Lauren Colvin Thompson, disappeared Rockhill, Texas, January 10, 2019. Remains found July 2022

Revised May 2024

Lauren Colvin Thompson was last seen in Rockhill, Texas on January 10, 2019. At 2.04 pm that day, she called her mother, sounding frantic. She asked to speak to her children, but they weren't at home, so she asked her mother to tell her children and her father that she loved them and was sorry. She also stated if she got out of this, she would never use drugs again. Her mother thought she heard a man talking in the background.

After a bizarre 911 call just 20 minutes later, where she was heard running in the woods, then she vanished.

In December 2022, the authorities confirmed that remains found in July 2022 were identified as Lauren’s. No cause of death could be established, and so the question remains: what happened to Lauren Thompson?

Lauren Thompson’s 911 call

On January 10, 2019, at 2.24 pm, a 911 operator in Panola County, Texas, received a call from a female reporting she was in a wooded area and thought someone was chasing her. The 911 operator could hear background noise, and it was clear she was running.

The female caller identified herself as Lauren Colvin Thompson during a conversation that lasted 22 minutes. and she sounded “disoriented and confused” as she told the operator she had fled her vehicle.

Through 911 phone pings, officers quickly obtained a general area of where Lauren had called from and located her vehicle quickly. It was stuck in the mud on the side of a road in the Rockhill community outside Panola County, off FM 1794. They found no sign of Thompson, however.

While the 911 operator still had Lauren on the phone, officers could also get in touch with people Lauren said she was with earlier in the day. One unidentified person she was with told us they had been fishing in the area around Sabine River and forest with her, and the friend had been in the car with Lauren when he said she ran off the road. He said he then told her he was going to walk to his house to get a vehicle to get them out of the mud, but then she ran off into the woods.

The authorities believed the 911 call Lauren placed only ended because Lauren’s cell phone battery died.

The search for Lauren Colvin Thompson

The search for Lauren started on the afternoon of January 10. Off-road vehicles and canine teams scoured the area during the first night. The following day, three hours away in Fort Worth, Texas, Lauren’s mother, Torie Colvin, awoke to missed calls from the sheriff’s office, “Me and my husband called them back, and they asked if we had heard from Lauren; I said no. They said they’d gotten a 911 call the day before, and she was missing.”

Meanwhile, organized search teams were trying to find Lauren, and they located a shoe that was identified as belonging to the missing woman. It was such a heavily wooded area that no footprints were found around the shoe. Around 2,000 acres of woodland and open fields were searched with ground search crews, and drones and helicopters searched over 9000 acres.

Despite the search efforts by the SAR teams, Lauren could not be found.

Investigations into the disappearance

Investigators believed Lauren may have been run off the road instead of accidentally driving into the ditch, as they found paint transfer on her car and another vehicle. One of the three alleged witnesses is now deceased, and her case remains unsolved.

Her bank accounts have not been active, and her phone records have remained untouched since the 911 call.

Discovery of remains in 2022

On July 27, 2022, a work crew in eastern Texas found skeletal remains in a wooded area in Panola County. There was little evidence at the scene, and a cause of death could not be determined, though investigators believed the remains had been there for some time.

On Tuesday, December 13, 2022, Panola County Sheriff Cutter Clinton announced the remains were positively identified as Lauren Thompson. Since the discovery of remains, Panola County Sheriff Clinton stated Texas Rangers and forensic anthropologists from the University of North Texas’s Center for Human Identification in Fort Worth helped positively identify Thompson following “multiple dental comparisons.”

What happened to Lauren Thompson?

Lauren’s parents, Greg and Torie, believe that there are many unanswered questions regarding their daughter’s death. Her father said, “The next phase of forensics would be to determine if there was a cause of death that was other than natural or normal. And according to the authorities, they have to go through that process to confirm one way or another. The difficult part is how we are going to approach the children to disclose this information to them. And for me, and I’m sure for Torie, too, looking into the eyes of a child is very emotional.”

Sheriff Cutter Clinton said that there will now be a turn in the course of the investigation. It will change from a case of missing persons to a death investigation. He added, “Please keep Lauren's family in your prayers.”

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Sources

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/missing-in-america/texas-mother-lauren-colvin-thompson-still-missing-after-sounding-disoriented-n989731

https://medium.com/@btyt_radio/from-breaking-silence-to-breaking-bad-45bb1e17f36

https://charleyproject.org/case/lauren-elizabeth-thompson

https://www.reddit.com/r/Missing411/comments/b8ct6r/what_happened_to_lauren_colvin_thompson/
https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/body-found-east-texas-identified-missing-woman-lauren-thompson

https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/what-happened-lauren-thompson-skeletal-remains-found-texas-identified-woman-missing-2019