The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals.
When a 911 dispatch supervisor disappears without a trace,
“I just had this awful, awful sinking feeling something was wrong.”
The bureau mobilizes.
“It happened so quickly it almost took your breath away.”
“Did the double divorcee run away with a new lover?”
His words to us I’ll never forget this long as I live was,
“I believe Tesa’s in Cancun with a man named Elvis.”
Or has murder come to a small town in Georgia.
“We absolutely looked at possible other missing people, possible serial killer.”
He would always brag to people about how he could take him out into the woods and bury him and nobody’d ever find him.
We followed the evidence where it led us. This is not a phantom we’re chasing. It turned out to be the monster in the end.
Saturday, March 23rd, 2007. Lafayette, Georgia.
It’s a typical morning in this sleepy southern town. At the local 911 dispatch center, the emergencies have been relatively minor until a troubling call comes in.
Claire Cars reports that she hasn’t seen her daughter Teresa in several days. This time, dispatchers don’t need to take a description. The missing woman, Teresa Parker, is one of their own — a 41-year-old dispatch supervisor.
The news stuns Teresa’s friend and fellow coworker, Rhonda Knox.
“Honestly, your heart almost stops because Teresa was somebody I was in the room for 12 hours a day for 4 days a week in a row. I was with Teresa more than I was my family, really.”
Dispatchers learn Teresa hasn’t spoken to her sister Christina or returned her calls in more than two days.
“I could just feel it in me that something was wrong. I just called her just over and over and over and over and over. I called the home, the cell, nothing. I left messages, you know, nothing. It’s so unlike Teresa. She always calls her mother and sister every day like clockwork.”
“Teresa would talk to my mom every morning. She would even call mom in the evenings from work when she would go to work. That’s just how she was. She was dependable.”
Dependable. Even as a kid growing up in Northern Georgia.
“Mother Teresa. I remember calling her that because she was always the one keeping everything together. She just took care of everybody.”
After graduation, Teresa married her high school sweetheart.
“The first marriage was kind of brief, you know, just a few years. They were just too young and things just didn’t work. She was very sad about that.”
After her divorce, Teresa took a job as a 911 dispatcher.
“She was a lady. You didn’t hear her cuss. She just was always there for us if we needed her and she was a very good supervisor.”
“She loved helping people. She was great at that and she loved her job.”
She pretty much sworn off men for a while but then went to work at the Lafayette Police Department. That’s where Teresa met Sergeant Sam Parker who served on the Lafayette Police Force with distinction for 12 years.
Everybody liked Sam. He was very, very funny. He’s a former Marine and he dressed the part. He looked like the professional police officer that you would expect.
For all his commendations, it was Sam’s outgoing personality that finally won Teresa over.
“They were kind of like opposites. He was the loud, rambunctious one, and she was the quiet one. Teresa was madly in love with him.”
Teresa and Sam Parker married on September 11th, 1993. They moved into a home in the countryside. Their romantic getaway from the stresses of police work. But after 13 years, their relationship went cold.
“I think she loved Sam. I really do. I think she I know she did in the beginning. I think that love just kind of started fading away through the years.”
“Teresa was depressed in a way about it ending. She just wanted to be friends with him.”
Teresa and Sam both seemed to be accepting the split. It was all over but the paperwork. The finances and the household were already divided and Teresa was moving out.
On Wednesday, Teresa had taken a few days off work to move into her new apartment. At first, her family thought Teresa was just too busy to stay in touch. But by Saturday afternoon, Teresa hadn’t been heard from in more than two days.
“Knowing Teresa like we knew her to be a responsible person, we all had our concerns that something was wrong. We better just jump on this. And matter of fact, everybody met that day, that Saturday, got several people together to start working on this.”
For agent James Harris of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, this case hits close to home.
“So I asked him, ‘Who were we looking at?’ Teresa Parker, and I remember a lump coming up my throat saying, ‘Oh no, I hope this doesn’t go where it possibly could.’”
For the Walker County Sheriff’s Office, Teresa’s case is personal — too personal for them to handle on their own. The Sheriff’s Office calls on the FBI to take the lead.
FBI Special Agent Marcus Vzy of the Atlanta Division springs into action. He knows they have to hit the ground running.
“Three days had passed. Lots of time for evidence to decay or go away. Lots of time for stories to be built, alibis to be made. So when we come in late in the game like that, we’re behind the curve.”
Agents first stop is Teresa’s new apartment. When they arrive, they find a note showing she missed an appointment on Thursday to have a new washer and dryer installed.
