Parents Search for Missing Daughter
April 02, 2006 - Article Credit
A Melbourne couple is hoping someone in central Florida might know what happened to their 43-year-old daughter.
Lisa and Dale Curry have been making national television appearances in hopes of finding their daughter, 43-year-old Dori Ann Myers.
Myers was last seen on January 10th at a bar in Vero Beach where witnesses say she left with two men.
Later that night, a fire gutted her house. Her car was also burned and found 80 miles away in Glades County and no one has seen or heard from her since.
You wake up in the morning, [and] that's the first thing you think about," Lisa Curry said. You go to bed at night [and] it's the last thing you think about. You think about her all day."
Dale Curry said: "We, of course, want to find Dori, but the first part would be to find the suspects. Once we find the suspects we can figure out what happened to Dori."
Dori Ann Myers' parents say their daughter was last seen with two men.
If you have any information about the men or Myers, call police.
Still missing
Saturday, March 25, 2006
By Allyson Bird
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Article Credit
Donajean Kapp sometimes calls Dori Ann Myers' cellphone, knowing she'll just get a voice mail greeting. But at least she can hear her little sister's voice.
"I'm still living at Jan. 11," Kapp, 46, says between harried drags on a cigarette
She's not the only one.
Jesse King had plans to start college in California. But the 26-year-old aspiring writer has been waiting in Vero Beach, the town he wanted to get away from, since old friends tracked him down in Milwaukee to tell him his mother had been abducted.
Dale Curry, a 69-year-old retired Piper pilot, stays up late thinking about reporters. He'll sometimes make his way to his computer at 1 or 2 a.m., log on to the Internet and shoot off an e-mail asking for another few minutes on the air, another article with his daughter's picture.
"If her story dies, we're going to lose all these contacts, all these leads," he says.
Dori Ann Myers doesn't have the blond schoolgirl innocence of Natalee Holloway, still missing from a senior-year trip to Aruba. Myers is a 43-year-old mother who has tattoos, rides Harleys and won a bathing suit contest just two years ago.
Her son says she buried her first two loves and suffered abuse at the hands of the next two.
But the pretty, petite brunette with the big smile has a family that doesn't want the country to stop looking for her. They have pushed to get her story on three national television shows and in newspapers around the state.
Kapp made "Abducted" posters with her sister's picture that biker friends and family have stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and that Kapp wears ironed onto her clothes and posted in the back of her truck.
You can still smell smoke from Myers' yard when a breeze blows through her tan-colored house on Salerno Road in Lakewood Park. It has been 73 days since her house and car were burned, 72 days since officials have volunteered any new information about her disappearance or the two men with whom she was last seen.
The red bows and yellow ribbons friends tied around her palm tree have seen better days. Rain and sun have battered the note: "We are praying for you. Love, Carol and Darren." And the other note: "Still praying. Carol." She came to play poker
Myers' first stop on Jan. 10 was at the Hillbilly Hideaway, a tucked-back Vero Beach locals bar near Scandals Salon, where she worked as a hairdresser. It was a Tuesday, poker night, and Myers loves Texas Hold 'Em.
But she came in too late to get a seat at a table, says Rick Bowman, whose wife owns the Hideaway. So Myers sat at the bar for a beer or two, played video poker and chatted with friends. She left by 8 p.m.
"I should've bumped someone off the tables," Bowman says. "That makes me feel real bad."
Because from there, Myers went to the St. Lucie Inn in Fort Pierce, where she reportedly met the two unidentified men with whom she was last seen.
One person who was at the bar that night says the two men came in with another man and a young woman who left earlier in the night. The witness, who does not want to be named until the suspects are arrested, says Myers and the two men sat together for only about half an hour and that Myers drank water.
When Myers got home, her ex-boyfriend and close friend, Joe Jones, called. He heard male voices in the background and asked Myers who they were.
Marines who were wounded in Iraq and were heading south, she told him.
Jones says Myers had a soft spot for military men and women and would often talk with Vietnam veterans from around town.
"I know if they conned her saying they were Marines, she fell for that," Jones says.
Myers assured Jones one man was sleeping on the couch and the other on a pullout sofa and hurried off the phone.
Aggravated by the situation, Jones called back. A truck driver, he was in Missouri and couldn't do much. He says he told Myers he loved her and that he'd see her that weekend.
He and Myers spoke several times each day, he says. But when his phone rang the next morning, it was the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office.
