Fifteen-year-old Tonetta Carlisle was walking home from school March 16, 1989, when she went missing.
Her mother called police that night after she didn’t come home from the North Chattanooga school then known as Chattanooga High School.
Police believed Carlisle was with a boyfriend and didn’t ask the community for help finding her until a week later. But her mother said she didn’t have a boyfriend, the Chattanooga Times Free Press previously reported.
The day Carlisle went missing, a couple reported seeing a young Black woman being forced into a vehicle by a group of men shortly before 3 p.m. near the intersection of Hamilton Avenue and Dallas Road, less than a mile from Chattanooga High. The couple gave police a license plate number.
By the time police connected the two cases, the owner of the vehicle, Jeffrey Jones, was dead in an apparent suicide. He was found March 18 in his vehicle, and a medical examiner ruled his death a suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, according to reports.
Carlisle’s mother, Nonie Sturvidant, believes Jones killed her daughter before committing suicide.
Former Hamilton County District Attorney General Neal Pinkston’s cold case unit revisited the case 30 years later in 2019, but the case remains unsolved and Carlisle’s body has never been found.
The cold case is among 23 in Chattanooga featured on the website Uncovered.
Founded in 2019, Uncovered is a national database for cold cases that includes public information and media reports.
“It’s my strong belief that we need more than government programs and not-for-profits to solve society’s biggest problems,” founder Jim Brown said in an email through a spokesperson. “Uncovered is building tools for the massive true-crime community to turn their interest into advocacy in ways that can actually help.”
Dana Poll, the head of growth at Uncovered, said in a Zoom interview that the database has more than 50,000 cases, and counting.
“It’s a safe space, in comparison to places like some Facebook groups and some Reddit threads, where you can put out an opinion or thought over a theory,” Poll said, “and unfortunately, you will get maybe one, maybe multiple people coming at you with the ‘that’s stupid.'”
Poll said part of the goal is to connect families with larger platforms to potentially bring out new information on cold cases.
“We’ve been really victim-focused, talking with families, connecting families to podcasts and content creators connecting families to resources,” Poll said. “(The) families really appreciate the fact that we’re doing this, and we’re putting all of this information in one place, so they can share it with law enforcement.”
While Hamilton County’s cold case unit has been dissolved, District Attorney General Coty Wamp said the cases are still being worked on.
“Cold cases are still actively being prosecuted by my office,” Wamp said by email. “I also have three investigators in my office who are willing to investigate cold cases and bring investigations to me if we believe we have new evidence.”
Wamp encouraged the public to contact authorities with information on a cold case.
“Anytime there is new evidence on a cold case, or any case for that matter, I hope that citizens will bring that evidence to law enforcement or to my office so that we can take a look at it,” Wamp said.
Poll said the oldest case she believes is close to being resolved is that of Paulding, Ohio’s Nancy Eagleson, a 14-year-old abducted and killed in 1960. The family reached out to Uncovered for help crowdfunding to exhume Eagleson’s body, Poll said.
Eagleson’s body was exhumed in September of last year, and a bullet was found in the casket under her head, along with fibers in the pelvic area of the remains, which were sent for testing, according to news reports.
“That really sparked a lot of a kind of new following of the case,” Poll said. “So it’s currently to a point where we believe we know who was responsible. It’s just going to be either a witness will come forward … or the sheriff working some magic … .”
Poll said Uncovered has a dedication to the survivors and people who join the community are “advocates at heart.”
“They are not there to slam anyone,” Poll said. “They are there to actually do work, to share it on social to do more research, to work together to find answers.”
Contact La Shawn Pagán at lpagan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6476.