She got home, left a movie in the VCR and vanished. Decades later, police haven’t given up on the search for Carla Anderson

Shallow depth of field image taken of yellow law enforcement line with police car and lights in the background. (iStock)

“Did somebody take her? Do they have her somewhere else? Is she alive?”

These are the questions that have haunted Dan Anderson in the nearly four decades since his younger sister, then 23-year-old Carla Anderson, vanished from her apartment in Wadena, Minnesota.

Memories of their childhood still flash into his mind like clockwork: the click of a camera as nine-year-old Carla held a spatula at the stove of their camper in Alaska, or the sound of her record player as she belted out “Delta Dawn” over and over in her room before her brothers pounded on her door asking her to turn it down.

And then the most troubling memory of them all — when Carla disappeared in November 1987, with a rented movie still in her VCR and the apartment door locked with her purse inside.

The Hardee’s fry cook affectionately known as “spud” had just spent the night out with her mother and stepfather celebrating her being chosen employee of the month.

The family, including Carla’s three siblings and parents, suddenly found themselves fanning out with an army of volunteers to distribute posters of her, waiting desperately for aerial searches, speaking to reporters amid a media frenzy and looking for her face in crowds.

But year after year, the searches came up empty. Her whereabouts have eluded investigators and stirred up theories both feasible and outlandish among the 4,000-person community as the townspeople tried to make sense of what could have happened to the young woman.

As alibis and polygraph tests dissipated police theories and the case moved from one investigator to another, newspaper interviews from the ’80s and ’90s capture the family’s desperate plea for answers melt into somber acceptance and hope that Carla wasn’t somewhere out there suffering.

“My mom was convinced very early on that she was not alive anymore,” Dan Anderson told CNN Friday. Before her death, Carla’s mother Roberta Wells had arranged a shared headstone for both Carla and her brother Scott, who died in 2007.

But sometimes, he lets hope creep in.

“Is she just not able to get in touch?” her brother asked at a news conference alongside officials Monday. “She wouldn’t have anybody’s phone number anymore.”

A new US$25,000 reward for information about her disappearance renewed hope members of the small, tight-knit city will help piece together what transpired that November night.

Wadena Police Chief Naomi Plautz is certain of one thing: “Someone knows what happened.”

“This is one of those cases that just haunts you,” Plautz told CNN Thursday. “We weren’t working the case from the beginning, but the heartfelt heaviness passed on from one chief to another, or an investigator to another, as they retire…those ghosts, those fears, they stick with you.”

‘I knew then that life would never be the same’

Though Carla’s family worried her stature and a learning disability left her vulnerable living alone, Dan Anderson described the 4’10, 90 pound woman as “fiercely independent.”

“After high school, she was anxious to get going on her own, and she did…had a job, had her own place,” her brother recalled. “She was just excited for what was to come. She was like a lot of other young women…looking forward to finding the right person and possibly having a family.”

Carla had gone out for dinner that cold Friday night with her mom and stepdad before renting movies and being dropped off at the Greenwood Apartments around 8 p.m., according to police. She would have stayed with her parents but they were working on their new house on a lake about an hour away and Carla didn’t want to go, Dan said.

Her mom, with whom she was incredibly close, planned to style Carla’s hair for her employee of the month photo Monday. That weekend, she called Carla multiple times but no one picked up, she told the Brainerd Daily Dispatch in 2007.

That’s when the concerned mother went to her daughter’s apartment, where she found it eerily untouched. There were no signs of a break-in, according to police. Her keys and a Hardee’s rainbow jacket she just received for being employee of the month were the only belongings missing, Plautz said.

“I knew then that life would never be the same. Immediately I got my husband and went down to the police station,” her mother Roberta Wells told The Dispatch.

That Monday morning at around 9 a.m., Dan got a call from his mother. Carla, who loved her job at the fast-food chain, had uncharacteristically not shown up to work. He immediately packed and drove about three hours from Eagan, where he was working, to Wadena.

It was then his turn to make the heart-wrenching call: He told their father, Marvin Anderson, who boarded a plane from his home in Alaska to find his daughter.

Carla, who had been participating in a living skills program and meeting with a social worker, was bullied by some in the town and her mother told the paper she worried she would be taken advantage of. Knowing she was vulnerable, her three brothers would always look out for her, Dan said.

“There’s a lot of not good people out there but you can’t protect somebody all the time, as much as you’d like to think you can,” he said.

Dan, who was in his 20s when his sister disappeared, described Carla as a caring, happy and bubbly music-lover who enjoyed spending time with her family, was loyal to her friends, and “never had anything bad to say about anybody.” Dan fondly remembers summers swimming at the lake by their grandparents’ cabin and hiking on their trips to Alaska with Carla and his two younger brothers.

‘The most frustrating case I’ve ever worked on’

With no signs of a struggle at Carla’s apartment, Lane Waldahl, an investigator on the case at the time, initially believed she had left there willingly, according to a 1987 Brainerd Daily Dispatch report.

The night she went missing, there was a fire burning in the nearby swamp and she may have gone to look at it, Waldahl theorized, according to the Grand Forks Herald. Plautz said the fire could have been visible from her apartment, but there’s no evidence to suggest she went to see it.

