Fourteen years ago a Bartlett woman disappeared. Dr. Cherryl Pearson was a well-liked pediatrician. She went to a Grizzlies game, hung out with some girlfriends, and then vanished with hardly a trace. Years later, she was declared dead, but, her body was never found.
“Sometimes I think she’s okay, then again, I think she’s not. So, I’m sure if she would, if she could, she would have contacted us. So, we don’t know what to think.”
That’s what Hazel Pearson told us years ago about her missing daughter.
Doctor Cherryl Pearson was reported missing in January of 2002.
She was 37 years old, around 5’6″ tall, and weighed about 160 pounds.
The mystery of Dr. Pearson’s sudden disappearance may be tied to what police found in her car and to a telephone call made to her home in the early hours of the morning she disappeared from a pay phone at a Citgo gas station about a half a mile from her home.
“The call went for about two minutes, a little less than two minutes,” said Bartlett Police Captain Tina Schaber. “We have no way of knowing what happened in that phone call.”
January 4, 2002, is the last time Dr. Cherryl Pearson’s family would hear from her. Cherryl called family members from a Grizzlies basketball game that Friday night.
“Her car was found in the parking lot of an apartment complex, which was a stone’s throw across a golf course from her driveway,” said Capt. Schaber. “We talked to several neighbors in that apartment complex. Nobody remembered anybody dropping it off. Inside the car were the Grizzlies tickets from the game, a bank envelope, a set of keys, and a set of car keys in the trunk. The fact that it was located so close to her house was very alarming because all of that area, the wooded fields between, all of that was searched. And, to my knowledge, her car was not there that day.”
Also troubling to police is what they didn’t find in the car–fingerprints. It had been wiped clean, pointing to foul play.
“Yes, at that point we’re starting to believe that something might have happened to her, that she might not have left of her own accord,” Schaber said.
Several people were questioned in her disappearance, starting with family. Her mother refused to talk to us for this report, but both of her parents spoke to us 14 years ago.
“You hear about similar cases and that kind of hits you,” said Leon Pearson, Cherryl’s father.
“We’re still hoping that somebody will come through with something,” said Hazel Pearson, Cherryls’s mother.
“There were things that mom and dad knew differently, but nothing that would really amount to, that would help us out. We did talk to her sister and her sister’s husband, Charles Hildreth. And there was a boyfriend that Cherryl was speaking to,” Schaber said.
Did the boyfriend have an alibi?
“Yes, I believe he did,” said Schaber.
Then there’s the brother-in-law, a brother-in-law that had a bank robbery charge against him.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Schaber.
In part two of our series on the missing person’s case of Dr. Cherryl Pearson, we take a look at people of interest in the case. That story airs Monday night at 10:00 p.m.
