A Family Changed Forever
Alissa Marie Turney was born on April 3, 1984, in Phoenix, Arizona. Her parents, Barbara Farner and Stephen Strahm, divorced when she was only three years old.
Her mother later married Michael Turney, who already had three children of his own. Michael eventually adopted Alissa and her older brother, John. Barbara and Michael also had a daughter, Sarah.
When Alissa was nine, her mother died of cancer. From that point on, Michael became the person responsible for raising the children who were still living at home.
By the time Alissa was a teenager, she was living with Michael and her younger half-sister, Sarah. She attended Paradise Valley High School, worked at Jack in the Box, and had a boyfriend. To those around her, she was a normal teenager approaching the end of her junior year.
Then, on one ordinary day in May 2001, she disappeared.
The Last Day Anyone Saw Alissa
May 17, 2001, was supposed to be the final day of Alissa’s junior year.
According to Michael, he drove her to school that morning and later picked her up around lunchtime. The two reportedly argued after she got home, and Alissa walked away upset.
Not long afterward, Michael and Sarah discovered a note in Alissa’s bedroom. The note said she was leaving for California.
But there were details that did not fit neatly with the idea of a teenager simply running away.
Alissa had left behind her cellphone and other personal belongings. She also had plans to attend a party that night, but she never showed up.
No one saw her leave with certainty, and from that point forward, there was no confirmed sighting of her.
A week later, Michael said he received a call from a California number. He claimed the person on the other end was Alissa, who swore at him before hanging up. The call was never established as proof that Alissa was alive.
Years of Questions
In the years immediately following Alissa’s disappearance, authorities did not initially treat the case as a suspected homicide. A missing-person report was filed, but the investigation did not develop into the kind of major search that would come later.
In 2006, a convicted murderer named Thomas Albert Hymer told a prison guard that he had killed Alissa. Police investigated the claim, but eventually determined that Hymer had not had contact with her. Hymer later acknowledged that he might have confused Alissa with another person.
Then, in 2008, the case was reopened.
That same year, Michael made a dramatic claim of his own. He alleged that Alissa had been murdered by two assassins connected to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and that her body had been buried near Desert Center, California.
Investigators did not accept that explanation as established fact.
Instead, their attention increasingly turned toward Michael himself.
The Investigation Turns Toward Her Father
In December 2008, detectives told Sarah that they considered her father their primary suspect.
Around the same time, authorities searched the Turney home.
According to the source material, investigators discovered numerous weapons and improvised explosive devices, along with homemade silencers and a van containing gasoline. They also found a document describing plans for an attack against an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers building in Phoenix.
Michael was subsequently arrested and prosecuted on weapons-related charges. He was sentenced to ten years in prison and was released in August 2017.
But Alissa’s disappearance remained unresolved.
Years later, the investigation took another major turn.
The Murder Charge
In August 2020, Michael Turney was arrested again, this time in connection with Alissa’s disappearance.
A Maricopa County grand jury indicted him on a second-degree murder charge in the death of Alissa.
Michael continued to deny that he had harmed her.
The case, however, never reached a completed murder trial. In July 2023, the charges against him were dismissed.
That dismissal did not answer the central question that had haunted the family for more than two decades:
What happened to Alissa Turney?
Her body has never been found.
A Sister Who Refused to Stop Looking
Alissa’s disappearance became more widely known through the work of her younger half-sister, Sarah Turney.
Sarah was only 12 years old when Alissa disappeared. Years later, she began investigating the case herself and eventually created the podcast Voices for Justice.
She worked through thousands of pages of publicly released police documents and spoke openly about the investigation. In 2020, she also began discussing Alissa’s case on TikTok, bringing renewed attention to the disappearance.
The case has since been featured on television programs including 20/20 and Dateline NBC, while another podcast, Missing Alissa, explored the disappearance through interviews with people who knew Alissa and her family.
Despite the attention, the most important piece of the story is still missing.
There is no confirmed account of where Alissa went after May 17, 2001.
There is no confirmed evidence establishing what happened to her body.
And there has never been a final answer for the family.
More than two decades after a teenager walked away following the last day of her junior year, Alissa Turney remains missing.
Her disappearance began with a note saying she was leaving for California.
But whether Alissa ever made it there remains unknown.
This story is based on publicly available information and reported facts. It has been independently written and presented for informational purposes. Images, if any, belong to their respective owners.