Carlene Tengelsen had recently gotten her driver’s license and had never driven anywhere, so she was thrilled when her mother allowed her to use the family car to pick up her younger sister from summer camp on Wednesday, June 21, 1972. The 16-year-old left her home in Macon, Georgia in the early afternoon, intending to stop by a local shopping plaza before heading to Mercer University, where her sister was on a field trip with her camp group. Carlene invited her younger brother and older sister to come with her, but neither was interested and the teenager left alone in the white 1963 station wagon. She never returned home and she was never seen again.
The first sign that something was wrong came around 4:00 pm, when 14-year-old Joanette Tengelsen called home asking why no one had picked her up from summer camp. At first, Joan Tengelsen told her younger daughter that she was sure Carlene would be there any minute and to just sit tight. After more than an hour passed, Joanette called home again. Carlene still hadn’t picked her up and she was getting bored of waiting. Eventually, 17-year-old Arnelle Tengelsen drove to Mercer University and picked up her youngest sister.
Joan Tengelsen wasn’t sure what to think when Carlene failed to pick up Joanette and didn’t return home that afternoon. Although Carlene had only had her driver’s license for about a week, she was normally a very responsible teenager and it was unlike her to go anywhere without letting someone know. As hours went by without any sign of Carlene, Joan started to worry that something might have happened to her.
Carlene’s father, Arnold, was on a business trip in Florida at the time the teenager went missing. Although Joan was initially reluctant to worry him, as darkness fell without any word from Carlene, she called him and told him that the teenager was missing. He had just checked into a hotel in Deland, Florida, more than five hours away from home. Despite a brewing hurricane, Arnold immediately left the hotel and headed for Macon, driving as fast as he could on the rain-soaked highway.
Joan called the Macon Police Department and reported Carlene missing, but they didn’t take the case seriously at first. Since Carlene was a teenager, they assumed that she had simply gone off with some of her friends and would return home when she was ready. Although they did spend a few hours searching for the Pontiac station wagon Carlene had been driving, they were unable to locate it.
Arnelle was supposed to go out with her boyfriend, Marvin, that night. She canceled the date so she could help her mother search for Carlene; they started calling all of the teenager’s friends, trying to find someone who might know where she could be. Wanting to help, Marvin picked up Joanette and the two of them spent hours driving around Macon, searching in vain for any sign of Carlene or the white station wagon.
The first place they searched was the Westgate Shopping Center, where Carlene planned to stop on her way to pick up Joanette. Her family was able to confirm that Carlene had made it to the shopping center that afternoon; some teenage boys she knew from school had been playing pinball at Newberry’s and they said that Carlene had stopped and watched them play for a while.
After leaving the pinball machines, Carlene then headed to the shopping center located behind Westgate; her boyfriend had been working at the Winn-Dixie supermarket that day and she left a note for him on the windshield of his car. He hadn’t seen Carlene but found the note when he finished his shift. “Came by to see you…see you tonight.” By that night, however, Carlene was gone.
Joanette and Marvin drove around Macon until well after midnight. They had driven through countless parking lots and dozens of side streets, but Carlene and the white Pontiac were nowhere to be found. Around 1:45 am, they made a final pass through the Westgate Shopping Center as they headed for home. Suddenly, in the parking lot across from Krispy Kreme, Joanette spotted the white station wagon.
At first, Joanette could only stare at the car in shock. She and Marvin had searched this same parking lot earlier, and the car definitely hadn’t been there at that time. Marvin pointed out that there was a Macon police car in the same parking lot; although the entire police force was aware of Carlene’s disappearance and officers were supposed to be on the lookout for the white station wagon, the officer hadn’t noticed that he was only feet away from the wanted vehicle.
Marvin approached the police officer and asked him if he was searching for a white Pontiac station wagon. When the cop confirmed that he was, Marvin pointed it out. “Well, it’s sitting right over there.” Although the car had been located, Carlene was still nowhere to be found.
When the Pontiac was found, the driver’s side door was ajar and the windows were down. Joan was adamant that her daughter never would have left the car in that condition; she had been taught to always make sure the car’s windows were rolled up and the doors were locked whenever she got out of the vehicle. “Carlene would not have left it like that.” She knew that she risked losing her driving privileges if she didn’t take good care of the family’s car.
Despite the fact that Carlene hadn’t been found with the car, police still insisted that she was likely off with friends and there was no need for concern. Arnold, however, insisted that something was wrong. He was certain his daughter hadn’t been the person who abandoned the station wagon; he feared she had been a victim of foul play and her abductor had later ditched the vehicle where it was found. Arnold pleaded with police to process the Pontiac for evidence. They finally dusted it for fingerprints but found nothing useful.
Joan told reporters that there was no way Carlene would have voluntarily abandoned her family. She was close with her parents and siblings; she and Joanette shared a bedroom, and though they would sometimes fight over the space — Joanette liked to keep things neat while Carlene could be somewhat messy — they had a close bond and didn’t keep secrets from each other.
Carlene’s younger brother, Tom, was small for his age and sometimes got picked on by some of the older boys in the neighborhood. Carlene was fiercely protective of Tom; he knew that all he had to do was yell for her when he was getting picked on and she would drop whatever she was doing and run to his defense.
