Donnet and Jeanette Milbrooke were twins that grew up in Augusta, Georgia, and there

they lived with their siblings and mother, Mary Louise Sturgeus.

They were not very close with their father, John Milbrooke, but they shared his last name.

On March 18, 1990, Donnet and Jeanette decided to walk from their housing community, Jennings

Homes to their old neighborhood of Bethlehem. They were planning to pick up some bus fare for

the next week from their godfather, Ted, and also visit some friends and family in their old

neighborhood while they were there. At 3 o'clock that Sunday afternoon, they set out with the

understanding that they would be back before dark. Despite making it to Bethlehem, visiting not

only their godfather, but a cousin and a sister that lived in the neighborhood, the twins trail

would soon go cold. They failed to make it back home that evening, and over the next three decades

would fail to make contact with any of their loved ones. Donnet and Jeanette's family launched

a frantic search to find the two missing teenage girls, but would fail to find any trace of them.

Likewise, the police investigation headed by the Augusta Police Department and later the Richmond

County Sheriff's Office quickly reached a dead end. I covered what is publicly known about the

investigation in my original three-part series from back in March of 2018, but needless to say,

police did not press very hard for answers. Detective Jim Ship, who initially oversaw this

investigation, questioned a few people that had seen the girls on the afternoon they disappeared,

and would quickly label them runaways, a label that he would remain satisfied with years later,

based on nothing but hearsay. A year after the twins went missing, their case was closed.

Two years later, their case file was closed in the database of Nickmeck, the National Center for

Missing and Exploited Children. For roughly 20 years, no one was looking for Denette and Jeanette

Milbruck other than their family, and it wasn't until 2013 that public attention was finally drawn

...