“Teresa was always where she was supposed to be when she was supposed to be there. So when Teresa starts missing appointments, you know something’s wrong.”
Agent Harris let himself in with a key code provided by the manager. He finds no signs of foul play.
“Is anybody in here?”
And more importantly, no sign of Teresa.
A quick canvas results in an early break. A new neighbor tells agents she saw Teresa that Wednesday night.
“She is seen by a neighbor having a conversation on the cell phone at around 10:45.”
Agents know Teresa was talking to her sister Christina around that time. About an hour later, she phoned her friend Rhonda.
“She wanted me to come down to her apartment, help her move the next day, and just spend the night with her cuz she was kind of scared to stay in her apartment by herself for the first night. Teresa said she was heading home to spend one last night at her old house.”
About 5:00 a.m. on Thursday, Teresa called Rhonda’s phone again.
“I got a hangup call. I called it back and didn’t get an answer. Called it back again. Never an answer.”
Agents wonder if this was just a hang-up call or an interrupted cry for help.
Investigators head over to Teresa’s home she shared with her soon-to-be ex-husband Sam Parker. Sam is a 25-year veteran of the Lafayette Police Department with multiple commendations for bravery in the line of duty. After almost 15 years together, Sam and Teresa’s marriage failed. The couple agreed to split.
“The divorce was going really amicable. They had worked out things where he had agreed on everything.”
“Sam answered all of our questions. Everything we asked him for, he cooperated with us.”
“You do what you got to do.”
Sam tells agents he last saw Teresa Wednesday evening before she drove over to her new apartment. Sam assures them he’ll do whatever he can to help the investigation. And he offers up his own opinion.
“Do whatever you got to do.”
He doesn’t believe that Teresa’s missing at all. He thinks she’s gone on an impromptu vacation as she often does in times of stress.
“At one point during her first marriage, Teresa had left for a couple of days just to kind of clear her head. In fact, just 10 days earlier, Teresa took off to Gatlinburg, Tennessee for a getaway.”
“I’m so glad I decided to come up here. I really need this time to get away.”
“She just went have a few days just to relax and try to get her thoughts together, try to get her life together.”
But Sam was suspicious of what Teresa was up to. So, he did a little investigating. Sam had a receipt to a lodge in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which showed two people renting this cabin.
Sam reveals another even more troubling reason for his suspicions. He believes there’s at least one other man in Teresa’s life. It’s a shock to those who know Teresa, but definitely an avenue they want to explore.
“We knew that we at least had some paths that we had to go down. Check out the possibilities of where Teresa might be.”
A list of unanswered questions is growing. Is Teresa a victim of a forced abduction, murder, or is quiet, mild-mannered Teresa Parker hiding a dark secret?
March 2007, Lafayette, Georgia. 911 dispatcher Teresa Parker has been missing for 4 days. Without any leads or evidence, investigators are left to consider the most likely scenario. Perhaps Teresa ran away. Overwhelmed by the stress of her pending divorce from her husband, Sam Parker.
“We were just hoping that possibly Teresa had just gone off for a while to be by herself that she would show back up either for work or, you know, contact family members and things like that.”
While Harris is hopeful Teresa will show up for work on Monday, Agent Vzy is skeptical.
“One of the problems with that is that that might work for a night or two, but the thing that you’re going to run into is you’re going to need money. You’re going to need your credit card. You’re going to show up on the radar screen in some manner.”
He pulls up Teresa’s credit card and bank records, but there is no activity since she disappeared. Her cell phone voicemail shows a flurry of calls from worried friends and family.
“Hey, girl. All right.”
“We’re not looking for you, sweetheart. Uh, you know, I’m following a missing person’s report because of the fact that we haven’t seen you. Uh, if you get this message, I need to hear from you.”
“Please support God. Please, God be okay. Give us give me a call, please. I love you.”
Most heartbreaking of all, a call from distraught husband Sam.
“This is Sam. Uh, it’s Friday night, 3:00. Just wondering about you, where you are. Give me a call. Just give me give me a call. Stay in touch.”
Those messages, you could feel the panic in the voices. They got more and more desperate sounding as the days went on.
Vzy believes if Teresa had gone off on her own for the weekend, surely she would call her family and friends to say she’s okay.
To aid in the investigation, Teresa’s husband, Sam Parker, volunteers her phone bill, hoping that it might provide agents with some fresh leads.
