35 Years Ago, She Vanished After Getting Dinner With Her Parents To Celebrate Earning An Award At Work
Wadena, Minnesota. 23-year-old Carla Beth Anderson had strawberry blonde hair and bright blue eyes.
She was quite petite at 4’11” and 80 pounds, and it was easy to mistake her for more of a teenager than a young adult.
Carla was slightly disabled mentally, but that didn’t stop her from living life to the fullest and achieving things that many other people her age did.
Back in November of 1987, Carla had an apartment in the Greenwood Apartments complex in Wadena, where she lived all by herself, and she had a job working for the local Hardee’s, where her coworkers really adored her.
On the night of November 13th, a Friday, Carla went out for dinner with her mom and stepdad to celebrate the fact that she was about to be the employee of the month at her job.
She was thrilled to be awarded this honor at Hardee’s, and the family picked a place called Taco John’s to have Carla’s celebratory dinner.
After finishing their meal, the family got a few movies for Carla to watch before heading back to Carla’s apartment.
Carla’s mom and stepdad said goodbye to her, and they were expecting to see her that Sunday so Carla’s mom could make her hair look great for the photo she needed to take for her award.
Facebook; pictured above is Carla
If true crime defines your free time, this is for you: join Chip Chick’s True Crime Tribe.
It was around 7:30 or 8 p.m. when Carla’s parents left her place, but they had no idea they wouldn’t see Carla as planned after that.
The very next morning, Carla never made it to Hardee’s, which was the first sign that something was wrong, as she was very diligent and reliable.
Carla was reported as missing, and when her apartment was searched, there were no obvious red flags to be found.
The soda that Carla had been drinking after grabbing dinner with her parents was right there in her apartment.
Carla had a movie still inside of the VCR player, so clearly she had sat down to enjoy her movies at some point in the evening.
Carla’s purse and all of her personal items were in her apartment as if she was coming back for them.
Her only means of transportation, a bike, was there.
The only things that were not in Carla’s apartment, aside from her? The keys to her place, and the jacket she wore to Hardee’s.
Strangely enough, the door of Carla’s apartment had been locked on the outside, not the inside.
“A fire burned on the edge of town that night, one that would have been visible from her apartment on the northwest side of the building,” the Wadena Police Department explained in a statement.
“One theory is Carla may have grabbed her jacket and keys and walked down to observe the fire up close. From there, someone could have grabbed her.”
“Another incident that night involved the theft of a car from the neighborhood near where Carla lived. A brown Plymouth Horizon was stolen a couple of blocks from Greenwood Apartments. It was never located.”
Now, there were tips that came in, but none of them panned out. It’s been 35 years since Carla disappeared without a trace.
Carla did have a boyfriend who resided in Lake Park when she went missing, but he was cleared as a suspect in her disappearance.
Carla’s family members were all cleared as well, and they agreed to take polygraph tests too.
“As we remember Carla on this day, we can only wonder if our family would have had more details relative to her disappearance had social media existed 30 years ago,” Bev Anderson, one of Carla’s family members, wrote in a Facebook post on the 30th anniversary of her disappearance.
“Someone out there has the information that can help to provide some closure. Please share. Thank you.”
Police do believe that Carla was met with foul play, though there isn’t any evidence to really determine what happened to her.
If you have any information related to Carla’s disappearance, please contact the Wadena Police Department at 218.631.7700.
More About:True Crime
