Carlene Brown, 19, of Rawlins, Wyoming, was last seen on July 4, 1974, when she and 19-year-old friend Christine Ann "Christy" Gross attended the Little Britches Rodeo at the Rawlins fairgrounds. Both women disappeared after that day; their car was later found abandoned, though accounts differ on the location — either at the fairgrounds or in Worland, Wyoming, more than 200 miles to the north. Brown is described as a white female, 5'0" to 5'3", 100 to 120 pounds, with brown/red hair and brown eyes, and has surgical scars on the big toes of both feet. She had graduated from Rawlins High School in 1973 and lived with her father and brother at the time of her disappearance; her mother lived in Colorado. Brown was adopted, and the identity and whereabouts of her birth family are unknown to investigators.
Gross's skeletal remains were found in October 1983 in a field three miles south of Sinclair, Wyoming; she had died from two blows to the head. Brown was not found at that scene and has never been located. Two other young women disappeared in the Rawlins area within the same several weeks in 1974 — 14-year-old Deborah Rae Meyer, who has never been found, and 10-year-old Jayleen Dawn Banker, whose body was recovered in April 1975. Royal Russell Long, a carnival and fairground worker who lived in the Rawlins area in 1974, is considered a possible suspect in Brown's and Meyer's disappearances and in Gross's and Banker's deaths. Long was convicted only of the 1984 kidnapping of a 12-year-old girl in South Dakota, for which he received two life sentences; he was separately charged in the 1981 murders of two Oklahoma girls, but those charges were dismissed in 1985 for insufficient evidence. He died in prison in 1993 and was never charged or convicted in connection with Brown's disappearance. The case remains open with the Carbon County Sheriff's Department. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Carbon County Sheriff's Department at 307-328-2782. Case Number 12921.
