In 1990, a regular day in Augusta, Georgia, turned into a nightmare for the Millbrook family.
Teenage twins, Dannette and Jeannette, disappeared without a trace.
The twins were last seen by a gas station worker at a gas station around 4:30 pm the day they vanished.
Their story is filled with unexpected twists and unanswered questions, which has left their family devastated and investigators puzzled..
Disappearance
The twins, both 15 years old, went to their church on March 18th, 1990.
When they came back home, they told their mom, Louise, that a man in a van had been following them.
This was the first strange thing to happen that day and nothing further is known about this man.
Later that day, the twins walked to their godfather's house to borrow money for the city bus to school the next week.
Their family had recently moved to a new apartment farther from their school.
After getting $20 for the bus and some extra for snacks, they went to their cousin's house and asked her to walk home with them.
The cousin's mother didn't let her go with the twins because it would soon be dark.
After leaving their cousin's house, they went to their older sister's house and stayed for about fifteen minutes.
They also asked their older sister to walk them home, but she couldn't because she had just given birth.
Their last stop was a gas station they knew well, the Pump-N-Shop.
The cashier, Gloria, recognized them and sold them some snacks and drinks and she said she didn't notice anything unusual.
They left the gas station, and that would be the final time anyone saw Dannette and Jeannette.
After their disappearance, family members found it strange that the twins asked multiple people to walk them home that day.
The twins were well-behaved teens and were not troublemakers.
They had never run away before, and there seems to be no reason why they would disappear.
Apart from one incident where one of the twins was bullied at a bus stop, they had no history of misbehavior.
Investigation
The next day, the girls didn't come home, so their mom reported them missing.
Shockingly, the police told her to wait a whole day before they would start looking!
This wasted valuable time when they could have found clues.
To make things even worse, the original police report went missing, making it hard to know what happened at the start of the investigation.
As a result of this, the case was closed almost quickly for confusing reasons.
There's a lot of varying reasons why the case was closed initially.
The family said they were informed that the case closed when the girls turned 17.
This was because, at that age, they could no longer be legally compelled to come home if they were found.
Another investigator said that a juvenile case officer told him the girls were found, which led to the case closing and their names being removed from the national list of missing children.
Additionally, some mistakes from the first investigation are still in the official case files till date.
For example, they spelled "Millbrook" as "Millbrooks," and that error is still in all the official records.
Jeannette's middle name is also wrongly listed as "Latressa" in these records as well.
Skeletal remains of an unidentified Black woman were found in Aiken County on January 25, 1993.
These remains were suspected to be from a homicide that occurred sometime between 1990 and 1992.
The family strongly believed that facial reconstructions of these remains looked like Jeannette.
In August 2017, the coroner's office collected DNA samples from family members to compare with that of the Jane Doe.
After analysis, they confirmed that the skeletal remains were not those of the twins.
Potential Suspect
Joseph Patrick Washington, a convicted sex offender, was known to be present in the girls' neighborhood around the time they disappeared.
Some suspect he might have been linked to their disappearance.
In 1995, Washington received 17 consecutive life sentences for various crimes, including abductions and sexual assaults involving five women.
Three of the women survived.
He was also implicated in the murder of Marilyn Denise Kelly and was suspected in the murder of Loretta Dukes, although he passed away in 1999 before his trial began.
However, investigators have not discovered any solid evidence connecting him to their disappearance.
Ongoing efforts
The twins’ mother Mary “Louise” Sturgis and her daughter, Shanta, never gave up hope
They kept asking questions and pushing the police to keep looking.
Authorities later told them that the girls had been placed in foster care, where they were later adopted.
However, further investigation showed this was not true.
It turned out a close relative had children in foster care which caused the confusion.
These discoveries eventually led to the case being reopened in 2013.
More than 30 years later, no one knows what happened to Dannette and Jeannette Millbrook.
There is still a reward for any information, and a billboard stands tall, a beacon of hope that one day, someone will come forward with the truth.
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