The manager’s voice on the phone was urgent. “Sherry, I know it’s your day off, but we’re swamped. Can you come in for the evening shift? ”
It was the Fourth of July, 1982.
Sherry Eyerly had just turned eighteen, and she wanted to save as much money as she could before figuring out what to do with her life. An extra shift meant extra cash, so she said yes. She was barely five-foot-two and weighed about a hundred pounds. Her family had worried when she took the job delivering pizzas for Domino’s.
It was a cash-heavy business in those days, and she drove alone, late at night, to strangers’ homes. But Sherry was determined to earn her own money, and she’d moved in with her cousin to keep expenses low. The job was the plan. That night, at around 9:30, she left the restaurant with three pizzas.
About half an hour later, a local priest was driving on a small, quiet road on the edge of Salem when he saw a Domino’s car pulled over. The driver’s door hung open. The engine was still running. Pizza boxes lay scattered on the ground.
Another man stopped. He knew Sherry’s family and recognized the car. There was no sign of the driver anywhere. They drove to the nearest phone and called the police.
When officers arrived, the scene made no sense. The parking brake was set, the headlights were on. Whoever had been driving expected to step out for only a moment. One pizza box had been driven over.
Another was knocked open with a clear boot print on it. Near the car, officers found Sherry’s Domino’s cap and her name tag. There was no blood, but in the dirt beside the car, they found drag marks—the soles of boots pulling against the ground. Police quickly pieced together what had likely happened.
Someone had pulled up beside Sherry, claimed to be the customer, and when she got out with the pizzas, they grabbed her. The drag marks suggested she’d been pulled toward another vehicle. The address and phone number she’d been given for the delivery were useless. No homes existed at the address.
The number was a payphone at a nearby motel. The name on the order appeared to be fake. Police checked the motel. Nothing.
They tried to lift prints from the payphone. Nothing. The tire tracks and boot print were too degraded to be usable. An eighteen-year-old had vanished into thin air.
Witnesses came forward with sightings of two vehicles near the scene that night: a dark Chevrolet Monte Carlo and an older, bright green pickup truck. But no one could tie them to anything solid. A few days after Sherry vanished, Domino’s got a call. A man claimed he had her and demanded a ransom.
He gave no proof, no details. He never called again. The search went on for days. Volunteers and family combed miles of woods and riverbank.
No sign of her. Then police got a tip about the green pickup. A man named Darrell Wilson owned one that matched the description. When officers went to his home, the truck was no longer green.
It had been freshly painted brown. Wilson admitted the truck had been light green, but said the timing was just a coincidence. He claimed he’d never met Sherry. Then he changed his story and said he’d seen her once at a party.
There was another strange detail. Wilson’s fiancée worked with Sherry’s mother. And his fiancée had a nine-year-old sister who had vanished without a trace just three weeks after Sherry disappeared. Wilson agreed to be questioned but refused a polygraph.
He had an alibi: he’d been camping at a lake with friends that night. But no one could account for his whereabouts between 6:30 p. m. and 3:30 a.
m. —the exact window when Sherry vanished. The drive from the lake to Salem took less than an hour. Police searched his truck and his home.
They found nothing. While investigators were still focused on Wilson, Sherry’s parents reached out to a Texas psychic who claimed he’d had a vision of a young woman, a house, and a man. When he was brought to Wilson’s house, he said it matched his vision exactly, and he declared Wilson was Sherry’s killer. But the evidence never matched the suspicion.
Wilson was questioned again, and again, he denied everything. Just hours after being released from police custody, Darrell Wilson was found dead at his home. He had taken his own life. He left no note.
Police remained deeply suspicious of him, but they never found anything connecting him to Sherry. Eventually, the case went cold. In 2005, a new cold case unit reopened Sherry’s file. The original investigators had been convinced Wilson was guilty, but the new detectives wanted a fresh look.
As they poured through the old records, they found a series of unsolved murders from the mid-1980s that caught their attention. In February 1984, a 21-year-old woman named Rebecca Darlene vanished from the store where she worked the night shift. Her body was found a month later in a river, tied up and strangled. A few weeks later, 18-year-old Katherine Redmond disappeared after leaving a party in her car.
