Early on the morning of September 13, 2013, Tiffany Whitton (born January 30, 1987) of Powder Springs, Georgia, United States, was observed apparently shoplifting by loss prevention officers at a Walmart in nearby Marietta. They gathered to confront her at the store's exit, but after a brief struggle, she broke free and fled. She has not been seen since.
At the time, Whitton, who had a criminal record, was jobless, addicted to heroin and crystal methamphetamine, and in a difficult relationship with her boyfriend, Ashley Caudle, who was at the Walmart with her. Caudle noted her failure to return that night, going to a nearby restaurant where she had previously worked to look for her, but did not contact the police or her family. Whitton's mother, who was used to her frequent and sometimes lengthy unexplained absences, went to the police in January 2014.
The investigation is continuing, but while police say new leads come regularly, none of them have proven useful. Due to Caudle's criminal history, false statements about events that night he made later, and his failure to inform authorities or Whitton's family when he was unable to locate her, he is considered a person of interest. Currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for drug and gun charges, he denies any involvement in Whitton's disappearance or knowledge of her whereabouts.
In 2016, journalist Tom Junod wrote an article about Whitton's disappearance in Esquire, seeing the media silence on the case as an exception to what is called missing white woman syndrome. While Whitton is white, her troubled past and criminal record made her a less attractive subject to report on, he noted; her mother complained that some television shows that devote airtime to these cases had told her they were not interested in her daughter's disappearance. Junod also reported that Whitton's half-brother Blake said he received a phone call from her in January 2014, almost four months after she was last seen.
Background Tiffany Whitton was born to Lisa Daniels in 1987; she and Whitton's father divorced soon afterwards. Daniels recalls her as "happy-go-lucky" and "rambunctious" during her early childhood in Kennesaw, Georgia, a western suburb of Atlanta, but she also saw signs of her daughter's later issues. When Whitton was two, Daniels told Esquire in 2016, "I'd find things in her toy box that didn't belong to her." Her daughter said that someone at day care had given her the toys; Daniels stated her daughter became a more accomplished liar as she got older.
As she reached adulthood, Whitton grew more rebellious. She dropped out of high school during her sophomore year, putting an end to early ambitions of becoming a veterinarian. Whitton relinquished for adoption a child from a teenage pregnancy and would later say that she was permanently affected by the experience. By 2008, she had had another child, a daughter, and started using drugs. She became addicted first to OxyContin and was caught shoplifting a pair of flip-flops from a local Walmart. Intermittently, she worked as a waitress or bartender; on Facebook she described herself as a Hooters waitress living in Kennesaw.
In March 2011, Whitton, then living in the North Georgia town of Dalton, along with several others, was arrested and charged after a home invasion. She told police that the victim had stolen $60 from her earlier that evening and she was merely trying to get it back; investigators, however, suspected it had been payment for drugs that the victim purportedly failed to deliver. Whitton was sentenced to a short prison term in late 2012. Daniels practiced tough love, raising her granddaughter and telling Whitton she could not talk to her again until she overcame her addictions and turned her life around. Whitton's grandmother, Anita Boyette, remained in touch, picking her up when she was released. Whitton entered a drug rehabilitation facility shortly afterwards.
After her release, Whitton was able to stay off drugs and get a job waiting tables at an International House of Pancakes (IHOP) restaurant in Marietta. After one relationship ended due to her infidelity, and a roommate, Sheila Fuller, kicked her out for stealing, Whitton met Ashley "Red" Caudle, who was raising a young daughter on his own. The two began using crystal methamphetamine together; Whitton, however, also became addicted to heroin. Caudle, who told Esquire he does not use heroin, was unaware she had been using it until one morning when she told him while suffering withdrawal.
Caudle and Whitton's relationship was, their friends said, characterized by frequent arguments. Police were called to one particularly loud dispute when the couple lived at a motel; no arrests were made. When they moved to a trailer park, their fights continued, and were so frequent and so loud that they were evicted.
Whitton's addictions seriously hampered her job performance. She often showed up for her shifts at the restaurant high; sometimes fresh needle marks were apparent on her arms and she was sent home. In early August, after security camera footage showed that Whitton had been stealing items, IHOP let her go. Daniels, as a result, ceased all contact with her daughter. Boyette stayed in touch, and on September 8, let Whitton, Caudle and his daughter come over to her house to do laundry. She was the only member of Whitton's family ever to meet her boyfriend, and the last one who saw Whitton before her disappearance.
Disappearance By the end of August 2013, Whitton and Caudle were living with his daughter in a house in Powder Springs. On the night of September 12, they went to the house of a friend, Stephen Weinstein, and took drugs. Shortly after midnight on September 13, they took a borrowed truck and went to the Walmart store on U.S. Route 41 in Marietta, near her former employer. They arrived at 1 a.m. and began shopping.
