On the morning of August 27, 1992, Vicky Felton left for work at a manufacturing plant a few minutes from her home on Honey Locust Drive in Tupelo, Mississippi. Her daughter Leigh was still in bed. Before leaving, Vicky locked the front door. Less than two hours later, she came home to find it unlocked, blood smeared across the walls, and her daughter gone.
Leigh Occhi was 13 years old. She has never been found.
A Family Divided
Leigh was born on August 21, 1979, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Vicky Felton and Donald Occhi, both serving members of the military who had met while stationed in California. The marriage lasted four years. When it ended in 1981, Donald transferred to Germany and Vicky took Leigh to Tupelo, Mississippi, to live near her own parents.
Distance did not diminish the relationship between Leigh and her father. She visited him regularly in Germany, throwing herself into the language and the culture with the same enthusiasm she brought to everything. Donald later described her as open-minded, adventurous, and fearless. When he relocated to Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1991, after a deployment to Iraq during Desert Storm, they spent more time together. They went to the shooting range. They went four-wheel driving. On one trip, they drove through a mud puddle that covered Leigh completely, and both of them laughed.
Back in Tupelo, Leigh lived with her mother and stepfather Barney Yarbrough in a ranch-style house at 105 Honey Locust Drive, at the end of a cul-de-sac. That arrangement had shifted in the weeks before her disappearance. Barney and Vicky separated in the summer of 1992, and Barney moved into an apartment elsewhere in town.
The Last Summer
The summer before Leigh’s eighth grade year was one of the better ones in recent memory. She spent much of it at a stable on Thomas Street, riding horses, which had been her defining passion for years. She turned 13 in August. Her boyfriend, an 11-year-old named Jordan Morse who attended a different school, gave her a pair of cat-shaped earrings for her birthday, chosen carefully because he knew about the animals. The two spoke by phone nearly every afternoon, a daily anchor in a school year where both of them struggled to make friends.
The night before she disappeared, Hurricane Andrew was sweeping through Mississippi. The worst had already struck Louisiana and Florida, leaving more than 180,000 people homeless, but the weather reaching Tupelo was still severe enough to forecast heavy thunderstorms through the following day. Leigh was frightened of storms. That night, she slept in her mother’s bed.
On the morning of August 27, Vicky woke at around 6:45 AM and found Leigh still asleep beside her. She showered, dressed, and by 7:00 AM Leigh was awake. They had breakfast together. They made plans to get Taco Bell that evening, after Leigh and her grandmother attended an open house at her middle school. Vicky left for work at around 7:35 AM.
The Morning She Disappeared
The manufacturing plant where Vicky worked was close. She arrived by 7:50 AM. At around 8:30 AM, with the weather worsening outside, she used the special ring she and Leigh had agreed on, calling once, letting it ring twice, hanging up, then calling again, so Leigh would know it was her. Leigh did not answer. Vicky left work within fifteen minutes and drove home.
When she arrived, the garage door was open. The light inside was still on, which meant it had been activated recently. The front door, which she had locked before leaving, was now unlocked. Inside, there was blood. On the walls of Leigh’s bedroom. In the bathroom. On the bedroom door. In the master bedroom. Across the upstairs hallway. A trail of blood ran from the hallway to the living room, where a fist-sized pool had collected on the carpet, consistent with someone struck in the head who had lain there for a period of time. Hair and blood were stuck to a doorframe.
One of Leigh’s nightgowns and her bra, both bloodstained, were found in the laundry hamper, indicating an injury above the neck. Blood in the master bathroom sink and a pink haze on the countertop suggested that whoever had been inside the house had made a partial attempt to clean up. Missing from the house were Leigh’s reading glasses, an old sleeping bag, and a pair of shoes.
There were no signs of forced entry. Leigh never opened the door or answered the phone for anyone she did not know.
Vicky called 911 at 9:00 AM, fifteen minutes after she arrived home.
The Investigation Stalled
Twelve patrolmen with bloodhounds searched a half-mile radius around the house that same day. The storm had washed away too much. The dogs could not pick up Leigh’s scent. The Knox Landfill in Chickasaw County was searched. The family vehicles were swept by bloodhounds. Nothing turned up. By September 1, a task force of four agencies had been formed. On September 6, Donald obtained an emergency one-month leave from his post in Virginia and moved to Tupelo. When he arrived, he said he was stunned. Vicky had called him two days after Leigh disappeared and made it sound as though the girl had simply run away. He had no idea about the blood. He had no idea about the scale of it until he was standing in the house.
