On January 13, 1996, Amber Hagerman and her five-year-old brother, Ricky, were visiting their grandparents’ house in Arlington, Texas. Just a few weeks earlier, their mother, Donna Whitson, had saved enough money and gave Amber a pink Manga bicycle for Christmas.
That afternoon, the excited nine-year-old and her brother asked their grandfather, Jimmie Whitson, if they could ride their bicycles, and he agreed on the condition that they stay on their block.
At the time, Donna was working on a local documentary titled From ‘Welfare to Work’ with a local news crew, so she was in the neighborhood but away from the house.
Intrigued by the bicycle ramp that the neighborhood kids had set up, Amber and Ricky disobeyed their grandfather’s instructions and rode two blocks past, ending up in an asphalt parking lot of an abandoned Winn-Dixie grocery store.
After playing on the ramp for several minutes, Ricky grew nervous about being too far from the house and told his sister he was going back. Amber told him she wanted to go down the ramp one more time and promised she would be right behind him.
With that, Ricky pedaled away, leaving Amber alone. In the time that he sped away and Amber went down the ramp one last time, a black single-cab pickup pulled into the parking lot.
A man exited and walked up to the girl, grabbing her off the pink-and-white bicycle. Amber kicked and screamed, but it was no use as the man threw her into the cab of the truck and sped away from the parking lot.
The entire abduction was witnessed by 78-year-old Jimmie Kevil, a retired veteran living adjacent to the parking lot. Kevil immediately called emergency services to report a girl being kidnapped by a man in a dark colored truck.
When Ricky got back to the house without his sister, Whitson immediately knew something was wrong and got into his own car to go look for her. Within minutes, he pulled into the abandoned Winn Dixie parking lot and found Amber’s bicycle abandoned on the pavement.
Arlington police, responding to Kevil’s 911 call, arrived on the scene at that moment and informed the frantic grandfather about the eyewitness report.
Police immediately interviewed Jimmie Kevil, who described the suspect as a white or Hispanic male. The getaway vehicle was a black 1980s- or 1990s single-cab pickup. While Whitson stayed at the scene, word of what happened reached Amber’s parents.
Amber’s father, Richard, and Donna rushed to the Whitsons’ house. In a panic, Richard immediately contacted Marc Klaas, who had experienced the same thing years earlier.
His daughter was kidnapped and murdered in 1993, and he had become an advocate for missing children. Klaas offered critical guidance on navigating the overwhelming situation and collaborating with the FBI.
Donna then reached out to the FBI and the local media. The Arlington Police Department also realized it was a stranger abduction and set up a dedicated task force focused on finding the missing girl. They also brought in the FBI and the Texas Department of Public Safety.
A Massive Search Yields Few Answers
Over the weekend, hundreds of law enforcement officers, along with K-9 units and community volunteers, combed the North Arlington area. They also searched the nearby fields and did door-to-door residential searches.
Because a local news crew had been filming Donna’s personal journey as she transitioned off government assistance, worked toward earning a GED, and turned her life around, recent footage of Amber was broadcast across the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
In the days following Amber’s abduction, more than 50 police officers and FBI agents worked to bring the nine-year-old home to her family. They canvassed the neighborhood, handed out fliers, and followed every possible lead.
The search also continued as law enforcement officers went to extraordinary lengths to find the girl. Officers only paused to take quick naps before going back out. However, the area around the Winn-Dixie lot complicated the situation.
A laundromat was next to the abandoned grocery store, meaning there were potential witnesses that Saturday. But few of them ever came forward. Detectives believe potential witnesses may have been afraid to speak out because they feared deportation.
This was likely because a fifth of the Arlington population at the time were Hispanic and many were undocumented. The Dallas Morning News reported Detective Grant Gildon’s statement saying, “We believe this case will get solved. We believe that there’s no way the killer in this case could have committed the crime in the manner that they did without someone seeing, hearing, or having some knowledge of what happened. We believe someone out there still has information that can help.”
