Carla Rebecca Corley, who was 14 at the time, was last seen with her family at their home in the Eastwood public housing project on Airport Highway in Birmingham, Alabama, on August 12, 1980, in the evening. She was watching TV with her mother, and then her mother went to bed.
On August 13, around 4:30 a.m., when her mother woke up, she saw that the doors to their apartment were wide open. The chairs at the living room table had been moved, and a bottle of soda had been turned over.
Carla’s new sandals were near the couch, where she had put them the night before, and her belt was on the ground outside the front door. All of her things, like money, clothes, make-up, and medicine, were left behind. No sign of her was inside the house. No one has seen or heard from her since.
Carla had been missing since July 1980, a month before a group of men were said to have taken her and raped her. The attack lasted three hours and happened near Lake Purdy in Alabama. The men went back to Carla’s family’s house a week before she went missing, but they weren’t let in.
No one knows if the last attack had anything to do with Carla going missing or if it was done by the same men. At the time, no official police report was made about the attack, and the police didn’t find out about it until 18 years after Carla went missing. Since 1980, the police have kept trying to find Carla.
People have tried to take advantage of her daughter’s disappearance over the years by taking advantage of her mother. Several people have said that they would tell where Carla is if they were paid money. Carla’s sister said that she has even been told she will be killed if she keeps looking for Carla. However, she has kept looking for Carla anyway.
Carla was about to start seventh grade and was looking forward to it when she went missing. She was close to her older sister, who had moved out of the family home by that time. Her sister doesn’t think she would have gone this long without talking to her. Their mother thinks that she was killed and sexually assaulted soon after she went missing.
A few years after Carla went missing, she was officially ruled dead. A suspect said he knew what would happen to her, but then he changed his mind. Her case hasn’t been solved yet. Foul play is suspected in Carla’s case.