“We don’t know if she went out for a walk, we don’t know if somebody was at the front door and she went with them. We don’t know any of that,” Dan said.

Police later suspected foul play may have been involved “because she would not have ever chosen to disappear and stay disappeared,” Plautz told CNN.

The first weeks after her disappearance, there was hope: the family offered a $10,000 reward and posters were distributed within a 60-mile (96 kilometre) radius as piles of snow fell.

Carla’s parents’ tiny apartment was cramped full of family and friends who constantly stopped by to bring meals and offer their support as they all shed tears together, Dan recalls.

Her disappearance was “absolutely devastating” for their mom, who would spend a lot of time with Carla and was in regular contact with her, Dan said.

Carla’s boyfriend and family members were ruled out after passing polygraphs, according to Plautz.

“It was chaotic…trying to go back…What do you remember? Is there some little tidbit of information that we can think of that maybe leads to something?” Dan remembers the family asking themselves.

But soon, then-police chief Joyce Kopp would share investigators had no leads, calling it “the most frustrating case I’ve ever worked on,” according to a December 1987 report from The Brainerd Daily Dispatch.

Volunteers assisted with a ground and air search that turned up nothing. The FBI later became involved in the investigation into what authorities believed was possibly a kidnapping.

At one point, investigators probed whether a brown car stolen near Carla’s apartment building that same weekend and was never recovered could have been connected to the case. Plautz told CNN police to this day have not found any evidence to show it was.

“It could have been just a coincidence, although it also could have been part of Carla’s disappearance,” the police chief said.

Fruitless searches worsened tensions in the family, Marvin Anderson told the Brainerd Daily Dispatch in December 1987.

Two years later, they believed Carla had died.

“I have very slim hope that she’s alive,” her mother told The Wadena Pioneer Journal in 1989.

‘They haven’t slowed down one bit’

In the decades that followed her disappearance, suspect after suspect was questioned, but each lead failed to bring investigators any closer to solving the case.

“There were just so many kind of unknowns,” Dan said.

In the ’90s, a man who Roberta Wells reported to police because he had been harassing Carla was interviewed as part of the the investigation, according to a 1995 report from the Wadena Pioneer Journal. He admitted to being in the area that night with a friend, but told police she didn’t answer when he called her at 9:30 p.m. Both he and his friend passed polygraph tests.

By 1995, Waldahl had her photo age enhanced, read all descriptions of bodies found and sent her dental records as far as Boston, he told The Wadena Pioneer Journal at the time.

“Carla is probably dead,” Waldahl said. “The main thing now is that her body be found.”

Convicted killer Floyd Tapson was also initially considered a suspect because he targeted women who had mental disabilities, according to a 1999 Minnesota Star Tribune report. Tapson had an alibi, however, that cleared him of Carla’s disappearance, according to the Grand Forks Herald.

Fast forward to the current investigation, Plautz said the department is not ruling any previous suspects out that had been cleared in the past. With fresh eyes and new technology like DNA analysis, police are pursuing both old and new leads.

“We definitely have some leads that we are pursuing more heavily than others,” she said.

The family has been reassured by the fact that every new police chief and investigator on the case over the years has been committed to bringing Carla home, Dan said.

“It’s pretty amazing to see that continuation of that dedication remain intact and that they haven’t slowed down one bit.”

‘I never dreamed of her not being with us forever’

The family’s memories of Carla, who would be 62 years old today, have faded with time, though they still talk about her every time they get together.

“You don’t want to forget things, but you get to this age, and obviously you forget stuff from that long ago,” Dan said at the news conference Monday.

The possibility that Carla is still out there somewhere has gotten “more and more dim” as the years since 1987 passed, and the wait has taken a toll on the Anderson family, Dan said.

All these years later, it’s still too painful for their father, who is 87 now, to talk about Carla, Dan said. It made Dan more cautious as a parent when his 35-year-old son was growing up.

“It certainly changed the way we probably raised our son in the fact that I’m not sure we would have let him take off and ride down the edge of the road to go three, four or five miles away to his friend’s house,” he said.

Carla’s missed both births and deaths: five of her seven nieces and nephews were born after she vanished and her mother, stepfather and brother all died without finding her.

“The only consolation is that we all believe that she’s with Carla now,” Dan said about his mother’s death.

Plautz, who nicknamed Anderson “Wadena’s sweetheart,” said police are interviewing locals and reviewing the scores of tips they’ve been receiving since the new reward was announced Monday.

“A little nugget of anything could lead into finding her,” she said. “I believe in my heart of hearts that somebody that knows what happened is still with us.”

The members of Carla’s family who are still here are ready for closure, but they can’t help but envision the life Carla could have had.

“She very possibly would have had kids of her own by now. What would her life look like? It’s hard not to think about that,” Dan said.

A year before her death and about 20 years after Carla’s disappearance, Wells told The Brainerd Daily Dispatch about the pain she had bore for so long.

“As vulnerable as I knew she was, I never dreamed of her not being with us forever,” she said. “I always knew she would be my child. I always knew I would always be a mother for as long as I lived because I had Carla.”