Middle Georgia Cold Cases: The Phone Call

TENNILLE, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – Washington County sheriff’s investigators are looking for a woman who went missing almost 12 years ago. It’s a Middle Georgia Cold Case.

Sonya Tukes was 22 years old at the time she disappeared from her sister’s home in Tennille.

She was driven they said, a mother of one and a baby sister.

“She was a hard worker. She loved her child,” Sonya’s sister, Barbara, said.

Their mother, Susan Rogers, says not knowing where Sonya is haunts her.

“It ain’t like no holiday without her, not to me it ain’t,” she said.

Both Susan and Barbara saw Sonya the day she vanished.

“I haven’t seen her since 6 o’clock that day,” Susan said.

“She was about to go to bed. She said she got to get ready for work and I was like ok then. She went in one room and I went in my room,” Barbara mentioned.

Sonya was living with Barbara temporarily in a trailer in the heart of town. The next day, she was gone.

“When they woke up that morning, she was gone and there’s no answers, there’s no clues,” Capt. Trey Burgamy, an investigator with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, said.

No note, no message of where she could be, nothing.

“There was no signs of forced entry to the residence. The back door was just open when they woke up the next morning,” Burgamy pointed out.

Sonya had a boyfriend. According to the sheriff’s office, they recently had a fight.

“I felt like she had built the strength up to get ready to leave him and then that happened,” Barbara said.

Investigators claim the boyfriend got a lawyer before they could talk to him and the little information they received showed him denying knowing anything about what happened.

“We searched. We did everything we possibly could. We took every lead, phone call, took everything we could at that time and nothing ever surfaced,” Burgamy said.

He added deputies at the time were left grasping at straws. They checked everything — they even got a hold of phone records. That’s when they got their first clue.

Someone called Barbara’s house late that night. Sonya picked up the phone.

Investigators traced the call to a pay phone on the outside of town at a service station.

“My guess is when she got that phone call, she went out to talk, she was going to come back in, but never did come back in the house,” Barbara said.

Burgamy says it’s impossible to know who was on the other end of that pay phone or the conversation, but he feels like that could be the key to solving the cold case.

“When it’s crimes against a person like this, like a missing person, you take it personal because what if this was your family member,” Burgamy said.

Not a day goes by where Sonya doesn’t cross her mother’s mind.

“I’m the type of person now that because of all of this, I like to be by myself. I can’t take it. I’m going through so much. I can’t take this. I can’t,” Susan cried.

Pain and suffering surrounded by confusion and the unknown.

“If anything, I just want to know, I would forgive that person. God wouldn’t want me to have hate, you know what I’m saying, I just want to know,” Barbara said.

A desperate plea for answers into what happened to the woman who went to bed and never made it to work.

41NBC reached to Sonya’s then boyfriend for this story and did not hear back. The GBI is helping in this investigation.

If you know what happened to Sonya Tukes, call the Washington County Sheriff’s Office at (478) 552-4795.