On the morning of June 6th, 1984, 12-year-old Sherry Marler accompanied her stepfather into nearby Greenville, Alabama, where he had errands to run. He gave her money to buy a soda from a gas station vending machine across the street while he went into the bank, telling Sherry to meet him back at the truck afterwards.
It was the last time anyone in her family would ever see her. Unsubstantiated sightings and bizarre allegations would follow, but little in the way of hard evidence was recovered in the investigation into Sherry’s disappearance.
More than four decades later, the question remains: What happened to Sherry Marler?
One of three children, Sherry Lynn Marler was born on August 18th, 1971, to parents Betty and Ralph, who divorced when she was a small child. Betty went on to marry a man named Ray Stringfellow, a retired army sergeant who had turned to the calmer life of farming, in 1979.
The family resided on a 400-acre farm where they grew a variety of crops, located approximately 12 miles away from Greenville, Alabama.
Strong and outdoorsy, Sherry disliked school and had a passion for farming, inspiring her nickname “Little Farmer.” One of her proudest achievements was that she could operate a plow. She was a cheerful girl who loved country music and was said to have a close relationship with her family.
“She was such a tomboy. We had a farm and she loved to stay out there with her stepdaddy and he would take her with him to the tractor shop and the feed store,” Betty recalled later.
The morning of June 6th, 1984, started like any other for the family. Betty, who worked as a waitress at the Waffle House, left for work around 7 a.m.
Ray had some errands that he needed to run that day and Sherry wanted to come with him.
He had to stop at First National Bank in Greenville to extend a loan. However, Sherry, still dusty from the morning’s chores, didn’t want to go inside with her stepfather and also said that she was thirsty.
Ray gave her a dollar to buy a soda from the vending machine in front of the Chevron gas station across the street from the bank and told her to meet him back at the truck. She agreed. The last time Ray saw Sherry, she was crossing the street in the direction of the gas station.
After conducting his business in the bank, Ray walked back to his pickup truck about 15 minutes later and was surprised to see that his stepdaughter wasn’t there. He began searching for her, becoming more frantic as time went on. He called Betty and asked if she’d seen Sherry, hoping that the young girl had perhaps stopped in at the Waffle House, but she hadn’t.
After another half hour of fruitless searching, Ray reported Sherry missing. According to early newspaper articles on the case, he filed the missing persons report shortly before noon.
Searches by air and on land were carried out by law enforcement and volunteers, but to no avail. The missing girl was nowhere to be found. Naturally, the police focused their attention on Ray initially, as he was the last known person to have seen Sherry.
Among the residents of Greenville who were interviewed, none could recall seeing either Sherry Marler or any strangers in town that morning. Investigators believed that an unfamiliar person would have stood out in this close-knit community.
“I have a hard time believing that she was snatched off the street by a perfect stranger in Greenville,” said Police Chief Lonzo Ingram.
Other members of law enforcement agreed that this was a highly unusual occurrence for Greenville.
“This is the only disappearance from Greenville in my entire life,” said Captain Thomas L. Tutchtone of the Greenville Police Department.
Though Ray was adamant that he had no involvement in his stepdaughter’s disappearance, he was inclined to agree that she was taken by someone she knew. He noted the difficulty that a stranger would likely have in attempting to abduct her by force.
“They’d have to wrestle her down because she was rough. She could knock down a boy easily.”
However, Betty believed that it was possible Sherry had at least gone up to a stranger that day. She noted that vending machines at the time didn’t offer change, so Sherry would have needed to find exact change to buy her drink. Did she approach a passerby to see if they had change for her dollar?
As days went by with no sign of Sherry, investigator Kenneth Flowers concluded that she likely wasn’t a runaway and that something more sinister had occurred.
“Runaways are usually found in a few days and that is why we believe that foul play may be involved.”
Ray and Betty, both of whom refused to take a polygraph test, felt that the police were biased against them, preventing them from taking the stranger abduction theory seriously enough in the beginning. Like Flowers, they were certain that the 12-year-old didn’t run away.
“Why should we take a polygraph test when they don’t even check out people who say they have seen Sherry?” Ray questioned. “We haven’t done anything we’re ashamed of. We didn’t do anything to prompt Sherry to run away.”
For his part, Ingram didn’t see his request as unreasonable, under the circumstances.
“It looks to me like a standard police procedure since he was the last person to see Sherry alive. When something like this happens, you try to eliminate family members first as possible suspects. That’s just what we’ve tried to do.”
