The Road Trip Disappearance of Karen Denise Wells | Unsolved Case
On September 22, 1970, Karen Denise Wells was born into a world brimming with potential. An Oklahoma native with a fondness for her middle name, Denise would navigate her life with a spirit that was as bright and open as the expansive plains of her home state. As a young woman, she embraced the joys and challenges of single motherhood, raising her son in the comfort of her hometown, Haskell, Oklahoma. Life seemed to be following a predictable path. Until it wasn’t.
April 1994. A typical month in most people’s calendars but for Denise Wells, it marked the beginning of an unsolvable mystery that continues to baffle investigators and armchair detectives alike. The young mother decided to embark on a road trip from Oklahoma to Bergen, New Jersey, to visit her childhood friend, Melissa Shepard. Denise, used to long-distance driving and fiercely independent, wasn’t daunted by the prospect of the journey. But her intended destination of a friend’s welcoming home morphed into the starting point of a 29-year-old mystery.
Her journey began as expected. On April 10, she dropped her 14-month-old son off at her mother’s house and rented a white Plymouth Acclaim in Tulsa, OK. After driving nearly 1200 miles, she reached Carlisle, Pennsylvania on April 12. The perplexing aspect? She had driven further east as far as…
