The call came in on a blustery November afternoon, November 17th, 1954.

Jeanette Ernest, a bright-eyed 11-year-old had vanished from a Fort Worth-Wachateria while waiting for her mother to pick her up after school.

Nadine Ernest arrived to find her daughter gone and a chill ran down her spine.

She knew with a mother's intuition who had taken Jeanette, and it was a man I'd come to know all

too well in the coming days. Thurman Priest, Nadine's brother-in-law.

I've been working homicide for over a decade, and cases involving children always hit me the

hardest.

There's something about the innocence lost, the future is stolen, that never quite leaves

you.

And as I listened to Nadine recount her suspicions about Priest.

I felt that familiar not form in my gut.

Priest, a 48-year-old bookkeeper, had developed an unhealthy fixation on young Jeanette. He started attending her Sundays. and She'd even gone so far as to change their place of worship, hoping to put some distance between

her daughter and the man who seemed to be growing more obsessed by the day.

But Priest was undeterred.

He began coming over to the earnest home, playing with Jeanette and her siblings

under the guise of a doting uncle. Nadine saw through the charade and warned him off, but it seemed

her words of

fallen on deaf ears.

Now, with Jeanette missing and Priest nowhere to be found,

I knew we were in a race against time.

I assembled my team and we hit the ground running, canvassing the area and putting

out an APB on Priest's vehicle.

...