HATTIESBURG — It’s been more than 42 years since Deborah Faye Owens allegedly stepped out of her husband’s vehicle into nowhere on a New Year’s morning.
Investigators still have no answers about what happened to the 27-year-old woman after she and her husband left a New Year’s Eve celebration in the early hours of Jan. 1, 1984.
According to the Hattiesburg Police Department, Owens was last seen after attending the party with her husband. Authorities said the couple allegedly got into an argument while driving home, and her husband told investigators that Owens asked to be let out of the vehicle.
He told police he pulled over and let her out, then drove away. Owens has not been seen or heard from since.
Owens was a white female, and at the time of her disappearance, she was 27 years old.
A 1985 report in The Clarion-Ledger quoted Hattiesburg Detective Bob Hopkins as saying that Owens’ disappearance was unusual because she had always remained in contact with family or friends in the past.
“It’s not the first time she’s done something like this, but it’s the first time she hasn’t contacted anyone,” Hopkins told the newspaper.
In the months after Owens vanished, local newspapers published classified legal notices in April 1984 seeking a divorce from “Deborah Faye Owens, whose last known address was Hattiesburg, Mississippi but whose present residence and address is unknown,” citing cruel and unusual treatment.
Little additional information about the case was publicly released in the years that followed. Owens’ name appeared briefly in a 1987 Clarion-Ledger story about unresolved missing persons cases in Mississippi, but no major developments have ever been announced.
Today, Owens’ disappearance remains unsolved.
Anyone with information about Deborah Faye Owens or her disappearance is asked to contact the Hattiesburg Police Department at (601) 545-4971.
