7 Hoosier children vanished more than 30 years ago. Here are their stories.

Shannon Marie Sherrill was shy, quiet and was not one to talk to strangers. She never liked leaving her father’s side. She never just wandered off alone without telling her mother.

Yet, on a warm fall afternoon, while playing hide-and-seek with other kids in her mother’s yard, the petite 6-year-old girl wearing a sundress vanished.

Almost 40 years later, Shannon has not been found.

A weeklong search and hundreds of tips over the years have led nowhere. A nationally publicized hoax involving a woman who claimed to be Shannon compounded her family’s pain. A convicted rapist and serial killer became a person of interest but was never charged. Another dead end. Her parents still hope she’s alive, while families of other missing children did not live long enough to find out.

More than 900 Hoosiers have been reported missing in the past five decades, according to the Indiana State Police. Nearly half were minors. About 400 were between the ages of 11 and 17 when they disappeared. Forty were younger children, including nine infants.

Capt. Kevin Smith, who leads cold case investigations at the Indiana State Police, said that’s not surprising because it’s fairly common for juveniles to run away from home. Investigating cases of missing children and teens is also harder because they don’t have as much “life experience footprint” as adults, he said. There are no driver’s licenses, no credit cards and other paper trail with which to start looking.

Investigating decades-old cases is even more daunting, he said. Witnesses die, detectives retire, documents disappear and memories fade.

“The very first challenge you’re going to have,” Smith said, “is, ‘Who’s still alive that has information? How good are your primary witnesses? How good is their memory if they’re still around?'”

Shannon is one of a handful of Hoosier children who vanished more than 30 years ago and have yet to be found. Here are their stories:

Shannon Marie Sherrill

Dorothy Sherrill went inside her mobile home to make a sandwich for her 18-month-old son, Shannon’s younger brother. She went back out a few minutes later to ask Shannon if she wanted some food, Sherrill recalled. But the girl was nowhere to be found.

Sherrill thought maybe her sister, who lived nearby, had taken Shannon to the store. Maybe the girl had crawled under a neighbor’s trailer while playing hide-and-seek. Maybe she was in a neighbor’s house. Sherrill knocked on doors until she realized something was wrong.

“Something just hit me,” she said, “and I just fell to the ground.”

Sherrill quickly reported Shannon missing on Oct. 5, 1986. Police, family members and volunteers scoured the small community of Thorntown in Boone County for several days.

“We searched cornfields, trailers, any place she could’ve been,” said Mike Sherrill, Shannon’s father who lived an hour away but stayed in Thorntown to join the effort. “I searched every waking moment for the entire week I was over there.”

Investigators followed up on hundreds of tips. Hypnotists questioned the children who were with Shannon that afternoon. Parents and neighbors submitted to polygraph tests. Even psychics were consulted.

Dorothy Sherrill does not remember much about those early years. What kept her going, she said, was knowing she still had a young son to raise.

“I love her and I miss her,” she said, “and I would like her to come home.”

In 2003, a woman called the family and told them she was Shannon. She sent several photographs, including pictures she claimed were of Shannon as a teenager. She gave authorities a phone number, an address, a Social Security number, a date of birth, schools she had attended and landmarks she remembered as a child in Indiana.

But the woman turned out to be an impostor from Kansas with at least 30 aliases. She was charged with identity deception and pleaded guilty. Her attorney later said she was simply trying to help, a claim that never made sense to Mike Sherrill, who talked to the woman on the phone believing she was Shannon.

“I was devastated,” he said, his soft voice shaking. “It was the most heartbreaking thing you could ever go through.”

Shannon had always been a Daddy’s girl, he said. She always wanted to go with him, even if he was just going to the store. One day, he recalled, he got sick with fever and Shannon took care of him, placing a cold wash cloth on his forehead.

After her parents divorced, Shannon and her brother lived with their mother, while their father had weekend visitations. Mike Sherrill remembers dropping off Shannon after one of those weekends. She was upset because she wanted to stay with him, he said. Before he left, he promised to take her out to eat when they saw each other again.

Shannon vanished a few days later.

For a while, Mike Sherrill called detectives daily asking for an update. Each time, there was no news. Everyday became every other day, which became every week, until he finally stopped calling.

On Aug. 12, 2025, he posted a message on Facebook. It was similar to messages he posts on the same day every year, hoping Shannon will see it, realize where she came from and come home.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHANNON SHERRILL,” he wrote. “HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY WHEREVER YOU ARE.”

Shannon, Mike Sherrill said, “was my little girl.” Then, he immediately corrected himself: “She is my little girl.”

If you have information about Shannon’s case, call the Indiana State Police at 800-453-4756.

Wendy Louise Felton

When Wendy Louise Felton vanished from her parents’ home on June 4, 1987, the Grand County teen left belongings she would’ve brought if she’d intended to run away. Her favorite sneakers, her contact lenses, her purse. Instead, a suitcase and a random assortment of clothes disappeared along with her.

Nearly four decades later, Wendy is still missing.

Julie Bennett left to drive her parents to the airport for a weekend trip to Florida that summer afternoon. When she got back to their home in Marion, a small city halfway between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, her 16-year-old sister was gone.

There was no sign of a break-in. Bennett figured that her more outgoing sibling, who was part of youth groups and bands at school, was probably picked up by a friend and will be home soon.