“Guys, I think I got something. It shows Teresa hasn’t made any outgoing phone calls since that brief hangup to co-worker Rhonda early Thursday.”
But agents do find something interesting. Teresa made over 20 phone calls to one phone number shortly before her disappearance.
“That number’s on this phone bill 20 different times.”
“That’s got something to do with what’s going on. You sure?”
“It’s got to be. I’ve never seen that number before. Track down that number. Find my Teresa.”
“We will.”
A reverse number search reveals the number belongs to a police officer who works with Teresa. It would throw up red flags to anyone. That amount of calls going to this person’s phone. Why would she be talking to this person so much? Why did she call him so much? It warranted a more thorough investigation.
Investigators know Sam Parker suspects his wife is having an affair. Could Teresa’s coworker be her secret lover? The officer’s identity is kept out of the public as investigators probe the alleged affair in their ranks.
“I believe that a relationship might have been starting out. I believe that she started confiding in this police officer and perhaps it gave the illusion of that there was possibility of a relationship.”
He admits she invited him to Gatlinburg for the weekend, but he didn’t go. And the officer has a solid alibi. The night Teresa disappeared, he was on duty.
But investigators wonder, was there another man in Teresa’s life? Someone even her closest friends didn’t know about? Maybe she was hiding out with someone else. Was a scenario we had to take into consideration.
They look into Sam’s suspicion that Teresa used her recent vacation to a mountain resort as a cover up for a romantic liaison. Sam gave them a receipt showing she booked a double occupancy room.
Agents wonder, did Teresa have a weekend tryst with a mystery man?
“We investigated into her trip, speaking to the staff, speaking to the cleaning staff to determine whether or not there was anyone else there.”
The reservation placed under Teresa Barker turns out to be nothing more than the hotel clerk misunderstanding Teresa’s name when she phoned in the reservation.
“Our investigation showed that there was no one else there. She was there alone.”
“Thanks, Sandra. Appreciate it.”
“We’re looking at anything and everything. If anyone brings up the fact that she may have been seeing someone or they had heard this, we tried to follow those out as far as we could take them. In a case like this, you want to follow up all the leads and not have blinders on.”
With little else to go on, investigators turned their attention to the Parker household. By all accounts, Sam and Teresa were on good terms despite their pending divorce. But perhaps a deeper conflict festered behind closed doors.
Sam is happy to oblige the request to search the couple’s home.
“He let us search and I believe he said several times that whatever y’all want to do, whatever you want to search, you know, I got nothing to hide.”
Teresa’s purse, keys, and cell phone are missing, but her SUV is there and more.
“We noticed in the bathroom that Teresa used that her makeup case was there, her contacts, contact solution, her toothbrush was still there. Things that anybody most likely is going to take with them. So that started putting a few sparks in her head.”
When you overlay that with the scenario that she just walked away, it doesn’t really fit because she left so many things behind that if you’re going to walk away, you would have taken with you.
Investigators wonder, could Teresa have been taken against her will?
But the house is meticulously clean and shows no sign of a struggle. They impound Teresa’s SUV for further analysis.
And then a potential break in the case. Sam tells detectives his neighbor may have seen something related to the investigation. A neighbor had suggested she had seen two men around the area of the Parker residence around the time of Teresa’s disappearance. She spotted two suspicious men in a light colored truck in Sam and Teresa’s yard.
Now, it’s just a matter of tracking down these two mystery men.
Investigators believe the two men working in the yard were actually Sam and a neighbor’s son. And the light colored pickup more than likely belonged to Sam. It appears to be another dead end.
Near the small town of Lafayette, scores of volunteers line up to walk through the thick Georgia forests. They search for any signs of the missing 911 dispatcher, Teresa Parker. The woman who had always been there when anyone needed help.
“Teresa loved her job. All the officers called her Mama T because she kind of just took care of everybody. She was mama mama T. You know, she was such an integral part of the law enforcement community.”
The searchers find no trace of Teresa.
Her description is given to the local media and investigators print missing person posters. They received hundreds and hundreds of tips, but none of the sightings could be verified as Teresa Parker.
For investigators, it’s one disappointment after another.
“I really hope Teresa walks in the door here any moment so we can just all go home and laugh about this. We really hoped that she would just show back up, but that slowly faded away.”
They have to face a terrible possibility. Teresa might be found eventually, but not alive. They keep Teresa’s files with them 24 hours a day just in case.
Then finally, a break in the case. Crime techs scouring Teresa’s impounded SUV find something puzzling. The vehicle was very, very clean.