Authorities also refuted the claim that they weren’t doing enough to locate the missing girl.
“I must have walked 25 miles of swamp,” noted investigator James Rhodes.
In addition to searching hundreds of acres in the area, they checked out an abandoned well nearby too, but found only dead snakes. All told, the local police spent hundreds of man-hours combing the fields and wooded areas of Greenville.
Within days of Sherry’s disappearance, a number of disturbing sightings began to be reported. In each case a girl matching Sherry’s description was seen with an older man, who was said to be approximately 50 years of age, 5’8’’, with a “weathered complexion.”
These eyewitnesses took notice of the young girl because she was visibly distressed, as well as disheveled and “dazed.” She reportedly referred to the unknown man as “B.J.” when they were spotted at a truck stop in Conley, Georgia.
The last sighting of her reported that year took place at a mall in New Orleans.
In 1986, Sherry’s case started to receive more media attention than it ever had before, when it was featured on the television program, Missing III: Have You Seen This Person?
Following the show’s first airing, calls came in from around the country—including cities like Boston, Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans—from people who claimed to have seen Sherry.
However, none of these sightings have ever been verified.
Ryan Anderson, a Greenville resident, runs a Facebook page called Sherry Lynn Marler Still Missing. According to her, she has spent years investigating the disappearance of Sherry and has interviewed many individuals during that time. As a result, she came to know Betty, as well as Larry, Sherry’s brother.
In recent years, Anderson claimed that Sherry Marler was likely a victim of a “multiple family based incest pedophilia ring that involved people from both Butler (where Greenville is located) and Crenshaw counties” and that she was kidnapped by someone she knew very well (but not Ray).
She also speculated that Sherry was pregnant when she vanished and that she was murdered and dismembered by her abductor, before being dumped on a pig farm.
(Warning: Disturbing photo shown below.)
She has posted pictures, which she alleges show a severed human head on said pig farm, taken back in 1984. Anderson said that her research has led her to the conclusion that Sherry was killed by a man who is now deceased, and she allegedly obtained the photo from a member of this individual’s family.
Another picture shows Sherry lying down, with an unidentified girl standing next to her. Anderson asserts that this picture was discovered by Larry, tucked inside of a Bible, in an abandoned trailer in Butler County. She thinks that it was taken after Sherry went missing.
(Side note: It’s unclear when or under what circumstances Larry happened to enter this abandoned trailer, as no further details have been reported about this.)
Conversely, a post on Websleuths quoted a Facebook commenter who said that she was the other girl in the picture and that her father had taken her to see Sherry at the Stringfellow home, an unspecified amount of time before she vanished, when Sherry was sick, and that there was nothing more to it than that.
Yet Anderson has stated that she has “so many sources who are extremely credible but unwilling to publicly expose themselves.” As such, there are no corroborating sources for any of this information, making it impossible to verify the veracity of these disturbing claims.
(Side note: I’m not endorsing these claims and am only including them in the interest of trying to provide a comprehensive overview of this case. Anderson has worked with the family and appears to have their support.)
Lonzo Ingram, now retired, is still haunted by the lack of resolution in Sherry’s case.
“It’s never far from my mind. We push hard, but it’s frustrating when we can’t seem to obtain some good results.”
According to authorities, all of Sherry’s family members were investigated, including her biological father, and ultimately eliminated as persons of interest.
For her part, Betty has always believed in Ray’s innocence.
“I don’t blame my husband for what happened. She could have been with me and it could have happened.”
“I wish I could get out of this bed and bring her home to you,” Ray told his wife in 2003, as he lay in his hospital bed, dying of cancer.
But some Greenville residents still suspect that the family was involved in some way.
“That little girl never made it into town or else I would have seen her. Wherever she’s at, she’s dead,” said an anonymous local.
Sherry’s surviving loved ones have never given up on finding her. Betty has continued to work tirelessly to try to locate her, as did Larry until his untimely death in 2016.
“I wish I could see her again. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her,” said Betty, who went on to open a restaurant in Sherry’s honor, called Carlisle’s on Main.
She explained:
“We want to honor her memory. But we also want to heighten people’s awareness of children missing every day in this country.”
Betty and Ralph Marler, Sherry’s father, eventually reconnected and were engaged at the time of his passing in 2013.
Sherry Marler’s case remains open and unsolved.
If you have any information regarding Sherry’s disappearance, you are encouraged to contact the Greenville Police Department at (334) 382-7461.
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