– Growing up, Shelly Nagle was always protective of her little sister, Sherry. When she got pregnant at only 15, Shelly was by her side, and since then, never stops looking out for her. Eight years later, Shelly is throwing a big birthday party for her youngest son. She expects her little sister to join the celebration, yet she fails to show up.
– When I didn’t hear from her at all, I felt like something bad could have happened. – In the small town of Altoona, rumor starts spreading that Sherry has run away, leaving her husband and children behind. – Deserted by their own mother, that’s the story Sherry Leighty’s children grew up believing. – My sister would never have just left the kids.
Left him, yes. Left the kids, no. – When Shelly took her suspicions to the police, they refused to look into the case because of the rumors, but there was no way Shelly could accept this. Instead, she began investigating on her own by opening a Facebook page and directly messaging the various suspects she identified along the way.
– This case went cold for more than a decade. Really, what took so long? – Sherry’s sister Shelly started a Facebook page to solicit information. – She’ll do whatever she can to share her sister’s story. – I had faith that I would be able to find her. – Even if it would turn the entire world against her, Shelly was ready to risk it all to find her sister.
– In the small town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, Shelly awaited her sister’s arrival before singing “Happy Birthday” to her youngest son. – I thought everything would be fine. We never missed any of the kids’ birthday parties. But everybody was there except for her. – Finally, someone rang the doorbell, and Shelly went to get it right away.
– And there stood Sherry’s husband and his dad, Ken Leighty. – When asked about Sherry, her husband said she recently left town to live with her boyfriend in Maine. Before he could continue, his father cut him off. – Then Ken said something like, “I can’t believe she left the kids.” – Sheldon, the sisters’ father, told Aaron and Kenneth to leave.
Afterward, he went to the police. While he was gone, Shelly kept trying to understand what happened. Why did Kenneth come along with Aaron? Why would Sherry leave without telling anyone? – I didn’t think that sounded right. I thought Aaron was lying but I just didn’t know why. – A few days later, Sheldon received terrible news from the detectives.
– The police in Altoona had no reason to believe that she was in danger or that a crime had been committed. Their belief was simply that she had decided to leave and have no contact with her family. – Altoona was a small town and rumors spread fast. Aside from Sherry’s siblings who knew something was off, everybody seemed to think that history was simply repeating itself.
– Our mother had abandoned all of us at a young age. I knew 100% that Sherry would never leave her children because that happened to us. There was nothing more important to that girl than her children. – One month later, the police visited the Leightys and interviewed Sherry’s father-in-law. – All the information was that Sherry got up to leave for work on a Friday morning.
Her father-in-law, Kenneth Leighty, dropped her off where she worked, and that was the last time anyone had seen Sherry Leighty. – Kenneth eventually had to tell his three young grandchildren why their mother left them. – The Leightys led them children to believe that their mother ran off with another man and that’s why she wasn’t around.
– As the year went along, the Leightys completely cut off Sherry’s family from their own. – I was around my nieces and nephews all the time. Our kids played together. After her disappearance, that came to an end. – But this didn’t stop Sheldon, Sherry’s father, from at least trying to get more information from the Leightys.
He kept calling them, hoping they’d remember any more details about her disappearance. He also never stopped pushing for the police to do something. – That’s what was a little worrisome. The police said, “Well, she’s an adult, and she can leave on her own if she wants.” They had no answers. They haven’t, you know, seen or heard of her, nothing.
I feel like he kind of like lost hope as far as getting any help from law enforcement. – During that period, the immense stress Sheldon kept subjecting himself to eventually took its toll. His already fledgling health kept getting worse and worse. Ultimately, he was hospitalized and couldn’t fight for his daughter anymore.
When the doctors told him that his time was coming, he summoned Shelly to his side. – Our dad was definitely heartbroken over the whole ordeal. I think he felt like he let her down, like he wasn’t there for her. The last time I was at the hospital with him, I did promise him that I’m gonna find her. I’m gonna bring her home.
He passed away two days later. I believe my dad did die of a broken heart. – After she promised her father she would find Sherry, Shelly scoured the town, knocked on everybody’s doors, and called anyone she could think of. Her investigation went on for six agonizing years without yielding any results. All the while, Richard kept trying to get the police to help, but they simply ignored him.
