Cayce Lynn McDaniel

Case background and investigation

Cayce Lynn McDaniel was 14 and about to begin her freshman year of high school when she disappeared from her home in Milan, a town in Gibson County, Tennessee. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, she was last known to be at her residence on August 16, 1996. She was born on July 14, 1982, the Milan Mirror-Exchange reported.

That night she had attended a back-to-school party for young people at Double Springs Cumberland Presbyterian Church. WMC Action News 5 reported that an adult from the event dropped her off at home around midnight. When her family returned, the back door was standing open and she was gone. The station reported that the television in her bedroom was on, that the clothes she had worn that evening were laid out, and that a bowl of cookies and milk had been left on the floor. There were no signs of a struggle. A friend told the Mirror-Exchange that police believed she had changed for bed before she left the house.

Milan police and the FBI questioned many people in the following years without an arrest. In 2010 the police chief at the time said dozens of people had been interviewed and several given polygraph tests, and that Cayce was probably no longer alive.

In July 2018, Milan Police Chief Bobby Sellers publicly named Finis Ewin "Pete" Hill as a suspect. Hill was an acquaintance of the family, and Cayce knew him as "Uncle Pete," according to the Mirror-Exchange. He had earlier served a prison sentence for attempted kidnapping and aggravated assault in another case and was in federal custody in 2018 on a separate charge involving a minor. Sellers said Hill's alibi had not held up when investigators re-examined it. A Gibson County grand jury indicted Hill in October 2019 on two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated rape, and he pleaded not guilty.

On August 26, 2022, Hill, then 70, entered a best-interest plea to criminal responsibility for second-degree murder and abuse of a corpse. Under that type of plea a defendant accepts conviction and sentence without admitting the acts. He received a 15-year sentence to be served in full, followed by six years of supervised probation, and gave up his right to appeal; the other charges were dropped. District Attorney General Frederick Agee told the Mirror-Exchange that Hill did not admit to the killing but supplied corroborating details and information about where Cayce was believed to have been buried.

Agee said searches of a specific area had already been carried out and would continue, and that the agreement required Hill to keep cooperating. As of that report, and in the sources reviewed, Cayce's remains had not been recovered. She is still listed by NCMEC as missing.