Jerome Painter stands in front of a sign for Kayla Croft-Payne at a memorial for the missing woman at Penny Playground in Chehalis in April, 2011. Family members are planning to hold another vigil as the second anniversary of her disappearance approaches.
Kayla Croft-Payne
Two years after 18-year-old Kayla Croft-Payne’s disappearance, her family still checks her Myspace and Facebook profiles every day in hopes of finding an update that might point to her whereabouts.
As the anniversary of her disappearance approaches, her family plans to host a candlelight vigil at the end of the month in order to remind the community that Croft-Payne is still missing, and that they want to find her.
Croft-Payne was last seen on April 28, 2010, after leaving a friend’s house in Cowlitz County. She was reported missing a few days later by a friend.
Since her disappearance, both her family and the sheriff’s office have received numerous tips, said Croft-Payne’s aunt Karen Hinton. None have led to anything concrete or helpful.
“It sucks,” Hinton said. “It’s been two years and we are still in the same spot where we began.”
Detectives have followed each lead, including some recent ones, said Detective Sgt. Dusty Breen of the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office.
“We’ve ran down what we can, but we are at a stopping point now,” he said.
Hinton said Croft-Payne had been involved in drugs for a few years by the time she disappeared.
She also said Croft-Payne was a frequent user of Facebook and Myspace, a fact not lost on law enforcement. Breen said detectives also occasionally check Croft-Payne’s social media sites to see if she resurfaces at all.
Even if a person wants to disconnect and stay away, it is often difficult to break up one’s normal daily routine, including social media use. That’s why searching the websites is one of many methods investigators use to track missing individuals in cases like that of Croft-Payne, Breen said.
In the two years since her disappearance, both her family and police widened the possible search to a national level.
Hinton said she created a listing for Croft-Payne with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She also forwarded Croft-Payne’s photo and information to U.S. Border Patrol officials in various towns along the Mexican-American boarder that might come across cases of human trafficking.
Additionally, investigators process her information through databases that would show if she, or anyone else with a name similar to hers, has run a recent credit check in another part of the country, Breen said. They have also monitored court records to see if she has been a witness, victim or suspect in a crime outside of Lewis County.
“Either she has completely isolated herself or something not so good has occurred,” he said.
Breen said while there are a handful of other open missing persons cases in Lewis County, unlike Croft-Payne’s case, there is a pretty good indication of what might have happened to the missing individuals involved in those cases.
Croft-Payne is the only case without a plausible explanation for her disappearance, he said.
“We get to that point where we have a dead end and we don’t have any information to go on from there,” Breen said. “That’s when we hope the community gets involved.”