Eventually, Shelly refocused her efforts online, first through MySpace in 2003, then via Facebook around 2009. – I started searching on a couple of social medias. I first started sending friend requests to anybody I could think of. Her friends, my friends. – In 2011, Facebook implemented a new feature that completely changed how people used the platform.
Group pages allowed users to gather and interact around a single subject matter, giving Shelly an idea. – And I just thought, “Well, I’ll just make her a page and see if that helps at all.” The Facebook page is what started everything. – The issue with her previous efforts was that in Altoona everyone knew each other and rumors spread fast, so nobody seemed to be ready to risk it by publicly divulging what they knew.
But things were different behind the curtain of anonymity offered by the internet. One of the first people to reach out to her was an individual known as John B. He claimed to be a neighbor of the Leightys and witnessed that their behavior completely changed since Sherry’s disappearance. – He said, the doors used to be open all the time because he used to go in and hang out with them.
But after Sherry went missing, no one was outside, and the only person you could speak to was Aaron’s dad. – More concerning messages started pouring in, most of them pointing towards Kenneth, Aaron, and some even at Ryan, the mysterious boyfriend the Leightys claimed had taken Sherry to Maine. John B too kept messaging the page, claiming that Sherry told him how Kenneth was obsessed with her and how scared she was to be left alone with him.
Aaron’s ex-girlfriend also told her that his son, Shelly’s nephew, knew where his mother was. The Leighty’s 150 acres of camping grounds up in Warriors Mark. At the same time, an individual hidden behind an anonymous account told her this: “Sherry’s still alive, but you will never see her again.” – For someone to say something like that, it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks.
I have to tell the police this because this was something we never even heard of. – But even this string of revelations wasn’t enough to get the police to start an investigation. Shelly knew she needed concrete evidence if she’d ever hope to get the authorities’ attention. – Sherry had been missing for 11 years.
I had faith that I would be able to find her. – So she started digging into her sister’s past, looking for anything she could have missed 12 years ago, and this is when Shelly finally identified the missing link, the one person nobody even attempted to talk to since Sherry’s disappearance. – I tried a new tactic to get more information, so I began looking for Ryan.
I knew Ryan’s last name, so I eventually came across him through I believe it was his wife’s page. – Even though she believed that Aaron and Kenneth were somehow involved, it didn’t necessarily mean that Ryan, the mysterious boyfriend who allegedly took Sherry to Maine in 1999, wasn’t a potential suspect. – I wasn’t sure what his involvement was, so I didn’t wanna say too much.
I just needed to know from him where he thought my sister was. – Shelly sent him a message, crossed her fingers, and armed herself with patience. Three days after asking him if he had any information about Sherry, Ryan finally answered. – He reached back out to me and said he did remember her and the last time he saw her was when Aaron confronted him.
He told me that him and Sherry were in the alley behind the Leighty’s house. – In an altercation that Shelly never heard about before, Aaron and Ryan got into a fistfight over Sherry. Her sister attempted to break them off, but Aaron pushed her away and told her he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her if she was ever seen with Ryan again.
– This was a huge piece of information. He told me Sherry just ended it with him there, she had never moved with him to Maine, so what could have happened to her? The whole story of her leaving was based around this, and according to him, this wasn’t true. – Shelly wanted to go to the police right away, but her brother Richard reminded her that after years of harassing the authorities, the police stopped trusting them a long time ago.
Instead, he asked Ryan to do them a favor. – We got Ryan to talk to the police to verify Sherry never left this town with him. – And finally, for the first time in 12 years, the Altoona police were considering declaring Sherry missing and opening a case. – Reaching out to Ryan was the reason that she had credibility as far as the Altoona Police Department was concerned, so Shelly really gets the credit there.
– Now that the police officially declared Sherry missing and that Ryan had been eliminated from the list of potential suspects, Shelly finally made her move. She told the police that the person responsible for her sister’s disappearance was most likely Aaron Leighty, probably with the help of his father, Kenneth.
– Aaron Leighty was absolutely a person of interest, and the fact that he believed she was cheating on him would’ve led to him possibly having motive to kill her. – Afterward, months went by without any action from the police. Shelly knew they would eventually interview Aaron again, but she was tired of constantly waiting on them, so she decided to take matters into her own hands once again.
