GA CARLENE TENGELSEN: Missing from Macon, GA - 21 June 1972 - Age 16

[Romulus]

Carlene Tengelsen

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs)

By bringing people, information, forensic science and technology together, NamUs helps resolve cases.

www.namus.gov

Endangered Missing from Macon, Georgia since June 21, 1972

Age: 16 -- Height: 5'9" -- Weight: 115 lbs -- Hair Color: Brown -- Eye Color: Hazel

Carlene had braces on her teeth when she was last seen. She has a brown freckle on her neck below her chin, a small mole on her left cheek, and a chipped front tooth.

Carlene was last seen in Macon, Georgia on June 21, 1972. That afternoon, she left home and drove to a shopping center. She planned to pick up her younger sister from summer day camp afterward. She stopped at her boyfriend's workplace behind the shopping center and left a note on his car telling him she would see him that night. She never made it to pick up her sister and never returned home. The police did not begin searching for her for 24 hours. The car she had been driving was found at the shopping center at 1:45 am the next day. There was no sign of Carlene at the scene and she has never been heard from again.

Links

2837DFGA - Carlene Sessions Tengelsen

www.doenetwork.org

Carlene Sessions Tengelsen – The Charley Project

edited by staff to media link

CARLENE TENGELSEN has been missing from Macon, #GEORGIA since 21 June 1972 - Age 16

Carlene left home and drove to a shopping center and planned to pick up her younger sister from summer day camp afterward. She stopped at her boyfriend's workplace behind the shopping center and left a note on his car telling him she would see...

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[SheWhoMustNotBeNamed]

Half a century after Ga. girl’s vanishing comes a keepsake out of the blue

MACON, Ga. — Life on Easy Street changed forever that first summer day in 1972. Carlene Tengelsen went to pick up her kid sister across town and never came back.

www.thedailynewsonline.com

Half a century after Ga. girl’s vanishing comes a keepsake out of the blue​

Mar 12, 2024

Life on Easy Street changed forever that first summer day in 1972. Carlene Tengelsen went to pick up her kid sister across town and never came back.

Carlene had turned 16 the month before. It was her first time wheeling out of the driveway alone, riding away in her family’s 1963 Pontiac. She had talked about nicknaming that frumpy white station something cool, maybe “Hendrix” or “Joplin.”

On her way into the heart of Macon to fetch her younger sister Joanette, 14, from a day camp at Mercer University, Carlene in all likelihood stopped by the decade-old Westgate Shopping Center. The place had been Georgia’s first air-conditioned mall and was a regional retail mecca.

Some boys playing pinball there later recalled seeing someone who might have been Carlene, but they noticed nothing unusual. No one else did either.

As the afternoon faded and night fell on June 21, 1972, Carlene never retrieved her sister. Carlene’s family, frantic, began searching. It wasn’t until the wee hours of the next morning that the Tengelsen family station wagon was discovered in the mall parking lot, just across the street from a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop.

All traces of Carlene end there. No sign of her ever surfaced. Not a clue. Detectives today shake their heads in disappointment at how her disappearance was barely investigated. Carlene’s father, who died in 2004, had to beg a policeman to dust the station wagon for fingerprints.

In that era of hippies and flower children, the cops on the case, now long deceased, did little to look for Carlene. Despite zero evidence to suggest it, the detectives wrote her off as a runaway.

Her parents knew better.



Late last summer, Joanette received word that a tipster had come forward.

The tipster, a Macon-area woman, had seen a social media post or article online about Carlene’s disappearance. It jogged the woman’s memory, or so it seemed.

The woman went to the cops claiming to have suppressed knowledge of the fatal disappearance or abduction of an unknown local girl, possibly Carlene. “She knows something, she thinks,” Joanette, 66, said at the time.

Though law enforcement officials never publicly divulged the tip, in September they quietly searched for human remains, meticulously digging and sifting soil in a neighborhood 5 miles south of the mall where Carlene was last seen.

Nothing the investigators unearthed proved fruitful. No known signs of Carlene or anyone were found.

Then, in December, came a wholly unrelated development. A woman in Tampa, Florida, near Clearwater where the Tengelsens once lived, got in touch with a private police consultant familiar with Carlene’s vanishing.

The consultant has in the past worked closely with police in Macon and other Georgia cities. After learning of Carlene’s vanishing through newspaper articles 25 years ago, the consultant befriended Joanette and volunteered her services.

The Florida woman explained how she had been given, 15 years or so prior, a storybook as a gift from a neighbor who collected books. “From the Tower Window” was published in 1921 and is roughly the size of a collegiate dictionary. It is an anthology of children’s literature full of nursery rhymes, fables, folk tales and a little Shakespeare. A man and woman on horseback grace its cover.

Jennifer Robinson said she never looked closely at the book until around 2021.

Peeking inside the front cover, she noticed a handwritten scrawl that looked as if someone had been learning to write their name.

It was a girl’s name. She had an unusual last name.

Robinson was curious.

She Googled the name and saw that Carlene Tengelsen had been missing for nearly 50 years.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’” she recalled. “I kind of freaked out a little bit, too.”

She wondered, “How’d this get here?”

‘That’s her handwriting’

Robinson didn’t know that the missing girl had once lived in Clearwater.

She tried to get in touch with a missing-persons network. She left messages but never heard back. Assuming no one was looking into the case, she let it go.

But late last year, Robinson heard about a cold case being solved in Florida. She told a co-worker about Carlene’s book.

“You’ve got to get ahold of somebody,” the co-worker said.

Two months ago, Robinson got in touch with the police consultant steeped in Carlene’s case.

The consultant asked Robinson to mail the book to her so that it could be examined. It was a long shot that the book bore any connection to Carlene’s vanishing, but the consultant wanted to inspect it.

After looking it over, the consultant mailed the book to Carlene’s sister Joanette in early February.

The book arrived in a postal pouch.

On a rainy afternoon, in a kitchen that overlooks the living room where Joan Tengelsen had prayed for Carlene and for those lost children she never knew, Joanette grabbed some scissors.

She snipped open one end of the postal pouch and reached inside.

She picked up the 100-year-old book, wrapped in clear plastic, and stared at its cover. She glanced at its spine and sobbed.

Peeling away the last of the plastic, she gripped the brown book in both hands. “It’s really old, isn’t it?”

As she opened it, her thumb landed inside of the front cover, just beneath the initials “C.S.T.”

The letters penciled above them, the name they stood for, were in the careful hand of a child: “Carlene Sessions Tengelsen.”

“Yep,” Joanette said, “that’s her handwriting.”

A lifetime of not knowing what had become of her sister came gushing back. This was the childhood signature of her own flesh and blood. A schoolgirl had left her mark in pencil, as if to say, “Carlene was here.” In that instant, she had, via graphite portal, made her way home.


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