The Unexplained Disappearance of Sherry Lynn Marler

On the morning of June 6th, 1984, 12-year-old Sherry Lynn Marler accompanied her stepfather into nearby Greenville, Alabama, a small town where everybody knew everybody. He gave her money to buy a soda from a gas station vending machine across the street while he went into the bank, telling Sherry to meet him back at the truck afterwards.

 

It was the last time anyone in her family would ever see her.

What happened to Sherry Lynn Marler?

 

Sherry Lynn Marler

Sherry Lynn Marler was born on August 18th, 1971, to parents Betty and Ralph. She is one of the couple’s three children. Sherry’s parents split up when she was young and Betty went on to marry a man named Ray Stringfellow, a retired army sergeant who had turned to the calmer life of farming, in 1979.

 

The Stringfellows resided on a 400-acre farm where they grew a variety of crops, approximately 12 miles away from Greenville, Alabama.

Strong and outdoorsy, Sherry disliked school and had a passion for farming, inspiring her nickname “Little Farmer.” One of her proudest achievements was that she could operate a plow. Sherry was a cheerful girl and appeared to have a good relationship with her family.

 

“She was such a tomboy. We had a farm and she loved to stay out there with her stepdaddy and he would take her with him to the tractor shop and the feed store,” Betty recalled later.

 

Trip to the Bank

The morning of June 6th, 1984, started like any other for the family. Betty, who worked as a waitress at the Waffle House, left for work around 7 a.m. Ray had some errands that he needed to run that day and Sherry wanted to come with him.

 

Ray had to stop at First National Bank in Greenville to extend a loan. Sherry, still dusty from the morning’s chores, didn’t want to go inside with her stepfather and also said that she was thirsty.

Ray gave her a dollar to buy a soda from the vending machine in front of the Chevron gas station across the street from the bank and told her to meet him back at the truck. She agreed and the last time Ray saw Sherry, she was crossing the street in the direction of the gas station.

 

After conducting his business in the bank, Ray walked back to his pickup truck about 15 minutes later and was surprised to see that his stepdaughter wasn’t there. He began searching for her, becoming more frantic as time went on. He called Betty and asked if she’d seen Sherry, hoping that the young girl had perhaps stopped in at the Waffle House, but she hadn’t.

After another half hour of fruitless searching, Ray reported Sherry missing.

 

Investigation

Searches by air and on land were carried out by law enforcement and volunteers, but to no avail. The missing girl was nowhere to be found. Naturally, the police focused their attention on Ray initially, as he was the last known person to have seen Sherry.

 

No one in Greenville could recall seeing either Sherry Marler or any strangers in town that morning. Investigators believed that an unfamiliar person would have stood out in this close-knit community.

“I have a hard time believing that she was snatched off the street by a perfect stranger in Greenville,” said Police Chief Lonzo Ingram.

Though Ray was adamant that he had no involvement in his stepdaughter’s disappearance, he was inclined to agree that she was taken by someone she knew. He noted the difficulty that a stranger would have attempting to abduct her by force.

 

“They’d have to wrestle her down because she was rough. She could knock down a boy easily.”

Ray and Betty, both of whom refused to take a polygraph test, believed that the police were biased against them, preventing them from taking the stranger abduction theory seriously enough in the beginning. They were also certain that Sherry didn’t run away, as some had suggested.

“Why should we take a polygraph test when they don’t even check out people who say they have seen Sherry?” Ray questioned. “We haven’t done anything we’re ashamed of. We didn’t do anything to prompt Sherry to run away.”

 

For his part, Ingram didn’t see his request as unreasonable, under the circumstances.

“It looks to me like a standard police procedure since he was the last person to see Sherry alive.”

Law enforcement also refuted the claim that they weren’t doing enough to locate the missing pre-teen.

“I must have walked 25 miles of swamp,” noted investigator James Rhodes.

 

In addition to searching hundreds of acres, they checked out an abandoned well nearby too, but found only dead snakes. All told, the local police spent hundreds of man-hours combing over the fields and wooded areas of Greenville.

 

Ray and Betty Stringfellow

Sightings

Within days of Sherry’s disappearance, a number of disturbing sightings began to be reported. In each case a girl matching Sherry’s description was seen with an older man, who was said to be approximately 50 years of age, 5’8’’, with a “weathered complexion.”

 

These eyewitnesses took notice of Sherry because she was visibly distressed, as well as disheveled and “dazed.” She reportedly referred to the unknown man as “B.J.” when they were spotted at a truck stop in Conley, Georgia.

The last sighting of her reported that year took place at a mall in New Orleans.

In 1986, Sherry’s disappearance started to receive more media attention than it ever had before, when her case was featured on the television program, Missing III: Have You Seen This Person?

 

Following the show’s first airing, calls came in from around the country—including cities like Boston, Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans—from people who claimed to have seen Sherry.

However, none of these sightings have ever been confirmed.

Facebook Claims

Ryan Anderson, a Greenville resident, runs a Facebook page called Sherry Lynn Marler Still Missing. According to her, she has spent years investigating the disappearance of Sherry and has interviewed many individuals during that time. She came to know Betty and Larry, Sherry’s brother, as a result.

 

In recent years, Anderson claimed that Sherry Marler was likely a victim of a “multiple family based incest pedophilia ring that involved people from both Butler (where Greenville is located) and Crenshaw counties” and that she was kidnapped by someone she knew very well (but not Ray).

She also believes that Sherry was pregnant when she vanished and that she was murdered and dismembered by her abductor, before being dumped on a pig farm.

 

She has posted pictures, which supposedly show a severed human head on said pig farm, taken back in 1984. Anderson said that her research has led her to the conclusion that Sherry was killed by a man who is now deceased, and she allegedly obtained the shocking photo from a member of this individual’s family.

Another picture shows Sherry lying down, with an unidentified girl standing next to her. Anderson asserts that this picture was discovered by Larry, tucked inside of a Bible, in an abandoned trailer in Butler County. She thinks that it was taken after Sherry went missing.

 

Conversely, a post on Websleuths quoted a Facebook commenter who said that she was the other girl in the picture and that her father had taken her to see Sherry at her home, an unspecified amount of time before she vanished, when she was sick, and that there was nothing more to it than that.

Additionally, Anderson has stated that she has “so many sources who are extremely credible but unwilling to publicly expose themselves.” As such, there are no corroborating sources for any of this information, making it impossible to verify the veracity of these claims.

 

Later Developments

Police Chief Lonzo Ingram is still haunted by the lack of resolution in Sherry’s case.

“It’s never far from my mind. We push hard, but it’s frustrating when we can’t seem to obtain some good results.”

All of Sherry’s family members were investigated, including her biological father, and eliminated as suspects.

Betty has always believed in Ray’s innocence.

“I don’t blame my husband for what happened. She could have been with me and it could have happened.”

“I wish I could get out of this bed and bring her home to you,” Ray told his wife in 2003, as he lay in his hospital bed, dying of cancer.

Some local residents still suspect that the family was involved, though.

 

“That little girl never made it into town or else I would have seen her. Wherever she’s at, she’s dead,” said an anonymous local.

Sherry Marler’s family has never given up on finding her. Betty has continued to work tirelessly to try to locate her daughter, as did her brother Larry until his untimely death in 2016.

“I wish I could see her again. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her,” said Betty, who went on to open a restaurant in Sherry’s honor, called Carlisle’s on Main.

“We want to honor her memory. But we also want to heighten people’s awareness of children missing every day in this country.”

Betty and Ralph Marler, Sherry’s father, reconnected and were engaged at the time of his passing in 2013.

Sherry Lynn Marler’s case remains open and unsolved.