COLD CASE: A deeper look at the disappearance of Sarah Elizabeth Kinslow

Sarah Kinslow, from Greenville, Texas, disappeared when she was just fourteen years old. On the morning of May 1, 2001, Sarah was dropped off at school, which was the last time her family ever saw her. At the end of the school day, her parents were notified that she had not attended any of her classes. After speaking to her friends to try and figure out where Kinslow went, they told her that she was supposed to skip school that day to meet them at the East Mount Cemetery to hang out, but that she never showed. Worried, this is when her mother notified the police. 

During the initial search, police gave a tracker dog a piece of her clothing to pick up a scent. Her scent was found where her father dropped her off at school and her scent created a trail around the school and down two blocks, where her scent suddenly stopped in the middle of the street. Police believe this is where she may have gotten into a car and left. A teen witness claimed that they saw her in a light blue truck driven by a white male with dark brown hair and a pencil mustache at 3:30 p.m. that day. 

Although only fourteen at the time, Sarah was in a relationship with an 18-year-old male, of whom her parents did not approve. Curtis Wayne Bell, her boyfriend at the time, was a resident of Quinlan, Texas, and was one of the people she was supposed to meet the day that she went missing. After her disappearance, police discovered that the two had been sexually involved, and although the couple might have considered it consensual, she was not of age to give consent. Her diary contained entries that explained her love for Bell and how she wished to run away with him. According to her mother, she was not prepared to be gone for an extended period as she didn’t take her purse or any of her belongings and had never run away before. Many of her friends failed polygraph tests regarding her disappearance.

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Just six days following her disappearance, Wayne was arrested for aggravated sexual assault of a different child. He was freed on a 50,000 dollar bond. Bell is currently serving nine years in state prison after being convicted of sexual assault of a child in 2009 and violating the terms of his 10-year sentence of deferred adjudication probation.

Following her disappearance, there were multiple sightings of Kinslow in Hunt County. Of these, one of them was at a gas station where the clerk recognized her from a missing person’s poster. There was a video of these people walking into the store, and police believed it to be Kinslow and Bell. When questioned about it, Bell initially claimed it was a different girl in the video. After being questioned again, he denied being the person in the video altogether. Another sighting, although not confirmed, was by one of her neighbors, who claimed to have seen her in a car on Christmas day of 2001. After tracking down the person who owns this car, they claimed they didn’t know Kinslow.

In 2010, her parents received an anonymous letter regarding the disappearance of their daughter. The letter, left in their mailbox, urged them to speak with a specific individual, who they reached out to. The woman who they spoke to was the ex-wife of a close friend of Bell’s, but after questioning, she claimed to know nothing of Kinslow’s disappearance. Later after finding out who left the note in their mailbox, they questioned the man, who claimed that their daughter had been killed and buried in a rock quarry full of water. 

In an interview conducted with Kinslow’s mother on the Buried podcast, a podcast hosted by George Hale about the disappearance of Carey Mae Parker, her mother claims that Bell had a reputation for drugging girls with his friends so that he and his friends could sexually assault them. Kinslow’s older son, Jerry, who was in prison at the time of her disappearance was told this by someone he met in prison.

Her mother speculates that her body is buried somewhere in Waco Bay, a neighborhood at Lake Tawakoni. Bell’s grandparents, whose property was searched following their death lived in this area, although nothing was found by cadaver dogs. Kinslow’s mother claims that there was an area that was not thoroughly searched that she explains is suspicious.

Her mother believes that Bell definitely had something to do with her disappearance and that she ran away initially, but something bad had to have happened to her. She speculates that he could have helped her overdose and that the chances of her daughter being alive may be low because she thinks she would have reached out to someone in their family already. Her family is still searching for answers.

Kinslow has blue eyes, and at the time of her disappearance, her hair was blonde. She was 5’4″ and weighed 100 pounds, but now that she would be 34, she could be taller or weigh more. Claims of sightings in Oregon in 2004 and British Columbia in 2004 claim that she could have cut her hair short and dyed it brown, although these sightings have not been confirmed.