Her vehicle was found abandoned in the middle of a road. Her body was discovered four days later, not far from where Rebecca had been found. Police quickly focused on a 25-year-old man named William Scott Smith. Witnesses had seen a Pontiac near Katherine’s abandoned car, and Smith owned one just like it.
A tow truck driver reported that Smith had called him in the middle of the night after his Pontiac ended up in a ditch near the same area. Smith had a long record of harassment, threats, and stalking. About a month before Rebecca’s murder, he’d repeatedly called a 20-year-old woman, threatening to kill and sexually assault her. She reported it, and Smith spent 180 days in jail.
While in jail, Smith denied any involvement in the two murders. But after his parents urged him to tell the truth, he confessed to both killings, describing them in such specific detail that investigators had no doubt. He was sentenced to two life terms. The cold case detectives learned that police had once checked whether Smith could have been involved in Sherry’s disappearance.
He’d provided an alibi—he said he was working far away that night. And they’d ruled him out. But the new team dug deeper. They found a traffic record showing Smith had been stopped by a patrol officer in Silverton, a town just a short drive from Salem.
On the very night Sherry vanished. Detectives searched for physical evidence, but after twenty-four years, they found none. So they went to prison to talk to Smith. In late 2006, they interviewed him.
Smith denied killing Sherry, but investigators felt his denials were hollow. They decided to offer him a deal: if he told them the truth, he’d be transferred to a more comfortable prison. Smith accepted. He admitted he’d taken part in Sherry’s abduction and murder, but said he hadn’t acted alone.
There was a second man. Roger. According to Smith, Sherry wasn’t even their intended target. He and Roger had seen another woman who worked as a delivery driver at the same Domino’s and had planned to kidnap her for ransom.
They picked an isolated road, set up a fake address, and Roger placed the order, specifically asking if that woman could make the delivery. When they learned she had the day off, they went through with the plan anyway. When Sherry arrived, one of them waved her down, pretending to be the customer. She got out with the pizzas.
Roger grabbed her and forced her into their vehicle. They drove her toward the river. Smith never confirmed whether she had been sexually assaulted, but he admitted that at some point, they abandoned the kidnapping plan. He strangled her.
He dumped her body into the same river where Rebecca Darlene and Katherine Redmond would later be found. Smith provided details that had never been released to the public. He knew the name of the employee they’d originally asked for. He remembered the extra toppings on the pizzas.
Investigators had no doubt he was telling the truth. But there was one problem: Roger had died of cancer years before Smith confessed. He would never face justice. The investigation also revealed a deep prison of their own making.
The original detectives had become so convinced of Darrell Wilson’s guilt that they’d failed to seriously consider other suspects. Wilson, it turned out, had nothing to do with Sherry’s murder at all. Smith was given a third life sentence. But his story wasn’t over.
Six years later, a retired detective was going through Smith’s recordings when he noticed mentions of another unsolved case. That case was Terri Monroe, a 21-year-old who had vanished in 1981, a year before Sherry’s murder, after spending an evening at a bar. When investigators questioned Smith again, he confessed. He described how he’d abducted Terri near the bar, driven her to a river, killed her, and dumped her body.
Again, he provided details only the killer could know. Smith was given a fourth life sentence. Even then, detectives suspected there were more victims. They knew his tactic: on isolated roads, he’d bump a woman’s car, then pull over and try to convince her to get out to inspect the damage.
Several women reported this exact approach but had kept their doors locked and driven away. Sherry’s case is now considered solved, though she remains officially listed as a missing person. After so many years, investigators lowered the search into the river, even draining part of it, but they never found her remains. And what of Darrell Wilson?
Some part of his story still lingers in the dark. Three weeks after Sherry vanished, nine-year-old Danielle Good—the sister of his fiancée—disappeared from her home. Three weeks later, Wilson was dead by his own hand, only hours after police questioned him again. There was never any evidence that Wilson was involved in Danielle’s disappearance.
But now that we know he had nothing to do with Sherry’s murder, it’s hard not to wonder if the tragedy that followed him was tied to a different crime altogether. More than four decades later, that question remains unanswered.
