By Donna Hales
Phoenix Staff Writer
November 01, 2008 11:26 pm
—
Karen Denise Wells left her 14-month-old son with her parents before leaving to visit a girlfriend in New Jersey for a few days.
She left Tulsa on a Sunday night — April 10, 1994 — and stopped at a motel near Carlisle, Pa. about 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Wells, a resident of Haskell, never made it to New Jersey.
Now, more than 14 years since the 23-year-old disappeared, Middlesex Township Police Department detectives in Carlisle , Pa., are taking a new look at the cold case.
“There was a bunch of things in the car we’re going to test in different ways — ways we couldn’t in 1994,” Police Sgt. Bill Goodheart said.
Cigarette butts, paper cups and other items are going through DNA testing, he said Friday.
“Someone who has been arrested and put in the system may have drank from the cups or have DNA on the cigarette butts,” Goodheart said. “There were just no real clues at the time.”
The Wells case is gnawing on Goodheart’s boss — one of the few cases he has not been able to solve. His boss wants it solved before he retires, Goodheart said.
Bill and Deorma Wells, Karen Denise Wells’ parents, hope the new investigation will be fruitful, but don’t want to say much right now, they said.
Goodheart said he was in Haskell for eight days in 2006 talking to Wells’ family and friends.
The night Wells disappeared, she called her friend in New Jersey from the motel, her father, Bill, said at the time. Wells told her friend she was going to McDonald’s and then to bed.
But the last time she was seen was at the motel, Goodheart said.
The friend drove to Carlisle to meet Wells. She arrived about midnight Tuesday but didn’t find Wells.
Beds were undisturbed, and there was no sign of a struggle.
When Wells’ friend did not find her in her room at the motel, she filed a missing person report with Middlesex Township, Pa., police.
Wells’ clothes were in the motel room, Bill Wells said. Her rental car, a white Plymouth Acclaim, rented in Tulsa, was found the next morning, April 13, 1994. It had been abandoned in a wooded, rural area of Perry County, about 35 miles west of Carlisle, near New Germantown, along Route 274, according to police.
The car was out of gas and appeared to have stopped in its tracks in the road’s westbound lane, according to The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa. The car had several scratches on it and was spattered with mud. The passenger’s and driver’s side doors were standing open, the newspaper reported.
Well’s change purse, with cash still inside, was found in a nearby ditch. Police said there were no signs of a struggle inside the car. Her wallet also was found, Goodheart said.
Helicopters and dogs were used to search the area for Wells at the time she went missing.
The Patriot-News reported odometer readings from Wells’ rental car showed the car traveled 700 miles more than the distance from Oklahoma to Carlisle.
Goodheart said if she had stayed on the Interstate, that Tuesday, she would have arrived in New Jersey in about an hour and a half. Instead, she drove about an hour and a half out of the way to go to Carlisle, where she was three hours away from New Jersey, he said.
“I think she was lost — but somebody may have been giving her wrong directions,” Goodheart said Friday.
Reach Donna Hales at 918-684-2923 or Click Here to Send Email
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Wells