A glow from next door
Cindy Gamez was the one who called 911 as flames lit up Myers' house. Her husband heard voices next door just after midnight and when he flipped on their light, the people talking moved inside the house.
Less than three hours later, Gamez heard car doors slam and watched Myers' black 1998 Honda drive off. Then she saw the glow.
The fire damaged 30 percent of Myers' home, and smoke got the rest. A fire department spokesman said later that morning that the fire looked like it had been set in several spots with a flammable liquid.
Myers' car, also burned, turned up at a public boat ramp in Glades County at 5 a.m. that day.
Hours later, the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office held a news conference, unusual in a missing person case. The next day, the sheriff's office released information that Myers was believed to have been abducted.
Looking for leads
The vague drawings of the two suspects look like plenty of men in any given crowd.
"I saw those two composites, and now I'm seeing them everywhere," Myers' son says.
Her family insists that she wouldn't have let two men come to her house unless she knew them or a friend knew them.
They also discredit any notion that Myers wanted to leave because her "flabalab," a pudgy black Lab named Emily, and her cat, Miss Priss, died in the fire. And Myers had just finished paying off the car that was destroyed.
Sheriff's investigators told her father they got a tip that someone had seen Myers in a car with two men at a Seminole Indian reservation in Okeechobee the day after her house burned. The witness from the St. Lucie Inn says investigators placed a man they found at the reservation in a photo lineup.
Sheriff's office Chief Deputy Garry Wilson says investigators have produced dozens of unsuccessful lineups with people out of St. Lucie and Glades counties, including the man found on the reservation.
"So far we have not developed any solid suspects from those efforts," Wilson says, adding that several investigators are still actively pursuing Myers' case every day.
"This has not taken on a cold case type of existence at the sheriff's office," he says.
In the meantime, Kapp has hoped to organize a search through the swampy area where Myers' car was found, but investigators have discouraged independent searches out of fear of damaging evidence.
Kapp catches herself when she refers to her sister in the past tense but grows more restless every day her efforts are confined to copy-machine strategies and online networking.
Myers taught her how to use a computer, after all.
As Kapp prints more posters, she notices some of the originals have come down in businesses around town over the past 2 1/2 months.
"I guess it's not a happy thing to look at," she says.
But until someone finds Myers, she wants the whole country looking.
Search for missing Lakewood Park woman in high gear
February 3, 2006
By TYLER TREADWAY
Article Credit
FORT PIERCE More than three weeks after Dori Ann Myers disappeared from her Lakewood Park home, her family is still hoping for her return.
"But it's hard, very hard," said Donajean Kapp, Myers' sister who also lives in Lakewood Park. "Three weeks is way too long. Everybody is hanging in there, but we're devastated."
Believing Myers, 44, was abducted from her home at 8401 Salerno Road early Jan. 11 just as the house was set on fire, authorities are looking for two men one white, one believed to be Hispanic or American Indian seen with her at the St. Lucie Inn, a bar at 2102 N. Old Dixie Highway north of Fort Pierce, the night before the fire.
"Getting (Myers) back alive, that's our ultimate goal," said St. Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara, "but each day that goes by is bad news in that regard."
Mascara said his office has sent out state and national "be on the lookout" alerts for both the suspects and Myers; deputies have gotten lots of calls about possible sightings of the two men, but none has panned out.
Because Myers' car was found abandoned and burned at a boat ramp near the community of Lakeport in Glades County, he said St. Lucie County deputies have canvassed the area "on three or four occasions" hoping to turn up clues.
They've gotten help, Mascara said, from deputies in Glades and Manatee counties "talking to people all over their jurisdictions, especially notable characters, people with criminal backgrounds."
"What it's going to take," he added, "is for these two guys to be sitting in a bar somewhere, maybe having too much to drink, and trying to take a woman away with them or bragging about burning down a house in St. Lucie County."
For their part, family members have increased the reward they're offering from $5,000 to $6,500 for information that leads to Myers' release and the capture of her abductors. They've also been working hard to get media coverage, especially national coverage, of the case.
So far, the Fox News shows "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" and "The Lineup" have provided national coverage, and several newspapers and local television stations in South and Central Florida have done stories.
The family and Mascara have been in touch with John Walsh, host of the Fox News show "America's Most Wanted," in hopes of more coverage. Network news shows, Kapp said, haven't responded.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the sheriff's Detective Bureau at (772) 462-3230.
