COURTNEY LYN CLAYTON - 7 yo - (1988) - Stamford, TX

Cold Case: Girl disappears a half block from home

By Alexis Weed
updated 8:07 AM EDT, Mon July 29, 2013

NEED TO KNOW

• 7-year-old Cortney Clayton vanished on September 2, 1988
  
• She walked to a store a half block from her house, bought a soda, never made it home
  
• Her remains were found six months later; police released sketch of possible suspect
  

A fountain soda left on the back bumper of a pickup truck was the only trace of 7-year-old Cortney Clayton when she vanished the evening of September 2, 1988.

The small town of Stamford, Texas, was quiet that night. Nearly everyone in town had headed to Eastland to watch the local high school’s Friday night football game.

Cortney was home with her parents and two older brothers. The second grader had just finished riding her bicycle and was begging her father to let her walk to the store a half block away.

"She wanted to buy a soft drink. She kept bugging me. So I finally said 'Okay, go,'" her father Stan Clayton said.

Clayton watched his daughter walk across the street, then sent her older brother, Ryan, to follow minutes behind her. Cortney knew to wait for her brother before walking home.

"It was probably about 7:30 p.m. We were at the curb in the front yard. I could see her go to cross the street," Clayton said. "Now, the store was kind of off-set so I couldn’t see her go into the store."

Clayton said his biggest concern at the time was making sure Cortney crossed the road safely.

“You have to understand Stamford is a small town, only, like, 3,500 population. I knew the store owner. I was manager of the sewing factory so a lot of folks knew me and knew our family.”

Cortney brought her soda to the cashier and when she came up a few cents short a man in line behind her offered to pay the clerk.
“The cashier said ‘No, she’s okay, she’ll bring it back,’” Clayton said, explaining that Cortney visited the store on a regular basis and that the clerk knew she was good for the money.

Cortney headed to the parking lot with her soda to wait for her brother.

It was the last time anyone is known to have seen her.

When Ryan arrived, he saw no sign of his sister. He ran home to report to his parents.

"We searched up and down the streets, behind dumpsters, checked her friend’s house who we thought she might have gone to see," Clayton said.

Clayton called police. A search began immediately and lasted through the night, turning up nothing but the drink that Cortney purchased.

"Her soda was found sitting on the bumper of the owner’s pickup," Clayton said. "She probably set the soda there and was talking to someone and it went bad from there."

“Courtney was the type that didn’t ever meet a stranger,” he said. "That’s the type of kiddo she was. Very talkative. Very friendly.”
“Nothing like this had ever occurred,” said then-Sheriff Mike Middleton. “We just never had kids go missing, that was big city stuff. We were just country boys.”

Middleton identified a witness who was able to describe Cortney and offer additional details through hypnosis. The witness was driving to pick up her husband at an apartment building across the alley from the store.

"She remembers seeing Cortney kind of out there playing," he said.

The witness also recalled seeing a car parked in front of the store. It had a white interior and was parked next to the store owner's pickup truck.

“She also remembers seeing the car door open and a man leaning against the side of the building," Middleton said.

The man was never identified, but the witness was able to help investigators create a composite drawing of a dark-complected male in his early 20s. Authorities believe that Cortney was taken by vehicle because an immediate canvas of the area, including a door-to-door search, turned up no sign of Cortney, and because her remains were discovered far away from her home.

Six months later, on Easter Sunday, hunters in Shackelford County stumbled upon a small human skull lying in a rural grassland pasture 50 miles south of Stamford.

“It was probably 10 miles north of Baird and Interstate I-20, and south of Albany about 12 miles,” Middleton said. “Kind of out in the middle of nowhere.”

The location, Clayton said, was in the same direction that people would have been going if they were going to Eastland to the football game.

Middleton and his team covered about a square mile before all of Cortney’s remains were found. Her bones, which had been scattered, were too decomposed to identify the cause or manner of death.

“We identified her with hair from her hair brush,” Middleton said. Because DNA was not yet available to Middleton’s office investigators also used a facial overlay process for identification, where photos of Cortney were placed over the skull.

Investigators also found what we believe were her shorts and a white top with balloons on it. Middleton speculated that the wind and rain likely blew the clothing away from the general area of the search.

“You have to wonder if it happened today with all the advances would it have happened?” Middleton wondered. “Back in 1988 there were really only two labs that even did DNA – Dallas and California.”

Clayton said he still had hope after all the leads stopped coming in, but his wife Candace felt sure that their daughter was dead.
“She felt she was dead to start with and that put a problem between us because I felt she wasn’t,” he said.

“And that just aggravated me,” Clayton said. “I was angry about that because I felt sure God would bring her back.”

“When this person found her remains it was on Easter Day, so anyhow, I felt that it was God’s way of showing me that he was still with us and still cared.”

Forgiving the person who took her is the hardest thing they’ve ever done, he said.

“I’d like to see somebody charged with it,” Middleton said. “If they knew somebody was behind bars for this, it would make a lot of difference for them, and for us.”

Anyone with information concerning Cortney’s case is asked to call the Jones County Sheriff’s Office at (325) 823-4604.


 www.reporternews.com/.../p20-years-later-clayton-murder-still-haunting/‎