This Teen Vanished After Hanging Laundry Up On The Clothesline With Her Mom
In 1979, Tina Faye Kemp of Felton, Delaware, was 14 years old. She lived with her family on Main Street, and according to her older sister, Brenda King, she was very interested in horses.
“So she did a lot of taking care of the horses with my dad down at the stables,” Brenda recalled.
Tina also had a “few friends” at school and a boyfriend named Eric, whom she’d previously run away to see at his house.
That’s why, when the teen vanished on February 3, 1979, her family didn’t immediately suspect something was wrong.
That morning, 17-year-old Brenda had been at work; meanwhile, Tina and her mother, Ruth Kemp, were hanging laundry up on their clothesline.
Then, Tina supposedly said something about not feeling good, and Ruth eventually went to check on her daughter in her room.
Yet Ruth realized Tina wasn’t inside her room or outside their home. She had no clue where her daughter had gone, but again, foul play wasn’t immediately suspected.
“It was rough because, you know, she had left and run away two times before, within only, say, a couple of months, to a boyfriend’s house. So, you know, when it happened this time, that’s kind of what we were thinking. The same thing: that she had gone, you know, to the boyfriend’s house,” Brenda remembered.
Tina’s boyfriend, Eric, claimed he didn’t know where she was, though, and when Brenda arrived home from work later that day, she and Ruth began driving up and down roads searching for her.
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“It wasn’t the same as it is now, you know, with all the alerts that they send out. Now, you know, the whole town will get together and go search for people. None of that happened,” Brenda detailed.
What complicated the situation even further was the forecast. The very next day, Felton was hit with a blizzard, blanketing the town with about two feet of snow.
This “shut down the area,” Brenda noted, and Tina wasn’t reported missing by her mother until February 5, 1979.
Delaware State Police Public Information Officer Master Corporal Heather Pepper noted how investigators suspect foul play was involved, given Tina’s young age at the time of her disappearance and the fact that she “did not have the means to start a new life with a new identity.”
Today, more than 46 years after Tina vanished, there are still no suspects or persons of interest. Her DNA has also been compared to that of Jane Does in the past, but none were a match.
Tina’s siblings and father have joined an ancestry site, submitting their DNA in the hope that they’d find some familial match. Unfortunately, this proved to be a dead end.
In 2011, Ruth died before ever learning what happened to her daughter, but decades later, Brenda and her own daughter, Amber Barnes, refuse to give up the search for answers.
“We were just talking the other night that we were going to go to the station ourselves and sit there until somebody got us what we needed,” Brenda stated in 2022.
They both hope that someone who has information regarding Tina’s case, whether that be tips or potential sightings, will come forward.
At the time she went missing, Tina was about five feet tall, weighed 100 pounds, and had brown hair and blue eyes.
She was last seen wearing blue jeans, a white sweater, a red and white flannel shirt, and red and white tennis shoes.
Additionally, she had a gold band on her left arm, which had white rhinestones and the name “Eric” on a leather strap.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children created an age-progressed photo showing what Tina might’ve looked like at 54 years old. She would be 60 today.
Anyone with information regarding her case is urged to contact the Delaware State Police at (302) 697-4454.
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