Late one night in the fall of 1998, Samantha Hopper called her mother to ask if she'd watch Samantha's two young daughters, 3-year-old Dezarae and 22-month-old Courtney. Her mom, Debbie Mahan, said she could handle only one of the girls, so Hopper drove the short distance to Mahan's Russellville, Arkansas, house and dropped off Dezarae. Hopper, who was 19 years old and eight months pregnant at the time, then left in her Ford Tempo with her other daughter, ostensibly to visit a new boyfriend in Tennessee. She and Courtney were never seen again. As the years passed, Debbie Mahan filed so many missing-persons reports that she ran out of photos picturing her daughter. The local sheriff's office treated the case as a potentially criminal one but soon exhausted all good leads. Samantha and Courtney, it seemed, had disappeared without a trace. That was a particularly bitter pill for Dezarae Carpenter, who grew up wondering if her mother had abandoned her, perhaps to start a...
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