only a few minutes. The man said what he needed to say, provided the name, and then—before police could trace the call or convince him to come in for a formal interview—he hung up.
“Boy, we would sure like to talk to that person,” Abbott said in his statement to the press. “If you’re the one who called, please call back. We need more information. You could be the key to solving this case”.
But the caller never phoned again.
That anonymous tip sits at the center of the investigation today. Someone out there knows what happened to Angela Hammond. Knows who took her and why. Knows if the mistaken identity theory is accurate. And for reasons they’ve never explained, they reached out once to confirm investigators were on the right track—then disappeared back into silence.
Who was he? Why did he call? And why won’t he call back?
Rob’s Burden
For Rob Shafer, the revelations of 2021 brought no comfort.
Learning that Angela might have been taken because someone mistook her for a CI’s daughter didn’t change the fundamental truth: she was still gone. Their baby—who would have been born in the fall of 1991—never took a breath. The wedding they’d been planning never happened. And the promise Rob made to always take care of Angela had been broken seven blocks from his house.
“I often still think of that night,” Rob told investigators in follow-up interviews. Those seven words carry the weight of three decades. Of hearing the woman you love scream your name as she’s dragged away. Of chasing the vehicle that holds her. Of your transmission failing at the worst possible moment. Of living the rest of your life knowing you were so close to saving her.
Rob passed every polygraph test police gave him. Was cleared of suspicion within a week of Angela’s disappearance. Cooperated fully with every investigative request over the following thirty years. But none of that erased the guilt.
Survivor’s guilt. The kind that comes from being the one who lived while someone you loved vanished. From being seven blocks away when she needed you. From having your car break down during the chase. From hearing her final moments through a phone line but being unable to reach through that connection and pull her to safety.
In interviews, Rob’s voice still breaks when he talks about that night. The way Angela described the bearded man. The sound of the phone receiver falling. Her screams. His name on her lips.
And then the silence.
“I didn’t need to use the phone anyway”.
Those words—casually spoken by Angela’s abductor—haunt investigators as much as they haunt Rob. They suggest premeditation. Awareness. The statement of someone who’d approached that phone booth not to make a call, but to take a person.
If the mistaken identity theory is correct, those words take on even darker meaning. The man knew he wasn’t there for the phone. He was there for an Angela. And the young woman in that booth—four months pregnant, diamond ring on her finger, voice connected to her fiancé seven blocks away—matched close enough.
Marsha’s Search
While Rob carried the burden of what he’d heard that night, Angela’s mother Marsha Cook carried a different weight: not knowing.
For parents of missing persons, the uncertainty is its own special torture. When someone dies, there are rituals. Funerals. Graves to visit. A place to bring flowers and say the words you wish you’d said when they were alive. But when someone vanishes—when they’re simply erased from the world without explanation—there’s nowhere to go. No closure. No body to bury. No final goodbye.
Just questions that multiply with every passing year.
Is she alive? Is she dead? Did she suffer? Where is her body? Could she still be out there somewhere, held captive, waiting for rescue? Or did she die on April 4th, 1991, and I just don’t know it yet?
Marsha has spent thirty-four years searching for answers to questions that have no good outcomes. Every lead followed. Every tip investigated. Every anniversary marked with renewed pleas for information. And through it all, the not-knowing corrodes a little more each day.
“I just want answers,” Marsha told reporters on the thirtieth anniversary of Angela’s disappearance. Not “I want her back.” After three decades, the math becomes brutally simple. Angela would be fifty-four years old now. The baby she was carrying—Rob’s child—would be in their thirties. An entire lifetime has unfolded without them.
But answers would be something. Knowing would be something. A body to bury. A grave to visit. Confirmation that the not-knowing could finally end.
The mistaken identity theory provided Marsha with a framework—a reason why someone might have targeted her daughter. But frameworks don’t bring closure. And knowing Angela might have been killed for being the wrong person somehow makes the injustice even sharper.
