Waiting Down the Street

A new house in Bethany

In the summer of 1985 the Abell family had not lived long in their house in the 7000 block of NW 59 Terrace, in Bethany, on the west side of the Oklahoma City metro. They had come up from the south side of the city, where the children had grown up.

There were two girls still at home. Rozlin was eighteen. Fawn was fifteen.

On the afternoon of Thursday, July 25, the sisters went out to look for jobs. That was the whole plan, as far as anyone knew it. They didn't say where they were going, or what kind of work they had in mind. They just went.

Their brother came home that afternoon as they were heading out the door. He heard them talking, and he remembers one of them saying:

The paper doesn't say which of the girls said it, and neither will this page. What it does say comes in the next line: "The girls have not been seen since."

Somebody down the street

His name is Otto. Almost everything the public knows about that afternoon comes from what he remembered, and from what the family later told reporters.

It is a short sentence, and it carries most of the case. They. Somebody the girls knew, or trusted, or at least expected. Down the street. Not in the driveway, not at the curb. Somewhere out of sight of the house.

Nothing that has ever been made public says who it was. There is no car in the record, no name, no friend who said, I picked them up. No one has reported seeing either girl since.

The record does not even agree on the wording. When News 9 ran the story on February 22, 2013, its report said the girls had left "with friends." Three days later The Oklahoman printed the brother's memory of the doorway: somebody was waiting, and he didn't see who. Those are two different sentences. Maybe they come from the same memory told two ways. Nobody has said.

The spitfire and the mellow one

A missing-persons report gives you heights and ages. It took a family friend to put the girls back in the room.

Michelle Caudle had lived with the Abells for a while when the children were growing up in south Oklahoma City. In 2013 she was forty-five and living in Nicoma Park, and she was the one who had kept the girls' names in front of the public.

Rozlin was petite: four foot eleven and about ninety pounds. She had gone to U.S. Grant High School, and she had worked at a Del Rancho restaurant on the south side. She and Michelle had both dropped out of high school, Michelle said.

She called her "a spitfire." Fawn was the younger one, about five foot one and a hundred pounds. Michelle's description of her was four words: "Fawn was more mellow."

The Oklahoman said both girls had brownish-blond hair. The NamUs entries describe their hair as red or auburn. The sources don't agree, and this page doesn't choose.

And there was one thing everyone agreed on. The girls hitchhiked, and often. Lt. Austin Warfield of the Bethany police said they were known to hitchhike frequently. Michelle said the same: they were frequent hitchhikers.

There was an older sister, too. Loreile was grown and out of the house by 1985. She has said, in a later interview, that about two weeks before the girls disappeared, Rozlin called her and said she might be turning up at her door soon. Loreile was moving into a new apartment and told her to give it a couple of weeks. By her own account, she never saw either sister again.

The report

A missing-persons report was filed in Bethany when the girls failed to come home. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation dates it to July 28, three days after they left.

There was no evidence of foul play. No scene, no struggle, no witness to anything but two girls leaving a house in the middle of the day. And as time went on, the case settled into the shape the paperwork gave it. As Warfield later described the file to The Oklahoman:

That is two different kinds of missing, for two sisters who went out the same door on the same afternoon. The law of the time explains a good deal of it.

In May 1983, two years earlier, Oklahoma had passed a one-sentence statute, 10 O.S. § 1628. It made it the duty of every sheriff, police chief, marshal and constable, "upon notification of a report of a missing child sixteen (16) years and under, to immediately initiate an investigation into the disappearance of said child."

Sixteen and under. Fawn, at fifteen, was inside that line. Rozlin, at eighteen, was not. No Oklahoma law required anyone to start looking for her right away.

Whether the Bethany police applied the statute to Fawn in 1985 is not known. The department's file is closed while the case is open, and nothing public says either way. What can be said is what the law asked for. The federal rules came later: the National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990 required immediate entry of missing children under eighteen into the national crime database, with no waiting period, and only Suzanne's Law in 2003 extended that to someone Rozlin's age.

If the disappearance was in the newspapers that summer, nobody has found the story. Searches of the 1985 archives have turned up nothing. For twenty-five years there was a report in a file in Bethany, and a family that could not stop thinking about it.

Every answer

Over the years, people have put forward answers. The family has lived with all of them.

The plainest is the one Michelle Caudle believes. Two girls who hitchhiked all the time, somebody waiting down the street, a ride. She told The Oklahoman she thought they were hitchhiking and "ran into foul play." Warfield said that while there was no evidence of foul play in 1985, some family members think the girls were victims of a crime. It fits what is known. It is also the hardest to prove, because a ride leaves nothing behind.

The second is that they left. Rozlin was an adult, and she had told her sister she might be coming. But by Loreile's account they never arrived, and wherever the girls were going that afternoon, nobody has said they got there.

The third comes from inside the family. In a later interview, Loreile made serious allegations about the girls' father, and said she suspected he knew more than he said. Those are her allegations. No police agency has named him, or anyone, as a suspect, and nothing in the public record ties him to that day.

A fourth circulates online. It points to a man charged in the 1981 disappearance of two girls from the Oklahoma State Fair. It does not hold up: by May 1985, two months before the Abell girls left home, he was already serving a life sentence in Wyoming.

A question about bones

In March 2009, a woman's skull, with no lower jaw, was recovered from a creek in a wildlife refuge in Oklahoma City. It went into NamUs, the national database that sets missing persons beside unidentified remains, as case UP6728. A forensic artist's reconstruction of the face was added in March 2010.

In 2010 a family member, who did not want to be identified, called the Bethany police and asked whether any bones matching the girls had ever been found at the Stinchcomb Wildlife Refuge at Lake Overholser. The case was opened back up that year. No source in the file says the call was about that particular skull.

Warfield went to the systems that hadn't existed in 1985. Social Security Administration records showed no activity on Rozlin's number since July 1985. Both girls were entered in NamUs, as MP6998 and MP6999, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children made age progressions of them. He collected DNA from family members.

As for the skull, NamUs estimates the woman's age at twenty-five to forty, and her death somewhere between 1990 and 2008. That would rule out the Abell girls only if they died in 1985. No match to either sister has ever been made public. As of 2013, Warfield said, no bones matching the girls had been reported.

To this day

The story finally went public in February 2013, nearly twenty-eight years after the girls went out the door. News 9 put Otto Abell on the ten o'clock news on February 22.

He said he believed "something bad happened to them."

Three days later Robert Medley's story ran on the front page of The Oklahoman, with the girls' school photographs and the age progressions printed side by side. Warfield said there had been few clues. He said the chances were slim that the sisters, if still alive, would contact their family now to explain where they had been.

Michelle Caudle had started a Facebook page, FindRozlinNFawn. A few people had written to say they thought they had spotted the women recently. It wasn't the Abells. A psychic sent a message too, which was not a lead. Michelle ended the interview this way:

As of October 2026, the case is open, nobody has been charged, and no one has publicly said who was waiting down the street. If you know anything about what happened to Rozlin and Fawn Abell, call the Bethany Police Department at 405-789-2323.