She headed to the courthouse to gather more information on Sherry and Aaron’s divorce. She discovered a document dating June 10, 1999, stating that Sherry would be granted legal and physical custody of the children after the procedure. Convinced that she finally got her hand on the actual motive of the crime, she returned to the police and once again they dismissed her findings as irrelevant.
– We were skeptical, to say the least. – It seemed as if Aaron was attempting to cooperate with law enforcement the entire time, but they still had suspicions. – Aaron’s willingness to work with the police pushed the investigators in another direction. What if his father Kenneth acted out of his own accord? That’s when they decided to do something that should have probably been done 13 years ago.
After dropping Sherry off on the day of her disappearance, Kenneth claims that he went to work, so the police finally checked with his employers if they could corroborate this. – He said he was at work and he wasn’t at work. And if he was not involved, there would be no reason to lie to the police. – Following this discovery, they sat with Aaron a second time.
– We didn’t know whose team Aaron was on, so we needed to make sure that he knew he was gonna be a focus as well as his dad and we needed his help. – Except for a few texts from the Facebook group, the police still had no evidence at all. They had a motive against Aaron, but nothing concerning Kenneth. They knew they were onto something because Kenneth categorically refused to collaborate.
The cops also knew about Warriors Mark, the presumed location of Sherry’s body that Shelly shared with them a year earlier. Still, Kenneth refused to allow them to search the property and the DA denied a search warrant due to the lack of evidence. Instead, he proposed a different idea. – Under the wiretap law in Pennsylvania, if one person agrees to make a phone call to the other, they can consent to be recorded.
Aaron agreed to call his father to see if Kenneth would talk about the case. – At the police barrack, the detectives hooked Aaron’s phone onto a recording device and had him call his father. They also provided him with the script and told him to stick to it, but Aaron quickly lost his cool as the conversation went along.
He intended to prove to them that his father was innocent. However, it seemed like he too had been fooled all along. – The way Ken was answering, Aaron knew that something happened. He knew his father was lying to him. – Aaron was upset on the phone, his dad was upset on the phone, and, out of the blue, Kenneth said, “I did it.
” – He claims that it was an accident. He confronted her on the street after he learned she had been seeing Ryan. He allegedly only wanted to push her around, not kill her, but eventually she fell to the ground, hitting her head in the process. Shelly was shocked when the police shared the news with her. – It didn’t seem real, like this was the first time I heard someone say that Sherry wasn’t here anymore.
– During the call, the detectives couldn’t help but notice how Kenneth meticulously chose his words. It seemed like he knew how to differentiate murder from manslaughter and aimed to be charged with the latter. Now armed with the recording of his confession, the police didn’t lose any more time. – That’s when I sent troopers and the detectives up to Altoona to interview Ken at his residence.
– At the Leighty’s home, the detective immediately revealed to Kenneth that he had been recorded and that they planned to arrest him for the murder of Sherry. Then, suddenly, he stood up and punched the trooper in front of him right in the face. – He assaulted a police officer, knocked the police officer to the ground.
– At this point, Mr. Leighty ran upstairs where he had a gun. There was a slight scuffle. They tackled him in the residence. He was handcuffed and Mr. Leighty was placed in the Blair County Prison with aggravated assault charges against the troopers and the detective. – Thanks to Shelly’s years-long effort, Kenneth was locked up and the police also knew the approximate location of Sherry’s body.
While investigating online, Shelly learned about Warriors Mark, the Leighty’s family camping ground. She was convinced this was where they would find Sherry. At 150 acres, the area was large but still manageable. So, following Kenneth’s arrest, the Pennsylvania State Police started searching. – Everyone had high hopes that we were going to find this missing lady in fairly short order.
– Eventually, there were between 50 and 100 people on the property searching from early morning until dusk. – According to the DA, finding the body was the only way they could make sure Kenneth would get sentenced for murder. He was convinced Sherry’s remains would prove her death was more than a simple accident.
He brought in woodland experts, cadaver dogs, and local hunters, but couldn’t find anything helpful. After searching for five days, the sergeant in charge of the search made a somewhat controversial decision. – After we searched the property for the first week, the decision was made by myself and my superiors that it was time for us to pull off the property.