Former detective Randy Lockhart, who worked the case, later recalled the moment the call came in. He told the Cleburne Times, “That day I was building a deck outside my house cause it was a nice day. My wife came out and said the police department called because a girl was kidnapped. Well, I thought it was probably a child custody type deal and didn’t think much of it at first. But I never put another nail or screw in that deck until six months after that call.”
As the task force swept neighborhoods, tips came in, and detectives eventually knocked on a potential witness’s door. The man was, however, completely dressed in a Howdy Doody costume, but claimed to have seen the abduction from his backyard.
His story shifted, though, and yielded nothing of substance. Donna’s old boyfriend, Marian Lake, also popped back into the picture around this time because she and Richard had separated.
Lake was also considered a person of interest in the investigation for a time before his tragic death following an accident two months after the abduction.
According to Hub Pages, former Arlington police detective Randy Lockhart said, “They got back together and, within two weeks, they were getting married during the investigation. About two weeks after that, he was … according to the medical examiner, he had a seizure and wrecked on 287, and so now he’s dead. Spent a lot of time on him, thinking he might be involved.”
The task force eventually cleared him of any involvement.
January 17, the Tragic Find
On the morning of January 17, four days after Amber went missing, a man named Stuart Kocher was walking his dog near an apartment complex in North Arlington when it suddenly stopped.
Kocher then saw the body of a child lying face down on a concrete slab of a drainage culvert behind an apartment complex playground. Horrified by what he saw, Kocher rushed to the phone and dialed emergency services.
Police arrived within minutes and cordoned off the area. Because the culvert was directly behind a playground, the police had to move quickly and shield the public before onlookers swarmed the scene.
The previous night, a violent storm also dropped heavy rain across the Arlington area, flooding local creeks and drainage channels. Investigators also noted that maintenance workers had been there the previous day but saw nothing.
It led detectives to determine that the floodwaters had likely washed Amber’s body down the drainage system from a different location, depositing her in the culvert.
All That’s Interesting reported Lockhart’s observations, saying, “Amber was totally nude except for a sock on her left foot. We rolled her over, and I caught her head in my hands. Several lacerations to her throat. A knife or screwdriver had been used to rip her throat out.”
The body was taken to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s office, and on January 18, 1996, they officially confirmed Amber’s identity using dental records. An autopsy revealed Amber had been kept alive for two days after her abduction.
She had been sexually assaulted, and the cause of death was severe lacerations to the throat.
“She’s Still Alive”
While forensic teams worked on the body, Arlington police chaplain Harold Elliot arrived at the Whitson home after Midnight on January 18th to deliver the heartbreaking news to Donna and Richard that a child matching Amber’s description had been found.
Amber’s parents did not want to believe the news at first. According to Kiro7 News, Richard Hagerman refused to acknowledge it saying, “She’s still alive”. Donna collapsed in grief after receiving confirmation from the dental records.
On Friday morning, January 19, Donna and Richard stood side by side outside the Arlington Funeral Home. Flanked by microphones, she made a tearful public statement addressing the murderer and begging them to turn themselves in.
The funeral was held on January 20, one week after Amber’s abduction. Thousands of mourners, including law enforcement officers, search volunteers, and strangers, attended in solidarity with the family.
A Stalled Investigation
Detective Lockhart told the Cleburne Times Review, “Everyone from the FBI down came and reviewed this case and said there is nothing that could have been done any differently. Does that make me feel any better? No, because I failed her family.”
A task force led by Arlington police sergeant Mark Simpson brought together local homicide detectives, Texas Department of Public Safety agents, and FBI behavioral specialists. The media coverage also generated an unprecedented number of tips.
Investigators were subsequently flooded with over 7,000 tips from across the country. Clerks logged every phone call and letter into an indexing database and grouped them by priority.
Because the lone witness, Jimmie Kevil, was very confident about the vehicle description, investigators focused on tracking it. Detectives then pulled Department of Motor Vehicles data on every black single-cab 1980s and 1990s pickup registered in Tarrant County.