She lived. She loved. She was creating a life with Rob, planning a wedding, preparing to become a mother. And then someone mistook her for someone else, and all of it ended.
The Serial Killer Theory
While Captain Abbott’s mistaken identity discovery dominated headlines in 2021, another theory about Angela Hammond’s disappearance has persisted for decades.
His name is Larry DeWayne Hall. A serial killer serving a life sentence for kidnapping and murder, though true crime investigators believe his actual victim count could be as high as sixty-eight women.
Hall operated throughout the Midwest in the 1980s and 1990s, targeting women in rural areas. His preferred hunting ground included Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Kansas—the exact geographic region where Trudy Darby, Cheryl Ann Kenney, and Angela Hammond all disappeared within months of each other.
The timeline fits. The victimology fits. And Hall has confessed to multiple murders over the years, including some high-profile cases like the Springfield Three—three women who vanished from Springfield, Missouri in 1992.
But there’s one critical problem with the Larry Hall theory when it comes to Angela Hammond.
Hall always drove a van. White. Windowless. The stereotype of every serial killer’s vehicle. He used that van to transport victims. To hold them. To conceal what he was doing from public view.
Angela Hammond was abducted in a green Ford F-150 pickup truck from the late 1960s or early 1970s, with fish artwork on the side. Rob saw it. Chased it for two miles. Heard Angela screaming from inside it.
It wasn’t a white van.
Still, some investigators haven’t completely ruled Hall out. Perhaps he borrowed a truck that night. Perhaps he was working with an accomplice who owned the green F-150. Perhaps the details Rob remembered—traumatized, in the dark, during a high-speed chase—weren’t entirely accurate.
But those theories require ignoring concrete evidence to make Hall fit. And with the mistaken identity angle providing a more logical explanation—one that doesn’t require a serial killer to suddenly change his MO—most investigators have shifted their focus away from Hall and toward the CI’s case.
“It’s pretty much been confirmed that she was a victim of mistaken identity,” one investigator noted in a 2024 online discussion.
If that’s true, it means Angela Hammond wasn’t taken by a serial predator hunting random victims. She was taken by someone with a specific target in mind—someone who’d been hired or motivated to hurt a CI’s daughter and grabbed the wrong woman in the dark.
Which means somewhere out there, the person who ordered the hit might still be alive. The person who drove the green truck might still be alive. And the anonymous caller who phoned police in 2021 and named a name—he definitely knows something.
The Phone Booth
If you drive through Clinton, Missouri today, you won’t find the phone booth where Angela Hammond made her last call.
Phone booths are relics now—glass and metal monuments to a time before everyone carried computers in their pockets. The intersection of Second Street and Jefferson Street looks different than it did on April 4th, 1991. Businesses have changed. Buildings have been renovated. The world has moved forward.
But for Marsha Cook, for Rob Shafer, for the investigators who’ve worked this case for thirty-four years, time stopped at that corner. Everything that matters happened within a few square feet of pavement outside a convenience store, in the span of seconds between Angela describing a bearded man and screaming her fiancé’s name.
The physical evidence from that night was minimal. No fingerprints on the phone booth that didn’t belong there. No witnesses who saw the abduction. No security cameras—this was 1991, before surveillance became ubiquitous. Just the phone receiver hanging from its cord, swaying slightly in the night breeze when police arrived.
And Rob’s testimony. The most detailed, most heartbreaking eyewitness account of an abduction that investigators had ever heard. A man who’d been on the phone with his fiancée when she was taken, who’d heard every sound, who’d chased the vehicle and seen her inside it, who’d screamed her name while his transmission ground itself to failure.
In most missing persons cases, investigators struggle with gaps in the timeline. Hours where no one knows what happened. Conflicting witness statements. Uncertainty about when and where the victim was last seen.
But Angela Hammond’s case had none of that ambiguity. Investigators knew exactly when she was taken. Exactly where. Exactly what vehicle was involved. They had a description of the suspect: white male, approximately forty to fifty years old, filthy appearance, bearded. They knew he drove a green Ford F-150 pickup from the late 1960s or early 1970s with fish artwork on the passenger side.