Shortly before she went missing, Carlene finished her sophomore year of high school at Southwest High School in Macon. She had always done well in school; she got along well with her classmates and never gave her teachers any problems. She had a steady boyfriend — she had been wearing his class ring when she vanished — and had been looking forward to a date with him on the night she went missing. Joan noted, “She’s never done anything like this before. She never spent a night away from home and was always home on time from her dates.” In her mother’s eyes, foul play was the only explanation for Carlene’s disappearance.
The Tengelsen family flooded the area with missing person posters and made sure that Carlene’s picture was displayed in all area businesses. Carlene’s friends and classmates spent hours driving throughout Macon, handing out flyers and searching for any sign of the missing teenager.
Two weeks after Carlene vanished, her family announced that they were offering a $500 reward for information leading to her whereabouts. While the Macon Police Department and the Macon-Bibb County Civil Defense Office were both officially investigating the disappearance, detectives believed that Carlene had most likely left the area voluntarily and they still expected her to return home eventually.
Joan was devastated by the disappearance of her daughter. She alternated between weeks of sleepless nights and months when she didn’t want to get out of bed. She refused to leave the house, fearing that someone would call about Carlene the moment she stepped away from the phone. For six weeks, she slept in her clothes, wanting to make sure she would be ready to leave immediately if she got a phone call that Carlene had been found.
The family received dozens of calls, but they were mostly from people who provided only vague information yet hoped to collect the reward money. Others were clearly in need of mental help; one woman insisted that Carlene lived in her attic and would come down each night to steal food from her refrigerator.
Months went by and Carlene’s fate remained a mystery. Although the teenager remained listed as a missing person, Macon police did little to try and find her. The investigation was hindered by the fact that officers initially believed that Carlene had run away from home; by the time they were willing to admit that she could have been a victim of foul play, the case was already ice cold.
In May 1973, Joan told Arnold that she didn’t want to live in Macon anymore. She was haunted by memories of her missing daughter and thought it would be good to have a change of scenery. Arnold arranged to buy a steakhouse in Durham, North Carolina, and moved his family there.
Before leaving Georgia, Joan arranged for their neighbors to have a second phone line installed; the phone number that had belonged to the Tengelsens was transferred over to this phone line so that Carlene would still have a way to call home if she were able. The neighbors kept the phone number active for three years; in 1977, the Tengelsens moved back to Macon.
In July 1981, Arnold filed a petition to have Carlene declared legally dead. On August 26, 1981, a Bibb County judge ruled that the legal presumption of death had been established and granted Arnold’s petition. Carlene had been missing for more than nine years at that point and there had never been any confirmed sightings of her. Although it didn’t change her case status with the Macon police — she remained listed as a missing person — her family had accepted the fact that she had likely been killed on the same night that she vanished.
Although they never got over the loss of Carlene, Joan and Arnold refused to allow their grief to completely consume them. They would still talk about her often, especially late at night when it was just the two of them, but they resigned themselves to the fact that they might never get answers about what had happened to her. In 2004, shortly after the couple celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, Arnold died at the age of 78. Joan liked to think that Carlene was waiting for him in heaven.
In 2009, Joan noted that missing children cases were treated far differently than they had been in the 1970s. The pain felt by parents, however, remained the same. “Anytime I see on the news that a child is missing, I pray for that family…I feel a kinship with them because I know the hell that they’re gonna go through…it’s something so horrible that you can’t really express it.”
Joan said that if she were able to speak to the person responsible for her daughter’s disappearance, she would ask them why they did it — and she would tell them that she forgave them. Her faith had grown stronger over the years and she was looking for answers, not vengeance. Joan died in December 2016 at the age of 83, hopefully finally getting the answers she so desperately wanted.
June 2022 marked the 50th anniversary of Carlene’s disappearance. In the five decades since she vanished, her parents and her older sister had died, but Joanette and Tom still hoped to learn what had happened to her. Joanette stated, “People say, ‘After 50 years, you know she’s dead,’ and I know that’s probably true. I just don’t want to say I agree and that’s it. I just can’t let it go…it would be nice to know for sure, to have some justice to it.”
Joanette wasn’t as willing as her mother to blindly forgive the person who stole her sister away from her. “I hate that person, and I’ve had to ask God to forgive me for hating them, because I don’t even know who they are.” She hopes she can one day forgive this person, but noted that if she ever met them face-to-face, “I may not be so nice.”
Carlene Sessions Tengelsen was just 16 years old when she vanished from Macon, Georgia in June 1972. She had just finished her sophomore year of high school and had only had her driver’s license for a week when she went missing; although police initially believed she was a runaway, those close to her knew that she would never have voluntarily walked away from her family. Carlene has hazel eyes and brown hair, and at the time of her disappearance, she was 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 115 pounds. Although her hair was naturally curly, she preferred to iron it straight. Carlene was last seen wearing blue jeans with metal studs down the sides and one of her dad’s blue button-down shirts; she also had on her Mickey Mouse watch, a silver POW bracelet engraved with the name of an American soldier taken prisoner during the Vietnam War, and her boyfriend’s white gold class ring. She had braces on her teeth when she went missing. If you have any information about Carlene, please contact the Macon Police Department at 912–751–7505.
