Gone but not forgotten: Mo. family gets resolution and help, with sister missing since 1987

After 22 years, Mo. family finds slain sister

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The last time Stephanie Clack saw older sister Paula Beverly Davis they were sharing a pizza at a Kansas City-area restaurant and talking about getting tickets to a Bon Jovi concert.

Later that night, she heard from a friend that Davis had gone missing.

That was 22 years ago. Now, thanks to a television show, a Web site, and two little tattoos — one of a unicorn and another of a rose — Clack knows more: Her sister was strangled and her body dumped in Ohio. And the cast and crew of the “The Forgotten” — a TV show about amateur detectives who investigate the deaths of John and Jane Doe victims — have agreed to help pay to have her remains brought back to Missouri.

It’s not the happy ending Clack once hoped for. But it’s much more than she has had for the last two decades.

“My mother had a nervous breakdown after Paula went missing,” Clack said Thursday. “We just never knew.”

The story of what happened to 21-year-old Davis began unfolding for Clack in October when a relative called her after watching an episode of “The Forgotten” and seeing a public service announcement for the Web site NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. The Department of Justice recently launched the Web site that’s a repository for unidentified remains and missing persons.

Clack, 36, punched in some of her sister’s information and came up with about 10 possible matches.

“I was looking for characteristics she had that nobody else would know,” she said. “Then I saw the one with the rose and the unicorn, and I knew we had found her.”

“I was shaking and crying.”

From there, Clack contacted authorities in Montgomery County in southwest Ohio. Davis’ body had been found on an Interstate 70 entrance ramp on Aug. 10, 1987, two days after she and Clack, then 14, had shared that pizza. Davis had been strangled. A homicide investigation was opened then, but remains unsolved.

Davis’ unidentified remains were buried in Montgomery County, in a grave with no name, no headstone. DNA testing has confirmed that the Jane Doe in Ohio was Paula Beverly Davis.

Clack and her sister Alice Beverly, 39, had searched other Web sites for clues about what happened to their sister and come up empty-handed.

Kevin Lothridge, CEO of the National Forensic Science Technology Center, which runs NamUs, said the information on Davis had been at the Montgomery County, Ohio, offices, but “nobody would have known to search there” because Davis went missing in Missouri.

“NamUs pulls all that together,” he said.

After finding Davis, her family faced another task: bringing her remains back to Kansas City. Her relatives didn’t know how they would afford an expected $5,000 to have the body exhumed, cremated, sent to Kansas City and buried. Clack, who lives in Lone Jack outside Kansas City, was recently laid off from a toy store and her husband is also unemployed.

Then she got a call from NamUs, saying that the cast and crew of “The Forgotten,” including actor Christian Slater and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, had offered to help.

The family hopes to have Paula’s remains buried in the Kansas City area this spring, near the graves of their mother and grandmother.

“She was taken from us, you know, and my mom went to her grave not knowing what happened to her daughter,” Clack said. “Our biggest goal was to get her home, back with her family where she belongs.”

Associated Press Writer Dan Sewell contributed to this report from Ohio.

National Missing and Unidentified Persons System:

www.namus.gov/