On the morning of September 20, 2014, Tammy Kingery (born April 13, 1977), a nurse in South Carolina, called her husband Park from work and asked him to take her home as she was not feeling well. He did, and afterwards went to run some errands with his two sons. When they returned, the house was locked and Tammy was not there. A note inside the house, apparently left by Tammy, said she was going for a walk and would be back soon, but she never returned and has not been seen since.
Tammy's family said it would have been unusual for her to leave a note, or walk in the woods near their North Augusta home. In the house, she had left her purse, phone, and keys, which would have been needed to lock the door. An extensive search of the area around the house turned up no sign of her.
Investigation by local police revealed that she had been exchanging texts with two men in the area, but police do not believe that is related to her disappearance. She had suffered depression. The case has been the subject of an episode of the Investigation Discovery series Disappeared.
Background
Kingery, a native of Northwest Indiana, met her husband Park Kingery there in the mid-1990s when the two worked together at a local drugstore. On September 20, 1994, the two were engaged. After their marriage, the couple had three children and settled down in a house they built in a wooded area of Edgefield County, South Carolina, just north of North Augusta, near where Park Kingery had gotten a job as a welder. After finishing a degree in nursing in 2001, Tammy took a job as a nurse in a local branch of the NHC Healthcare nursing home. She was still working there in September 2014.
Her marriage to Kingery was strained. While her father, who still lived in Indiana, says he was not aware of any marital or psychological issues his daughter may have had at that time, her mother says the couple had grown distant from each other since their youngest son was born and had considered divorce. Tammy had an ongoing struggle with depression for which she took medication; it had led to extramarital affairs and attempts to take her own life.
During the first weeks of September, Tammy seemed to be suffering physically—according to Park she had missed a few days of work, which was unlike her. She often went to bed shortly after returning from work. Park says Tammy believed no treatment would work. In the middle of that month, around September 16, Tammy began having trouble sleeping. One night she woke up sweating so severely she had to change her clothes. She confided this to her two sisters, with whom she spoke regularly. They advised her to make an appointment to see the doctor, which she did, for September 21.
Disappearance
On the morning of September 20, 2014, Tammy went to work her shift starting at 7 a.m. Her coworkers there say she was agitated about something, uncharacteristically raising her voice in conversation, and checked her own blood pressure four times, finding it high. They urged her to calm down as her agitation was keeping her heart rate high.
Not too long after arriving, she called Park to say she was feeling a little lightheaded and wanted to come home. Since she did not feel up to driving, he picked her up, leaving her car at work, and brought her home, where she changed into her pajamas and lay down to take a nap. Around 10 a.m., he left with the couple's two sons to do some errands and give his wife the chance to rest. Their daughter was still at the house of a friend with whom she had spent the preceding night.
Park dropped the older son off at his mother's house so the boy could mow the lawn. He took the younger boy with him on his errands, visiting several stores where the two were seen by security cameras. When he returned to the house, the dog was outside and the door was locked. Inside they found a note from Tammy reading: "Gone for a walk. Be back soon. Love you." Tammy was initially reported to have taken a Hard Rock Café backpack with her, but that was later corrected as the backpack had been sold a week before at a yard sale. Her purse, wallet, cell phone, and keys were still inside the house.
When he saw the note, Kingery believed right away that something was wrong. His first thought was that she had attempted to walk back to her job in order to retrieve her car. He left his sons at home and drove the route she would have taken but did not find her. He called his daughter and told her to get into a car with her friend and look for her mother; he called his mother-in-law, who came to the house right away. At the home he and his son called and searched for Tammy in the thick surrounding woods. At 2 p.m. they called the police.