They had everything except the one thing that mattered.
They couldn’t find the truck.
The Search for the Green Pickup
In the days and weeks after Angela’s disappearance, police pursued the green pickup lead with singular focus.
Every Ford F-150 in the region that matched the description was tracked down and investigated. Officers visited body shops, asking if anyone had recently painted over fish artwork. They checked with local fishermen who frequented Truman Lake—the kind of people who might have murals on their trucks. They followed tips from across Missouri and neighboring states about green pickups spotted in suspicious circumstances.
Hundreds of leads. Hundreds of trucks. None of them were the right one.
The fish artwork was particularly distinctive. Rob had been clear in his description: it was a jumping fish, the kind of amateur airbrushing or hand-painting that fishing enthusiasts sometimes commissioned for their vehicles. Not a professional decal. Not a mass-produced sticker. Custom work that should have been memorable to anyone who’d seen it.
But no one in the area recognized that description. No body shops remembered painting it. No artists recalled creating it. It was as if the truck had materialized specifically to take Angela Hammond and then vanished back into whatever darkness had conjured it.
“The truck is the key,” Detective Damon Parsons told reporters in the months after the abduction. “If we can find that vehicle, we can solve this case”.
But the truck never surfaced. And as months became years, investigators began to consider other possibilities. Had the artwork been temporary—something that could be washed off or removed? Had the truck been destroyed shortly after the abduction, crushed or burned to eliminate evidence? Had it been driven out of state, far from Missouri, where no one would connect it to a missing woman from Clinton?
Or—the theory that gained traction after Captain Abbott’s 2021 revelation—had the truck belonged to someone connected to the drug case that had targeted the CI’s daughter? Someone who knew that abducting the wrong Angela would bring massive law enforcement attention and had taken steps to ensure the vehicle could never be traced back to them?
The mistaken identity theory provided new context for the truck’s disappearance. This wasn’t a random predator who might use the same vehicle again. This was a targeted hit—bungled when the wrong woman was taken, but still professional enough to eliminate evidence afterward.
What Happened After Rob’s Car Stopped
The question that haunts everyone who studies this case is simple and unbearable: What happened to Angela Hammond after Rob’s transmission failed and the green pickup disappeared around that bend?
Was she still alive in those moments? Still conscious? Still aware that Rob had been chasing her, that he’d tried to save her, that he’d gotten so close before his car gave out?
Did she know, in those final moments of clarity, that she’d been taken by mistake? That someone thought she was someone else? That her life was ending because of a case of mistaken identity so cruel it defies comprehension?
Investigators have spent thirty-four years trying to answer these questions without a body. Without physical evidence of what happened after the truck left Clinton’s city limits. Without anything concrete except the terrible mathematics of survival: every day Angela remained missing decreased the likelihood she was still alive.
The most likely scenario—the one investigators whisper but rarely state publicly—is that Angela was killed shortly after the abduction. That her pregnancy, her engagement ring, her desperate screaming had convinced her abductor he’d made a catastrophic mistake. And that rather than release her and risk identification, he’d made the decision to ensure she could never testify.
Where he disposed of her body is another question with no answer. Missouri is vast. Rural. Filled with forests and lakes and abandoned properties where someone could hide evidence. Truman Lake alone—the massive reservoir just miles from Clinton—has hundreds of miles of shoreline, much of it undeveloped.
Search teams scoured the area for weeks after Angela vanished. K-9 units, dive teams, volunteers beating through underbrush and checking abandoned buildings. They found nothing.
“She could be anywhere,” one investigator admitted years later. “Within thirty minutes of Clinton, there are countless places someone could hide a body. And after thirty-four years, physical evidence would be minimal. We might be looking for bones. Or nothing at all”.
The Unborn Child
In all the discussion of mistaken identity and threatening letters and anonymous phone calls, it’s easy to lose sight of another victim in this case.