Teams of detectives also went out to track down thousands of these truck owners and question them. They inspected the truck beds for physical evidence, checked the upholstery, and verified alibis for January 13, 1996.
Because Amber was snatched from a neighborhood lot and left in a culvert miles away, FBI profilers concluded the killer was familiar with the Arlington area. They probably lived in the area and regularly commuted through it.
The nature of the abduction also implied a disorganized and opportunistic predator that saw a child alone and acted impulsively.
However, the biggest frustration in the investigation came from the crime-scene data. Because the severe rainstorm on January 16 flooded the drainage ditch, it acted like a natural washing machine.
The rushing water stripped away critical trace evidence, including fingerprints, hair, fibers, and easily accepted suspect DNA. DNA technology in 1996 also required pristine biological samples to create a profile, which was simply not available.
By late 1996, no primary suspect had been identified, and the task force gradually scaled back as the active case files transferred to the Arlington Police Department cold case unit.
According to Kiro7 News, Sergeant Ben Lopez, a member of the original task force, said, “All this time, we’ve only had one witness. That’s why we’re pleading, if there’s anyone out there that has information — even if they think it’s just a small bit of information — (it) may be the lead we need to break this.”
Lopez was not able to hide his investment in the case, saying, “I would love to be able to give Donna, Ricky, and the rest of the members of their family the answer to the question that they would like to know — of course, that is who did this to Amber — and bring that person to justice.”
DNA Evidence Sparks Lead After Two Decades
In 2021, Arlington police first revealed the presence of DNA evidence. Detective Grant Gildon told the Dallas Morning News, “We’re submitting evidence that we’ve maintained for 25 years, that we believe could provide us with results that could be a DNA profile.”
Investigators maintained the evidence had been reviewed several times since the murder, including by the FBI. Gildon also said it had been preserved until technology could process what older methods could not.
He elaborated, asking major laboratories each year whether new technologies could help with the evidence they had. He also fought the characterization that the case had turned cold, telling People Magazine, “A lot of people will refer to Amber’s case as what’s commonly referred to as a cold case. But for the Arlington Police Department, it has never been listed as a cold case because we’ve never gone 180 days without having some lead come in.”
As of January 2026, on the 30th anniversary of the abduction, Arlington police are utilizing advanced DNA technology in hopes of generating a complete profile of the killer. No arrest has been made yet, but the suspect, who was in his 20s or 30s, is likely in his 60s currently.
A Bitter-Sweet Legacy
In the immediate aftermath of Amber’s death, a woman in Fort Worth named Diane Simone was watching the news, and she saw Amber’s parents grieve on television.
People reported her saying, “I said, ‘I can’t get over this child. There has to be something we can do.” The population already received severe-weather alerts, so “Why wouldn’t they do it for this?”
Simone called a local radio station and proposed a broadcast system for child abductions. This would put a description of the suspect’s vehicle on every radio station within minutes of a kidnapping.
The system was named after Amber Hagerman and also fit the acronym, America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response. Broadcasters, law enforcement agencies, and the Child Alert Foundation integrated the system in 1997.
As of 2026, the AMBER Alert program has successfully recovered 1,312 children in the United States. Later, Donna voiced complicated feelings about it.
According to All That’s Interesting, she said, “There’s another part of me that wonders what would have happened if we had had the alert when Amber went missing. Could it have helped bring her back to me?”
Donna continues to live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where she works and remains dedicated to keeping her daughter’s memory alive.
Richard Hagerman unfortunately did not live to see this legacy and died in 2007 while still seeking justice for his daughter. Ricky, who was five at the time his sister was taken, is now an adult and remains in touch with investigators concerning the case.
Jimmie Kevil, the only witness to ever come forward, died in 2016 shortly after giving a last interview to CBS Dallas. After 33 years, the man he saw in the black truck has never been identified.
Anyone with information concerning the murder of Amber Hagerman is asked to contact the Arlington Police Department. Oak Farms Dairy also continues to offer a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
If you would like to see other stories involving unsolved disappearances, check out our articles on Korrina Malinoski and Marina Boelter.
