Angela Hammond

Case background and investigation

Angela 'Angie' Hammond was a 20-year-old woman living in Clinton, Missouri, a small farming community, when she vanished on the night of April 4, 1991. Well-liked and recently engaged, Angela was about four months pregnant at the time. That evening she had been out with her fiancé, Rob Shafer, who dropped her off before she drove downtown to use a public pay phone. Shortly before midnight — around 11:45 p.m. — she called Shafer from the booth at the corner of Second and Jefferson streets, outside a Food Barn grocery store, so the couple could keep talking. What began as an ordinary late-night phone call between two young people planning their future would become the last time anyone is known to have heard from Angela Hammond.

As they spoke, Angela told Shafer that an older green pickup truck was slowly circling the block and that the driver — a bearded man — made her uneasy. Moments later she screamed, and the line went dead. Shafer immediately jumped in his car and raced toward the pay phone. On the way he passed a green Ford pickup speeding in the opposite direction and heard a voice cry out; convinced Angela was inside, he turned to chase it. The pursuit covered roughly two miles at high speed before Shafer's own vehicle broke down — reportedly his transmission failed — and the truck escaped into the night. Angela was never seen again, and her own car was later found abandoned near the pay phone where she had been standing.

The abduction became one of Missouri's most notorious unsolved cases. Witnesses helped police compile a detailed description of the suspect vehicle: a late-1960s or early-1970s two-tone green Ford pickup with a large decal of a jumping fish covering the rear window. Investigators reportedly checked more than a thousand registered trucks matching the description without identifying the driver. Over the years, tips and possible sightings surfaced across several states and even Canada, but none led to Angela or to a suspect. The case has been featured on Unsolved Mysteries and continues to draw attention from cold-case investigators and the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which still maintains her active missing-person file and has offered a reward for information.

One theory that has drawn particular interest involves possible mistaken identity. Investigators have suggested that a criminal organization may have targeted the daughter of an informant — a different woman also named Angie who bore some physical resemblance to Hammond — and that Angela was seized by mistake as an act of retaliation. A threatening note tied to that theory reportedly surfaced the same night she disappeared. Decades later, however, the case remains open and unsolved, with no arrests and no recovery of Angela's remains. Her family has never stopped searching for answers about what happened to Angela and her unborn child during that brief phone call on an April night in 1991.