Angela Hammond was four months pregnant when she was abducted. She and Rob had been planning their wedding. Planning a nursery. Planning the life they’d build together as parents.
That baby—who would have been born in late summer or early fall 1991—never took a breath. Never had a name. Never had a chance.
If Angela died shortly after her abduction, her unborn child died with her. Two lives taken. Two futures erased. All because someone was looking for a different Angela and grabbed the wrong woman in the dark.
It’s a detail that adds unbearable weight to an already heartbreaking case. Not just a young woman stolen from her fiancé. Not just a daughter who never came home to her mother. But a family that never got to exist. A child who never got to live. A grandmother who never got to hold her grandchild.
When Marsha Cook talks about wanting answers, she’s not just searching for her daughter. She’s searching for the grandchild she never met. The life that should have been. The birthday parties and first days of school and graduations that were stolen along with Angela.
The Person Who Knows
Somewhere—in Missouri or beyond—there is someone who knows exactly what happened to Angela Hammond.
Maybe it’s the man who drove the green pickup. Now in his seventies or eighties if he’s still alive. Perhaps haunted by what he did. Perhaps not.
Maybe it’s the person who ordered the hit on the CI’s daughter. Someone connected to the drug case who made the call to target the informant’s family and accidentally set in motion the abduction of the wrong woman.
Maybe it’s the anonymous caller who phoned Clinton Police in 2021 and named a name. The man who knew enough to confirm the mistaken identity theory but not enough—or not willing—to provide the details that could finally bring Angela home.
“We would sure like to talk to that person,” Captain Paul Abbott repeated in every interview he gave after the 2021 revelation. “If you’re reading this, if you’re the one who called, please reach out again. You could be the key to giving this family closure”.
But three years have passed since that call. The anonymous tipster hasn’t phoned back. And whatever information he has—whatever name he gave to investigators—hasn’t been enough to solve the case.
Why did he call the first time? What prompted him, after thirty years of silence, to pick up the phone and reach out to police? And why, having taken that step, did he then retreat back into anonymity?
Those questions add another layer of mystery to a case already thick with unanswered questions. Someone knows. Someone cares enough to confirm investigators were on the right track. But someone isn’t willing to finish what they started.
Is it fear? Legal liability? Loyalty to people involved? Or something else entirely—some reason we can’t fathom without knowing who the caller is and what connection he has to this tragedy?
The Living Victims
In true crime, we often focus on the person who was taken. But abductions create concentric circles of trauma that spread outward, damaging everyone they touch.
Rob Shafer has lived for thirty-four years with the sound of Angela screaming his name. With the memory of seeing her in that truck. With the knowledge that his transmission failed at the exact worst moment. With the promise he made to always take care of her, broken seven blocks from his house.
Marsha Cook has lived for thirty-four years not knowing where her daughter is buried. Not knowing if she suffered. Not knowing if she called out for her mother in those final moments. Not knowing if she ever got to say goodbye.
The other Angela—the CI’s daughter who was the intended target—has lived for thirty-four years knowing someone else died in her place. That a pregnant woman was dragged from a phone booth because she had the misfortune of sharing a first name and general appearance with the target of a revenge plot.
How do you carry that? How do you wake up every morning knowing your father’s cooperation with law enforcement led to someone else’s death? That a threatening letter with your name on it set in motion events that took Angela Hammond’s life and her unborn baby’s life?
These are the living victims. The ones who survived but carry wounds that thirty-four years haven’t healed.
Where She Might Be
If Angela Hammond’s body is still out there—still undiscovered after thirty-four years—where might she be?
Investigators have their theories. Truman Lake, with its hundreds of miles of shoreline and deep waters, has always been a likely possibility. The forested areas surrounding Clinton. Abandoned properties. Old wells. Caves.
Missouri’s landscape is pockmarked with places someone could hide evidence. And after three decades, natural processes would have reduced remains to bones—harder to find, harder to identify without modern forensic tools.