The crime scene specialist said,
“I think I found blood in the back of the vehicle.”
Two small drops of blood are found in the latch of the rear door. The samples are collected and sent to the lab for comparison with DNA from Teresa’s toothbrush. Lab results quickly determine the blood belongs to Teresa. It’s the first sign that her life may have come to a tragic and violent end.
Now, what we couldn’t tell is how it got there. Whether it was some type of cut or an injury during moving or not, or other evidence of a body being back there. It made us very, very suspicious.
Investigators have to look at the possibility that Teresa might be a victim of foul play, but who would want to hurt their 911 dispatcher? They come up empty on other possibilities.
They wonder, could Teresa’s disappearance have anything to do with Sam’s job as a law enforcement officer? They come up empty.
Days slip by with no sign of Teresa. So, they turn back to the information they do know. The timeline of Teresa’s last known movements.
Teresa goes missing on Wednesday night, March 21st, into Thursday morning, March 22nd.
What agents know is that Sam Parker last saw Teresa packing boxes at their house on Wednesday. She stayed there until around 7:00 p.m. when she left to go to her new apartment. She is seen by a neighbor outside having a conversation on the cell phone at around 10:45. That’s the last person that actually physically sees her.
Sam tells agents he left their house to spend the night at the home of his new girlfriend. He said he had spent from about 11:30 on Wednesday evening till about 6:00 on Thursday morning at this person’s house.
At around 11:30 p.m., Teresa called her friend Rhonda before driving back to Sam’s house to collect the last of her belongings.
“I had talked to her, and that’s the last time anybody spoke with her.”
After her conversation with Rhonda, no one knows what happened to Teresa. Sam tells investigators he drove back over to his house around 6:30 Thursday morning to pick up some gear for a fishing trip. He saw Teresa’s SUV parked in the garage.
“He loaded up his trolling motor or his battery in and went fishing. He said that her car was there in the garage when he left.”
After that, it seems like Teresa fell off the map. Two days later, her family reported her missing.
Investigators realize there is one part of that timeline that isn’t solid. Sam’s alibi. His new girlfriend verifies he was with her, but tells agents he didn’t arrive until after 1:30 a.m., almost 2 hours later than when he says. It’s a small window of time, but big enough to raise suspicions.
There’s something else that’s not ringing true. Sam told investigators he went by his house the next morning at 6:30 a.m. He said Teresa’s SUV was parked in the garage. But Rhonda phoned some on-duty police officers to do a welfare check on Teresa around 7:00 a.m. The police officers had gone out to the house early that morning and saw Sam’s truck parked there and was able to tell that Teresa’s 4Runner was gone.
When you start lying about simple things, you’re hiding bigger things.
The time has come to investigate one of their own.
Sam Parker knows he’s under an investigative microscope when he comes in for an interview with Agent Harris.
“This isn’t looking good. I’m finding her. I haven’t found her yet. Don’t have anything to say she’s alive or dead. You know that, right? I need to eliminate you as being a suspect in what happened to her.”
“I understand.”
“You know that.”
“I know that.”
During the interview, Sam would almost act like he was falling apart and start to cry, but there were no tears. Agent Harris is also suspicious of fresh bruising on Sam’s arms and takes photographs.
Looking for any kind of evidence, investigators obtain a warrant to search Sam’s locker at Lafayette Police Headquarters. They find a stockpile of C4, a high-powered plastic explosive.
Because he was keeping the C4 in his locker, the police chief at the time terminated his employment.
Explosives aren’t the only questionable item in Sam’s locker. In the locker, they found a poster. It depicted an abused female with a black eye and a cut lip. And it said something to the effect of, “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up. Go figure.”
Investigators turned to a woman who might know Sam best, his ex-wife Kila Baird.
“The first three years of our marriage were great. You know that was Jekyll. And all of a sudden, here came Hyde.”
After enduring terrifying arguments, Kila filed for divorce and Sam moved out. A few weeks later, an enraged Sam returned to the house.
“Scared me to death. He just comes straight, makes a beeline straight over to me. He says, ‘I hear you’ve been out.’ And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Sam accuses her of cheating on him and wraps his hands around her throat.
“I can’t breathe, you know, and he is so enraged and mad. And he takes out his service revolver and held it to my head and said, ‘What I ought to do is just blow your brains all over this wall.’ At that point, I just said, ‘Go ahead and do it.’ I think all that jerked him back to reality and got him off of me.”