Loss prevention officers in the store watched on security cameras as Whitton and Caudle walked around the store with a cart for most of the next hour. Whitton, who was in nearly continuous motion even when she was not looking at merchandise, seemed to them to be high. She continually took clothes off the shelves and replaced them, following a few steps behind Caudle, who eventually picked out some clothes for his daughter and a portable speaker. At the same time, the observers came to believe that Whitton was concealing some clothes she meant to shoplift, something she did often at that Walmart.
At 2 a.m., Whitton wanted to continue the trip, but Caudle, in his account, told her he needed to be somewhere else, after which she angrily began heading for the cash registers while verbally acquiescing. After Caudle paid for his items with some bills from a large roll of cash he was carrying, she abandoned the cart and the two began to leave the store. At the exit, loss prevention officers confronted Whitton on suspicion of carrying $20 worth of stolen clothing; one grabbed the strap of her handbag to detain her. Caudle stopped at the door, facing forward; on video footage from the store's cameras she appears to call to Caudle but without a response.
Whitton let go of her handbag, kicked off the flip-flops she was wearing, and ran out the exit. Neither Caudle nor the Walmart employees pursued her. She has not been seen since.
Aftermath The video of the incident shows the loss prevention officers waiting at the door, expecting Whitton to return, as she had left her footwear and bag behind. Caudle, who had watched Whitton's apprehension passively from the door, is seen talking to her. Later, however, he told people he had gone to the truck, where he was charging his phone, gotten a weapon—a gun or a knife, in different accounts—and confronted the loss prevention officers, who let her go, whereupon she escaped out the door. He explained in 2016 that he had told those stories only to impress the people he was telling them to, Weinstein and a woman who visited him in prison.
Caudle says that shortly after Whitton fled the store, he went out into the parking lot to look for her. He did not enter the truck, since he knew it had drugs in it and was afraid of arrest if he went in. He looked around the nearby stores, and sometime later, ended up at the IHOP where Whitton had worked until a month earlier. Sheila Fuller, Whitton's former roommate, recalls encountering Caudle sitting on a bench outside the restaurant sometime after 2 a.m.
Fuller had not seen Whitton either and told Caudle to call her phone and find her. He said he had been charging her phone and showed it to Fuller. She questioned how he was looking for her by just sitting in front of IHOP; he answered that some friends were coming to pick him up shortly. An hour and a half later, Weinstein, accompanied by two women, pulled up and Caudle left with him.
Weinstein says that Caudle, whom he describes as "full of shit and a piece of shit", but nonetheless pleasant company, told him about Whitton's absence, including how he had threatened the security guards at Walmart with a gun to get them to free her, which he doubted. However, he believed Caudle when he said he did not want to go back to his truck because of the drugs in it, and that he genuinely did not know where Whitton was. After returning to Weinstein's house, the two and another friend, he says, drove around the area looking for Whitton, who Caudle believed would eventually return to Weinstein's house. "I felt that he was telling the truth, other than the lying part", Weinstein said.
The next morning Caudle drove back to the Powder Springs house where he, Whitton and his daughter lived. He spent the next several days trying to find her—calling old boyfriends of hers, hospitals and jails in the area, calls verified by phone records. Two weeks later, he told his own probation officer that he had not been able to locate Whitton since that night, which records of the meeting confirm. Caudle also cleaned the truck, which later investigators took note of, but he insists he did that regularly due to the drug-related waste, such as used and discarded paraphernalia, left in it.
Investigation Caudle, and later Whitton's mother, made some efforts to locate Whitton on their own in the months after September 13, believing she was alive and might eventually return, as she had after dropping out of sight in the past. In January 2014, after Whitton had not made any contact with Lisa Daniels or anyone else in the family, to her knowledge, she informed the police.
By Caudle and Daniels Caudle did not inform Whitton's family of her disappearance, nor did he report it to the police. Lisa Daniels, who had not heard from her daughter since breaking off communications in August, was used to Whitton's long absences and expected she would hear from her eventually. In November a demand letter from a lawyer for Walmart seeking $150 in restitution for the items Whitton had apparently stolen the night of her disappearance arrived at her grandmother's house, which Whitton used as her mailing address since she moved so frequently. It was not the first time such a letter had been sent to her, but Boyette believed something might be amiss this time.
Boyette knew too that Whitton often went on long drug binges, and that since she had been apprehended for shoplifting while still on parole from the 2011 charges, she was probably also trying to lower her profile for a time. Nevertheless, she called Caudle and learned not only of the September 13 incident that had prompted the letter but that he, too, had not seen Whitton since then.