But there’s another possibility that offers a sliver of hope so thin it’s almost cruel to acknowledge. What if Angela Hammond isn’t dead?
What if—in the most unlikely of scenarios—she was taken somewhere and held? What if the person who abducted her couldn’t bring himself to kill a pregnant woman and instead kept her alive? What if she’s still out there somewhere, aged from twenty to fifty-four, waiting for someone to find her?
It’s the kind of hope that torments families of missing persons. Because entertaining it means imagining thirty-four years of captivity, of suffering, of a life stolen in a different way. But it also means entertaining the possibility that she could still be saved. That this story might not end with a grave.
Realistically, investigators know the odds. After thirty-four years, survival is statistically improbable. But until they find physical evidence of death, the question remains unanswered.
And so Marsha keeps searching. Keeps hoping. Keeps waiting for the phone call that will finally tell her where her daughter is.
The Case Today
As of 2025, Angela Hammond’s disappearance remains unsolved.
The Clinton Police Department continues to accept tips. The case file remains open. And every few years—usually around the anniversary of her abduction—investigators issue new appeals for information.
“Someone knows what happened,” they repeat in every press release. “Someone has information that could bring Angela home. If you know anything, no matter how insignificant it might seem, please contact us”.
The phone number is 660-885-2679. The case number is 91-0488. Tips can be submitted anonymously.
The mistaken identity theory—once buried in a case file, now the leading explanation for what happened—has given investigators new avenues to explore. Connections to the drug case. People who might have had motive to target the CI’s daughter. Individuals who owned or had access to green Ford F-150 pickups in 1991.
And somewhere out there, an anonymous caller has information he’s not sharing. A name he gave to police. Knowledge about what really happened that night.
“Please call back,” Captain Abbott’s plea echoes across the years. “Please help us bring Angela home”.
The Promise
On April 4th, 1991, Rob Shafer made Angela Hammond a promise.
He would always take care of her. He would build a life with her. He would be there when their baby was born. He would stand beside her at their wedding and promise, in front of everyone they loved, to be her partner through whatever life brought.
Seven blocks. That’s how close he was when the promise broke. Seven blocks between his house and the phone booth where a bearded man dragged his fiancée into a green pickup truck.
For thirty-four years, Rob has carried the weight of that broken promise. The transmission that failed. The taillights disappearing around a curve. The silence that followed Angela’s final scream.
But maybe the promise isn’t entirely broken. Maybe keeping Angela’s story alive—making sure people remember her name, remember what happened, remember that somewhere out there is information that could finally bring her home—is its own form of care.
Maybe after thirty-four years, the promise looks different than Rob imagined. Not building a life together. Not raising their child. Not growing old side by side. But ensuring she isn’t forgotten. That her case doesn’t go cold. That someone, someday, might read her story and remember seeing a green truck with fish artwork in 1991 and realize they have the key to solving a mystery that has haunted Missouri for more than three decades.
That would be something. Not what he promised. But something.
And for Marsha Cook—who has spent thirty-four years searching for her daughter—that would be everything.
Epilogue: If You Know Something
Angela Marie Hammond was twenty years old when she vanished from Clinton, Missouri on April 4th, 1991.
She was 4’11” tall with brown hair and brown eyes. She was wearing a black jacket, blue jeans, and black boots. She was carrying a purse. She was four months pregnant. She had a diamond engagement ring on her finger and a future planned with the man she loved.
If you have any information about what happened to Angela Hammond, please contact the Clinton Police Department at 660-885-2679. Tips can be submitted anonymously.
If you are the anonymous caller who contacted police in 2021, please call back. The name you gave investigators needs context. The information you have could finally bring this family closure.
If you remember seeing a green Ford F-150 pickup truck from the late 1960s or 1970s with fish artwork on the side in April 1991, that memory matters.
If you know anything—anything at all—please come forward.
Somewhere, Angela Hammond is waiting to be found.
After thirty-four years, she deserves to come home.