For the agents investigating Teresa’s missing person case, Kila’s story has an ominous ring to it.
But was Sam ever violent with Teresa? Bruises that Teresa always explained away.
“What is this? Come on now. What is this?”
“It’s nothing.”
“This is not nothing.”
“It’s not a big deal. Just let it go.”
In the last few months of her marriage, Teresa finally let on to her family that things weren’t good at home. She had to leave. She’d had enough. He called and had left a message saying that if she didn’t come home, he was going to slit all of her animals’ throats and they would be hanging in the trees when she got home.
In May 2002, a 911 caller reported a scene in the Parker’s front yard. Officers arrived and found all of Teresa’s clothing out on the front lawn. Teresa’s phone had been smashed and she had some type of abrasion. Teresa refused to press any charges.
With no reports or photos, it’s hard for agents to know what really happened. But it does indicate Sam can lose control.
And now investigators worry it may happen again.
Sam, unemployed and under suspicion, is feeling the pressure. Three weeks after Teresa disappeared, another 911 call comes in. Sam Parker is sitting outside his house in his Marine uniform with a shotgun to his chin, threatening to blow his own head off.
“Down. Put the weapon down. Lower it.”
“I believe Sam felt like he was being considered a suspect and not a victim. So, I believe his alleged suicide attempt was to portray himself as a worried husband and a victim of our investigation. It didn’t work.”
Everything appears to be pointing to Sam Parker. But without any physical evidence linking him to a crime, the DA fears he might get away with murder.
Then in a surprise move, Sam appears on the evening news and talks about Teresa.
“I’ve been wowed at Ruby Ridge by the FBI.”
He told the local reporter that he thought he knew where she was, but he wasn’t going to say. Agents traveled out to Sam’s house.
“All right, Sam, you told the news that you knew where she was. Tell us where she’s at and it’ll all be over with.”
And his words to us, and I’ll never forget this long as I live, was,
“I believe Teresa’s in Cancun with a man named Elvis.”
Sam refuses to cooperate further. Agents discover Teresa had met an Elvis impersonator while vacationing at a Cancun resort. Authorities located Elvis, but find no trace of Teresa.
The case drags on almost a full year. Finally, on February 4th, 2008, nearly 11 months after Teresa vanished, FBI and GBI agents arrest Sam Parker for the murder of his ex-wife. It’s only the sixth murder case in Georgia history to be tried without a body.
Armed with circumstantial evidence, the DA builds her case on Sam’s lies, his pattern of abuse towards women, and two drops of blood.
Prosecutor Patterson tells the jury when Teresa returned to Sam’s house that night, he was there. They argued and he choked her.
“We always theorized that he came up behind her and put a choke hold on her and she was trying to push him off of her and you can see the bruises on the insides of his arms.”
Sam put Teresa’s body in the back of her SUV. One of the two drops of blood found on the SUV hatchback belonged to Teresa. The other included DNA from Sam Parker. Sam then packed Teresa’s corpse in her vehicle and drove off to dispose of her remains.
After 4 days, the jury returns a guilty verdict. The judge renders sentence right there on the spot.
“In this matter, I am sentencing you to the rest of your natural life in prison.”
And it happened so quickly, it almost took your breath away.
This was only a partial victory. Despite his conviction, Sam refuses to admit guilt or tell anyone what he had done with Teresa’s body.
“He was still in control of the situation because he wasn’t going to reveal where she was, where her body was, what he had done to her.”
“Oh, it was so hard not knowing where she was. She’s out there probably in the woods somewhere, you know, thrown out like garbage, you know. That was horrible.”
Search teams continue to look for Teresa Parker. Almost a year to the day after Sam Parker’s conviction, a farmer trips over a human jawbone 16 miles from where Sam’s father had lived. The skull is positively identified as Teresa.
“And it was a very chilling moment because the amount of time and effort and heart and soul that we had put in, here she was. And there were days when I didn’t think we would ever find her and we did.”
“It was wonderful to be able to lay her to rest and not have to worry anymore. That was a miracle. How she was found was a miracle in itself.”
Many remember Teresa as the 911 dispatcher who had always been there to help everyone. They only wish that she had been able to help herself.
“I wish every day Teresa would have told somebody and made that call because maybe if she did, she would still be here.”
“The thing that is disappointing is that Sam as a police officer is supposed to be the good guy. Sam is supposed to be the one that comes in and is the hero and saves people. But it turned out to be the monster in the end.”