Three polygraph tests were conducted. Donald passed his without difficulty and was eliminated as a suspect given he had been stationed in Virginia at the time. Barney also passed, after days of interrogation, and provided a solid alibi for the morning. Vicky was given three separate tests, each administered by a different examiner. She failed all three. She attributed this to the trauma of losing her daughter. Donald and Barney had endured the same trauma.
On September 9, a letter arrived at 105 Honey Locust Drive. It was addressed to Barney, misspelling Honey Locust as Honey Locus, and bore six 29-cent heart-shaped love stamps, twice the postage required. It was postmarked from Booneville, a town roughly 30 miles north of Tupelo. Inside were Leigh’s reading glasses. Both the Mississippi State Crime Lab and the FBI analyzed the handwriting and tested the stamps for DNA. The stamps had been wet with water rather than saliva. The sender was never identified.
Fourteen months after Leigh disappeared, an 18-year-old farmer named Ray Chance discovered a human skull in a soybean field in Monroe County. After examination by the state medical examiner’s office, the remains were initially identified as Leigh’s. Leigh’s dentist intervened personally, contacting the office to ensure the most current dental records had been used. They had not been. The skull was later correctly identified as belonging to Pollyanna Sue Keith, 27, who had disappeared from Shannon, Mississippi, in March 1993. Donald later said the misidentification was the most difficult thing the family had endured throughout the entire ordeal.
In August 1997, investigators announced that they had a suspect. They declined to name one. In September 2016, more than twenty-four years after Leigh disappeared, a garden center worker finally gave a formal statement. She had tried to report what she saw on the day of the disappearance, calling the non-emergency line within hours. Nobody had followed up. She had been driving past Honey Locust Drive on the morning of August 27 when she saw a man and a woman walking in the torrential rain. The man was short and lean, with gray hair and a scruffy beard, wearing a green army jacket. As she slowed, thinking to offer a lift, the man pulled his hood up and drew the woman close against him. The woman was not visibly injured. But she looked frightened. The description matched Barney Yarbrough.
Three Theories, No Answers
No one has ever been charged with Leigh Occhi’s disappearance.
The first theory centers on her mother. Former classmates of Leigh said she occasionally arrived at school in a somber mood and on at least one occasion had bruises and a black eye, which Leigh attributed to being struck by an apple at the stables. One classmate recalled Leigh sitting alone at recess, eating berries, and responding to a warning that they might be poisonous by saying she didn’t care, that maybe she wanted to die. She later told a school counselor it had been a joke. Investigators noted that Vicky left work only forty minutes into her shift on the morning of the disappearance, and that it then took her fifteen full minutes to call 911 after arriving home to a house covered in blood. They also found it unusual that she could identify exactly what Leigh had been wearing when taken, despite having last seen her in a nightgown that remained at the house.
The second theory involves Barney. A family friend told investigators she had heard him physically discipline Leigh. Jordan Morse said that Leigh had mentioned being locked out of the house by Barney as a punishment, and that she was afraid of him. Donald claimed an investigator had told him Barney confessed to abusing Leigh, though the lead detective on the case stated he had no knowledge of any such confession. Barney provided a solid alibi, passed his polygraph, and was cooperative throughout the investigation, searching the woods and ditches around Tupelo alongside other volunteers.
The third theory, advanced by Vicky herself, concerns a man named Oscar McKearns, a vacation bible school teacher at the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church the family attended. McKearns lived approximately a mile from Honey Locust Drive and shared Leigh’s love of horses. In May 1993, nine months after Leigh’s disappearance, McKearns abducted a 15-year-old girl he had met through the church. He approached her at home while her parents were away, offered her a ride to school, and drove her instead to Memphis, Tennessee, where he sexually assaulted her before returning her to school. She contacted police immediately. McKearns pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 24 years in prison, with 16 years suspended. He served four. In 1999, not long after his release, he kidnapped a married couple and sexually assaulted the wife. He was returned to prison, with a release date set for March 2019.
The FBI attempted to interview McKearns in connection with Leigh’s disappearance on multiple occasions. Each time, he declined and requested a lawyer. He refused to take a polygraph. Vicky noted that he had begun avoiding eye contact with her and appearing at the house unannounced in the weeks following Leigh’s disappearance, behavior she had never observed from him before. She also noted that McKearns was someone Leigh would have recognized, trusted, and opened the door for.
Leigh Occhi would be 45 years old today. Her reading glasses were mailed back to the house. Her body has never been found.
