Cleashindra Hall case: Police search home for Ark. teen missing since '94
PINE BLUFF, Ark. (AP) - Police obtained a warrant to search an Arkansas man's home for clues into the 1994 disappearance of an 18-year-old woman after someone reported seeing blood at the house...
PINE BLUFF, Ark. (AP) — Police obtained a warrant to search an Arkansas man’s home for clues into the 1994 disappearance of an 18-year-old woman after someone reported seeing blood at the house, according to court documents filed Tuesday.
Authorities seized four items when they searched Larry Amos’ home in Pine Bluff for evidence related to Cleashindra Hall, who was working part-time for Amos doing clerical work and preparing for college. Amos, who hasn’t been charged or named a suspect in the case, is the last known person to have seen her.
“We have no viable suspect, and what we’re trying to do is narrow down the scope of the investigation,” Police Lt. Bob Rawlinson said Tuesday, declining to comment on what police found. “Until we are able to identify a person of interest, everybody associated with the case is (a person of interest).”
According to the court documents, a man who said he did some construction work for Amos in the late 1990s told investigators in January that he spotted blood in the home “like it had been splattered on the insulation.” Another man who was hired to fill a hole in Amos’ backyard said that “when the wind would blow he could smell an odor unlike anything he has smelled before,” according to a summary of a police interview included with the court documents.
The heavily redacted documents don’t indicate whether any blood was found. The paperwork also doesn’t say what items investigators took from the home when it was searched late last week. Rawlinson also wouldn’t comment on what was found, or whether two cadaver dogs that searched the home found anything.
Amos declined to talk to reporters when authorities searched his home in Pine Bluff, a city just south of Little Rock. A man outside the home Tuesday refused to comment or identify himself to an Associated Press reporter, saying only: “I have no comment no matter what you ask.”
Investigators believe that Hall went to work at Amos’ house on May 9, 1994. She called home around 8 p.m. to see if someone had called for her. No one had, so she hung up, her mother Laurell Hall said.
“That was the last time we heard her voice,” Laurell Hall said Tuesday.
Amos told investigators that he didn’t know how she left his house. Police initially suspected someone else was involved with her disappearance, but no one was ever arrested in the case.
Authorities believe Hall is most likely dead and acknowledge they’re now focused on finding new information that could lead to her body.
“Cleashindra wasn’t the type of person just to run off,” Rawlinson said. “She had her future ahead of her.”
Her mother said her daughter was doing clerical work for Amos, who at the time was running a business that supported in-home daycares, to make some money before she set off for college in the fall. She hoped to someday become a pediatrician.
Laurell Hall said she still pictures her daughter as an 18-year-old, even though nearly two decades have passed. She and her husband keep pink bows on their porch as a sign of hope, a reminder that they’re still searching. She holds out hope that her daughter is alive.
“I’m going to believe that until I find out differently,” she said.
___
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
