Tina Russell is a woman haunted. Broken under the weight of a question that has cursed her family for 14 years: what happened to her niece Alyssa McLemore?
“Do you know what it's like every day to walk around with a broken heart?” said Russell. “Every day I have to get up and pretend I'm happy.”
In April 2009, McLemore, an Indigenous woman affiliated with the Aleut tribe of Alaska, was raising a toddler and living with her family in Kent.
“Once her mom got sick and she had a baby, it made her grow up," Russell said. "And she was just a loving person."
As she grew up, the 21-year-old became a dancer, active in the nightlife scene. She had been picked up by police in the past.
But Russell said McLemore was always there when you needed her. So when McLemore got a call on the night of April 9, 2009 that her mother was dying, she told her family she was on her way home.
“She would always come home,” said Russell. “And she didn't come.”
To the family’s surprise, the next knock at the door wasn’t McLemore, but a Kent police officer. Police had received a frantic 911 call from McLemore's phone.
“On the 911 tape, Alyssa is asking for help,” said Russell, who was not allowed to hear the call but was provided a transcript. “There's somebody in the background telling her to come here. I don't know what they said – ‘I'll hurt you’ or ‘I'll kill you’ or something. Then the phone went dead.”
Kent Police Detective Brendan Wales took over the case in 2017.
“It is not very often that you have the voice of who you potentially believe is the killer, unidentified on a recording. Doesn't occur very often at all,” said Wales.
McLemore’s family said it began to dawn on them the real danger she was in.
McLemore was last seen off Pacific Highway South in Kent talking to a man in a green pickup truck with Oregon plates.
Russell said she believes McLemore was taken against her will.