It was the first “big” story of my local television career. A 23-year-old South Carolina woman vanished after attending a concert with friends. At the time, I was working as a reporter in Columbia.
How could it have happened? No one really knew.
What everyone does know is that Dail Dinwiddie, a college student, went to a U2 concert at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia on the evening of September 23, 1992. She was accompanied by a male friend with the understanding that he would not be able to give her a ride back home; this shouldn’t have been a problem, because Dinwiddie met up with friends at the concert and afterwards joined them at a now-defunct bar in the Five Points area of Columbia, a popular spot for college students.
Some time around 1:30am on September 24th, she went to the ladies’ room and by the time she emerged, she realized that her friends had already left without her. A bouncer at the bar remembers seeing her rushing across a parking lot to try to find them. She apparently turned and walked down a sidewalk.
She has not been seen since.
Back in 1992, the internet really hadn’t become a household word, yet. Cable TV existed, but with not as many channels, so the attention spans of the average person was still longer than about six seconds.
The story was what those of us in the news business called a “talker,” one that people were talking about no matter whether we had anything new to report on it.
The memory of Shari Smith, a 17-year-old who’d been abducted and murdered by Larry Gene Bell in Lexington seven years earlier still resonated with people. That case garnered national attention and reminded parents everywhere how quickly and easily their worst fears could be realized.
But in the Dinwiddie case, at least at first, there was a lot to report: Dinwiddie’s parents made numerous pleas to the public for any information, people in the community circulated flyers and volunteers searched for clues by trying to retrace steps the woman might have taken.
But even so, after a certain amount of time, even the most compelling of stories begins to fade and instead be marked by notations on a calender:
“It has been one month since Dail Dinwiddie disappeared…”
Two months. Three. Six. A year. Two years. Five.
It has now been 20 years since Dail Dinwiddie walked down a sidewalk and fell off the face of the earth.
As hard as it is for me to imagine what it must be like to lose a child to death, to have that child just vanish without ever knowing what really happened seems unimaginable.
Even though the media only reports on the disappearance on anniversaries now, mostly because the general public only genuinely thinks about it on anniversaries, those who were close to Dail think about her every day.
I hope and pray that one day they’ll get the answers they’ve been waiting for over the past two decades, and that the news will be much better than they’ve likely come to expect over the passage of time.
While it is certainly a tragic story, I'd be remiss if I didn't pose to you the musical question, "Whatever Happened to Christmas?"
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See what I did there? I got a JR Berry AND a Brian Mims reference in the same post. Brilliant!
@Chip_51 I definitely saw it. And yes, I had that terrible song stuck in my head as I wrote this!
Patrick is a television producer, writer, Mac lover, and Christian, though not necessarily in that order. He has a natural dislike of double standards and poor grammar.
