Alissa Marie Turney, 17, of Phoenix, Arizona, was last seen at her family's home near Bell Road and 34th Street on May 17, 2001, the last day of her junior year at Paradise Valley High School. According to her stepfather, Michael Turney, he picked her up from school before lunch; the two ate out and had an argument, after which he left her alone at the house around 1:00 p.m. while he ran errands and picked up her younger sister. He said he returned around 5:00 p.m. and found her gone, along with a note in her bedroom stating she was running away to California. Alissa left behind her cell phone, house keys, makeup, jewelry, and roughly $1,800 untouched in a bank account, though she is believed to have taken a black backpack. Michael Turney filed a missing-person report with the Phoenix Police Department that day. On May 24, 2001, he told police he received a call from a California phone number in which Alissa swore at him and hung up; she has not been heard from since.
Phoenix Police initially treated the case as a runaway. In 2006, a man imprisoned for an unrelated murder told a prison guard he had killed Alissa; investigators found no documented contact between him and Alissa and did not substantiate the claim. The Missing Persons Unit reopened the case in 2008 and began investigating it as a suspected homicide; a December 2008 search of the Turney home, conducted in connection with the reopened case, recovered improvised explosive devices, firearms, homemade silencers, and a manifesto describing a planned attack on a labor union building, a discovery unrelated on its face to Alissa's disappearance. Following years of public advocacy by Alissa's sister, Sarah Turney, including a podcast and social-media campaign, Phoenix Police reclassified the case as a homicide in 2019. In August 2020, a Maricopa County grand jury indicted Michael Turney on one count of second-degree murder in Alissa's presumed death, and he was arrested in Mesa, Arizona. At trial in July 2023, after the prosecution rested its case, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge granted the defense's motion for a judgment of acquittal under Arizona Rule of Criminal Procedure 20, finding the evidence insufficient to sustain a conviction; Turney was released from custody on July 18, 2023, and cannot be retried on the same charge under double-jeopardy protections. Alissa Turney remains missing and her case remains open.