Later, she called her other sister, and they alerted police the next day. Their parents rushed back home, and the decades-long search for Wendy began.

“Initially, the police said it was a runaway,” said Doug Felton, the oldest of the four siblings, “but I was skeptical of that.”

Wendy was just a week away from getting her driver’s license, he said, and she was looking forward to driving.

About 15 to 20 years ago, Felton gave his father a book about a man who lost his daughter and encountered God in a cabin in the woods. He said that’s when he learned their father blames himself for Wendy’s disappearance.

Wendy had begged their father to let her join them on their trip to Florida.

“He said,” Doug Felton recalled, “‘If I’d just let her go with us, then we’d still have her.'”

Bennett said their father often talked about how much he missed his youngest child, how he wished she was around, how he could never understand why she was gone. Wendy’s name used to come up during family gatherings, but as years passed and as their mother, Wanda Felton, developed dementia, there was less and less to talk about.

Russ Felton died in 2024. His obituary listed all four children as survivors.

“My dad died,” Bennett said, “without ever knowing what happened to her.”

For information about Wendy’s case, call the Grant County Sheriff’s Office at 765-668-8168.

Sandra Kay Powell

Sandra Kay Powell disappeared from her South Bend home on March 11, 1987, four days before her 17th birthday.

A year earlier, she witnessed the murder of a friend and later testified at the homicide trial. The teen, who was pregnant, disappeared shortly after, raising suspicions among her family and law enforcement that she was targeted because of her testimony.

Sandra’s mother, Sally McCoy, told ABC 57 in 2014, that she and her other kids still hope her daughter is alive.

“The children and I try to go along day by day just thinking that she’s out there somewhere,” McCoy told the media outlet. “Everybody says give it up and admit she’s dead. But I don’t do that.”

If you have information about Sandra’s case, call the South Bend Police Department at 574-235-9201.

Melinda Karen Creech

Melinda Karen Creech, 13, was last seen on Sept. 5, 1979, when she was taken to the Bronnenberg’s Children’s Home, then a juvenile facility for girls in Anderson. She and another teen were caught allegedly stealing motorcycles. When a detective went to the center two months later to question her about the burglary, Melinda was nowhere to be found.

In 1994, Shirley Creech told her family that her daughter was found dead on the East Coast.

But after Creech died in 2003, her other children found something puzzling in her personal belongings. A 1990 letter from a police department stated that the remains found in Livingston County in New Jersey did not belong to Melinda.

Melinda’s family contacted the Madison County Sheriff’s Office in 2004 to resume the search.

In an interview with IndyStar in 2014, Lt. David Callahan said it’s unclear why Creech misled her family. It’s also unclear when exactly Melinda disappeared. Callahan, who has since retired from the sheriff’s office, said an old report from the Anderson Police Department stated Melinda had run away, but it didn’t say if she ran away from Bronnenberg or if she was released back to her family and then ran away.

Investigators put Melinda’s dental records and old X-rays, as well as DNA from family members, in a database, Callahan said. There were several phone calls but no leads. Detectives also have talked to Melinda’s old friends, boyfriends and the teenage boy with whom she was caught.

“The last time he had seen her,” Callahan said, “was when they were arrested.”

If you have information about Melinda’s case, call the Madison County Sheriff’s Department at 765-646-4025.

Scott Michael Morris

Scott Michael Morris, 14, disappeared from his home in Indianapolis on Aug. 14, 1978, when he went to a nearby convenience store and never came back. He later called his family to tell them he was working at a carnival in Pennsylvania and was not heard from since.

In 2007, authorities announced that the mutilated body of a young man found in Western Kentucky, just outside of Evansville, belonged to Morris. But the DNA tests turned out to be wrong. The body remains unidentified, and Morris remains missing.

If you have information about Scott’s case, call the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit at 317-327-6160.

Joseph Andrew Spisak

Joseph Andrew Spisak, 11, went on his morning newspaper delivery route in Hammond on Jan. 27, 1974. He never came home.

Over the years, Joseph’s family sent his dental and medical records to states where unidentified bodies of young boys and young men were found, the Northwest Times of Indiana reported in 2019. But the family never heard anything back.

They even turned to a psychic.

There were suspicions that he was kidnapped. There were unfounded rumors that Joseph’s father, who died in 2006, was somehow responsible.

“My poor father had to go to his death with this,” Joseph’s brother, Steven Spisak, told the Northwest Times of Indiana.

If you have information about Joseph’s case, call the Hammond Police Department at 219-853-6490.

Debra Jean Cole

Debra Jean Cole, 12, vanished from her home in the Lebanon area on Aug. 29, 1981.

Two years later, her older sister, Annette Cole, also disappeared. The 16-year-old’s body was found a week later outside Lebanon. She’d been raped and shot.

In 1999, Boone County investigators announced that DNA tests matched Omer E. “Steve” Beebout, the girls’ mother’s ex-boyfriend, to the crimes. Investigators believe Beebout, who died of a heart attack years earlier, was also responsible for Debra’s disappearance.

Debra was initially reported as a runaway, but Beebout was believed to be the last person to see her.

If you have information about Debra’s case, call the Lebanon Police Department at 765-482-8836.

Contact IndyStar reporter Kristine Phillips at (317) 444-3026 or at kphillips@indystar.com.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: 7 Hoosier children vanished more than 30 years ago. Here are their stories.

Reporting by Kristine Phillips, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star

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