Circumstances of Disappearance
Childress disappeared while playing in the front yard of her Union City, Tennessee home on April 16, 1987.
When Childress disappeared, hundreds of people volunteered to search for her. Several weeks later, the search halted abruptly when her mother, Pamela Bailey, confessed to accidentally killing her daughter. She told police she threw the body into the Obion River, but no body was found, and Bailey later recanted the confession.
In April of 2002, Bailey was charged with stabbing her 12-year-old son in a cemetery. She has pleaded innocent.
Bailey's son, Casey, said his mother had told him she had a surprise for him and to be home from a friend's house by 7:30 pm the night he was stabbed. Shortly after 8:00, while driving the three miles toward Arnett Cemetery, Bailey told Casey to put a blue handkerchief around his eyes. The stabbing is believed to have occurred between 8:30 and 9:00. Bailey sat her blindfolded son by a cemetery marker with the inscription "son" before she stabbed him in the neck and shoulder with a knife. At that time he felt a cut in the right side of his neck, and was able to kick his mother and run to the nearest house.
Bailey's son was released from a hospital the day after the stabbing and remains with his father.