– Shelly couldn’t believe it. All of her efforts were in vain. She had waited 13 years for this and the police officially canceled all search efforts after only five days. – All this time, I just wanted to get out and… start digging myself. – Following the cancellation, the authorities were out of options, so the DA followed with another greatly disputed choice.
Acting out of his own accord and without the consent of Shelly nor Richard, he went directly to Kenneth’s attorney. – I made the decision to go to Leighty’s attorneys and try to come up with a deal. I put third degree murder on the table. – Now, even forensic evidence couldn’t change the verdict. No matter what they’d find in the woods, Kenneth could expect a shot at parole after only seven years in jail.
– I was very angry. I didn’t understand why they had to make a deal with him and without asking the family first, how we felt… – The next day, the detectives brought Kenneth to Warriors Mark and started searching again for Sherry. After a few mishaps, Kenneth pointed out a rock mound by the camping grounds where he usually brought his grandchildren to camp during the summer.
– I started throwing rocks off the pile. A void appeared. As I leaned forward on the rocks, I was on all fours and I could look down in the hole. There was a bone in that hole. We knew we had found Sherry Leighty. – For the past 13 years, Sherry’s children have camped with their grandfather right next to the remains of their own mother.
– I think he’s evil. All this time the kids thinking their mom left them, all along knowing what he did to their mom? – The discovery of Sherry’s remains countered Kenneth’s claims. – There was no way it was an accident. To cause that type of injury, Ken would have had to have dropped a bowling ball on her head accidentally.
– While in detention, Kenneth refused to talk to the police. He admitted that he used a weapon to murder Sherry, but refused to explain further. Looking into his past, one could easily assume that Sherry’s end was dire. Amongst the multiple rumors of sexual violence surrounding him, Shelly learned that he allegedly r***d his wife’s sister and a teenage girl back in his hometown, so Shelly and Richard suppose that Kenneth probably attempted to r*** their sister but she fought back and he killed her in response.
Even if he refused to collaborate with the police after discovering the body, Kenneth was only sentenced to 7 to 14 years of prison as promised by the DA. Now that the case was closed once and for all, Shelly, Richard, and their families finally paid their respect to their returned sister. – When we finally got her home, we did have a memorial service for her.
She was then buried with our father. I miss Sherry a lot and I know that she’s finally at rest. She’s with our dad. He just wanted to be with her. – But their rest was short-lived. In 2020, Kenneth’s minimum sentence was completed and was allowed to attempt parole. – When Kenneth Leighty came up for his first parole hearing in 2020, I did speak in front of the parole board.
– And every year moving forward, Shelly must carry on the fight for her sister. Here is an excerpt from one of her addresses. In it, she’s directly talking to Kenneth. – “My family has been through living hell not knowing what happened to Sherry. We knew she would have never left her young children. Sherry’s most basic right, her right to life, was cruelly and unjustly taken from her.
I lost a sister, but they lost a mother.” – On top of her addresses to the parole board, Shelly continues to manage her sister’s memorial page on Facebook. Together with the community she assembled there, she’s doing everything possible to keep Kenneth Leighty incarcerated. – I did start a petition. The first hearing, I think I had over 2,000, and the second hearing I had over 7,000.
– In her book <i>Through a Sister’s Eyes,</i> published in 2016, Shelly recalled losing more than her sister in 1999. She lost her faith in law enforcement and, ultimately, the criminal justice system. The sentiment was also shared by the DA responsible for Kenneth’s condemnation in 2013. – I can’t speak to what happened in 1999.
Would we have done things different today? Yeah, probably. – If it wasn’t for Shelly, I still believe to this day that we would not know where Sherry is. – I knew Sherry would’ve done the same for me. I promised my dad and Sherry was my best friend. Just an amazing person. – Today, the memory of Sherry lives on through Shelly, Richard, and her now adult children.
For the sake of all the other families with a missing loved one, Shelly keeps marching on, fighting not only for Sherry but all victims of violence. – Overall, I just wanted to get her story out there. I will continue to be Sherry’s voice and any opportunity available to me, I will tell her story.
