Bristol Herald Courier from Bristol, Tennessee • 4

A4 SUNDAY JANUARY 27 2008 BRISTOL HERALD COURIER WHEN LOVEPJIIEmmilfi STOPS: Ji amilies MgW A Jh 0 J' Lilburn Cunning ham right looks at a photo of his daughter Jill Nicole Pope (left) are ijolted anew by discoveries ifrom Page Al proving forward he said it as a half approach Sheras said there is often some amount of resistance among family members who find out after years of not knowing that a loved one has died 1 some point you have to let go of things you know and stick with the things you know for he said While a person might never have all the answers to how a loved one met his or her death the thing to do Sheras stressed is to keep in mind that ultimate ly the whys have made a difference in the st wil 08 5 Wk i InfiK few? 4 h' dBSM 07' Wjy 2' jfevj jjIISsMSww 5 zWi 5 "Ww' hkrak'5 rA'ittus vxf' i i L' 1 jffSg 7 Xhslba wl Sd ANDRE TEAGUEIBRISTOL HERALD COURIER Text by Daniel Gilbert dgilbertbristolnewscom (276) 645 2558 our stories of desperation: Sister of missing man struggles to make sense of disappearance Cody Scott Matney Gone April 28 2002 just vanish into thin tMore than five years after er younger brother Cody rent missing Tracie arm hr falls back on this basic (premise the only thing of yvhich she feels certain: A 5 foot 9 170 pound weight lifter is no butterfly in the wind Innumerable times parsed through the facts of the night he went missing There was the date with a girl in Bristol on a Saturday night the bouncer at a bar who remembered the then 24 year the worker who placed him at a different bar later bn making calls on a pay phone There were the eight phone calls Matney made with a calling card most of them lost to investigators and the grainy footage of him in his truck talking to an unidentified person an another truck in the predawn hours of April 28 2002 CONTRIBUTED PHOTO a' i i'ffl raygks' llkl Cody Scott Matney poses with his nephew Laban armer in a family photo right back or so it seemed hope Whenever there is to his sister a discovery of human re But Matney sports fan mains in our inally there was Mat 1991 ord Ranger parked outside the now de funct bar facing US Highway 11W ade out When husband Brad drove by the bar several days later he rec ognized the truck It was ocked the windows had seen rolled up and Mat checkbook sat on the dash he was coming 7 pray that the person or peoplehat know what happened to him or that did this to himvill get saved andhat then they will have to confess itecause they able to keep it in ny Tracie armer sister of Cody Matney missing since April 2002 doting uncle proud resi dent of Grundy did not come back to his truck the next day or any since He has not contacted his fam ily His checking account has not been touched All leads long exhaust ed thoughts and emotions have not so much evolved as remained in constant wrenching 7 flux At heart she believes bad happened to him He do this to our family knowing how much we cared about She grapples with the realization that if found dead there will be no body only remains But the next moment armer offers up a sunny alterna tive smiling through tears: it be something if he just walked up to the door? He would laugh because been so con This is roughly the emotional terrain she inhabits pinging torturous ly between morbidity and life stops armer said automatically think go mg to be him this time little different for Tony Matney In his Grundy home the 63 year old talks about time as if it flowed around him It feels like yesterday he said by phone that he watched the floodwaters rise up from the swollen creek in Buchanan Coun catastrophic floods in 2002 It was around this time that Cody his only son went missing tell any difference today sitting here than I did six years he said Before he disappeared Cody Matney had talked about wanting to see Cali fornia his father said But he admits indications are against Like his daughter Tony Matney also believes happened toCody something And he too is unable to shut out hopeful happy visions of his son pulling into the See STRUGGLES Page A5 'u Charles Sanders holds a letter his sister Kay sent to their mother in May of 1964 after she left home She was 16 years old when the letter was written DAVID CRIGGERBRISTOL HERALD COURIER 1 I Man's life forever linked to sister he only vaguely knew Linda Kay Sanders Gone March 1964 Charles last tangible link to his sister sits in a brown paper bag duct taped shut and reads Postmarked in Kingsport on May 16 1964 the letter is addressed to their now deceased mother There is no return address Kay Sand ers wrote am writing to let you know that I am It was two months after her brother says she left home things at home change and the family thinks we can get along together I will come home When you think that you can simmer down quit blaming us for all the mistakes you made I can forgive you we can be a real mother Charles Sanders 61 has a vague memory of the day he came home fromthe school he attended with Kay and a third sibling Sharron and was told that Kay had left home He has never seen or heard from her thought our mother was too hard on Charles said recalling his mother as a disciplinarian of the the rod spoil the stripe' Ina Sanders who passed away in 2005 raised her three children alone on a Illis SSx ELfe Tiir CONTRIBUTED PHOTOS Linda Kay Sanders is shown at left in a family photo as she looked before she disappeared in 1964 At right is a photo that was manipulated with computer software to speculate as to what she might look like today waitress salary spurning public assistance even when she qualified for it her son said Describing his mother and sister as he recalls no single monumental fight more than the And though Sanders and his sister were partic ularly the mystery behind her disappearance sunk into him like a hook holding fast even during his periods of wanderlust when he crisscrossed the country on a motorcycle always1 in my he said just gnaws at But it was his wife Ka tie who eventually threw herself into an active search for Kay whom she has never met the time I met him talked Katie Sanders said in the Kingsport home where she and Charles live said that one day if I had the time try to find That time came in 1992 when degenerative disc disease prevented her from working her job as a payroll specialist for a data processing firm The couple sent off to receiving 10 pages of names and locations They contacted television shows like Most and but received only form letters in response A few people have helped them along the way a now deceased detective in Knoxville opened a case on See SISTER Page A5 Cody Scott Matney Gone April 28 2002 Linda Kay Sanders Gone March 1964.