A Mysterious Disappearance

Welcome back.  In Pawhuska nowadays along Kihekah Street Ree Drummond is the talk of the town but back on June 23, 1976 there was another person that all the locals were talking about. Cindy Kinney was going to be a junior in high school at the time. Her dream of being on the pom squad had come true, she’d met a nice boy and she had a part-time job at her aunt’s laundromat which gave her some spending money so life was grand.

Early that morning on June 23rd as usual she had gone to the laundromat before school to work for a couple of hours before her pom squad teammate Terri Surritte came by to pick her up for practice at the school. At 5’6” and 95 pounds Cindy was the smallest girl on the squad but when the petite brown-haired girl with the big brown eyes got in front of a crowd people remembered her. Well liked in school also this all-American girl was the last person in the world to cause the kind of commotion that occurred when Terri got to the laundromat a little after 8 am to pick Cindy up and couldn’t find her. Terri made a quick drive through town and still no Cindy. Everyone at pom practice was worried because it wasn’t like Cindy to disappear without a word. Then at 9 am her hysterical aunt contacted the police and before long the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations had been called in. Eventually they would spend thousands of hours working on the case, spreading her high school photo around and chasing down dead-end leads. At the school hundreds of kids formed a human chain and searched the countryside. Four different psychics were consulted and still no leads.

It’s the strangest missing persons case of former Osage County D.A. Bill Hall’s long career and it remains unsolved today or does it?  A purse, her pom-pom and a half-eaten donut was all the cops had to go on but now 43 years later they may have identified a suspect in Cindy’s disappearance.

I’ll call it “The Case of the Missing Cheerleader.” Stay with me, there’s more to come about this true story.

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