The exact day that 21-year-old Alice Jefferson went missing is a mystery, but authorities believe that it was sometime between 1974 and 1975. She and her children, six-year-old Paula and five-year-old Johnny, lived on a post in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with Alice’s husband, Lee Andrew Jefferson (not their father). Jefferson was a soldier assigned to that post from 1973 to 1975.
During that time, Alice’s children remember one day, after school was over, they waited for someone to pick them up, but no one arrived. Eventually, they grew tired of waiting and decided to walk home. They didn’t have keys to their house and had to knock for someone to let them in, and after a long wait, Jefferson opened the door. The children claimed that he was sweating and seemed on edge. He told them he had forgotten to pick them up and took so long to answer the door because he was sleeping. Their mother’s car and clothes were still in the home, but there was no sign of Alice anywhere.
“Looked like somebody had doused him with a bucket of water, he was sweating so hard. He says to me, ‘I’m sorry I overslept. I was asleep.’ I didn’t buy it,” Paula said in 2015.