WHO WAS ANGIE HAMBY
by Jerry Lankford, Record Editor
Originally published circa 2000
Angie Hamby was smart, pretty and fiercely independent. Her five-foot, four-inch, 105-pound frame was delicate to the touch, “almost birdlike,” said her sister, Cheryl Church. Angie had hazel-specked blue eyes. They were big and round and shined when she smiled. When they were small children, some mistook Cheryl and her sister – who was 18 months younger – as twins. To look into Cheryl’s eyes is like going back 19 years and seeing Angie once again. But, there is more than a family resemblance – there’s a melancholy joy that quickly changes to confusion, then sometimes pain. “I was thinking the other day about how it used to be with Angie,” Cheryl said. “You know, I’ve spent half my life without her now, and that seems odd.” Cheryl is 40. She is a wife and mother of two daughters. She was 22 when her sister disappeared on Oct. 29, 1982. She’s spent her share of time wondering and worrying about Angie. For years she dreaded for night to come. “I’d have bad dreams. I’d dream all night long that I was searching,” Cheryl said. “Sometimes I’d dream that I found her, but when I woke up and she wasn’t there, I’d fall to pieces.”
As the older sister, Cheryl also felt guilty because she couldn’t find Angie. “I had a gut feeling that she was dead, but I didn’t want to believe it,” she said. “If she was living or breathing, I know she would have called or something.” Cheryl has her own speculations about what happened to her sister. The day she disappeared, a woman at J.E.’s, a downtown North Wilkesboro clothing store, saw Angie walk in the door. Cheryl said the woman knew both her and Angie because they were regular customers. “She told me that Angie was standing near the front of the store, just flipping through the clothes but not looking at them,” Cheryl said. “She said she was looking out the window the whole time. It was like someone was following her and she was trying to avoid them. Whatever it was, though, she must not have been too scared.” The woman working at the store was busy and didn’t see Angie leave. That was around 10 a.m. Angie had left her home on Pads Road around 9:30 to make a deposit at NCNB (at the location which is now North Wilkesboro Town Hall). She was also going to deliver a message to Cheryl, who worked up the street at Burke’s Jewelry, and return home. She and her mother, Shirley, had both taken the day off from work to go shopping out of town. Angie had been alone. Around noon, Angie was spotted at Glenn’s Tastee Freeze in Wilkesboro. A woman working at the restaurant said she saw someone who looked like Angie sitting in the passenger side of a Silver Mazda RX7. A man was in the driver’s seat. “The woman told me that it looked like they were arguing,” Cheryl said. “I think she (Angie) knew whoever it was. I think it was either an acquaintance or someone she had some sort of relationship with and didn’t want anyone to know about.” About the time Angie was seen at Glenn’s, Shirley became worried and called police. The car was found in the restaurant parking lot around 12:30 a.m. – 15 hours after Angie left home.
About the time Angie was seen at Glenn’s, Shirley became worried and called police. The car was found in the restaurant parking lot around 12:30 a.m. – 15 hours after Angie left home. Cheryl recalled that night and seeing Angie’s dark colored pocketbook lying in the passenger side floorboard. Inside the bag, investigators found her driver’s license and other personal items. But there was no cash and the car keys were gone. “The strange thing about that is how (the purse) was placed,” Cheryl said. “The strap was neatly folded around it. That’s how she would have laid it there if she had been in her right frame of mind,” Cheryl added. “If it had been a bad situation, I think she thought if she played her cards right, she’d be able to get out of it somehow.” A forceful abduction would be hard to pull off at the restaurant in the middle of the day, Cheryl said. “That place is always busy. All she would have to have done was scream.” There was another possible sighting of Angie the day she disappeared. A preacher, who was a friend of the family, said he saw a woman that looked like her in a vehicle headed north on N.C. 16 near the intersection of U.S. 421 West. Cheryl said she doesn’t remember what kind of vehicle the man saw, or if the woman he saw was alone. “I have a picture in my mind of how it was, but it’s been so long, I can’t remember if that was what he said or not.” From that information, Cheryl, her father, Jerry, and others headed up the road into Ashe County and into Virginia. They put up posters and asked if anyone had seen Angie. A woman at a convenience store in the Glendale Springs area told Cheryl and her father she might have seen Angie with two men on the day she disappeared. “She told us that the girl that was with them (the men) didn’t look like she belonged with them,” Cheryl said. “She said she acted timid.” The clerk went on to say that the men bought some wine and that the three left together. She didn’t see which direction they went or what kind of vehicle they were in. “It just makes me sick that I was there two days late,” Cheryl said. Many bad times and disappointments were to follow. Cheryl said she recalls hearing her mother cry herself to sleep. “That was tough to go through,” she said. The first couple of days after Angie’s disappearance, Cheryl couldn’t eat and lay awake at night. That changed on the third day – Sunday, Oct. 31. “That day, I had this calm feeling come over me,” Cheryl said. “That was the weirdest feeling. I cried all day long and after that I just felt peaceful. I feel like that was probably when Angie died.”
Angie’s 39th birthday was on Jan. 21. Her favorite color was sky blue. She loved her pet dachshund, Barney, and driving her silver sports car. That car remains parked in her parents’ driveway. “I can’t bare to part with it,” Shirley said. Angie graduated from West Wilkes High School in 1980. During her high school years, her neatly ordered bedroom was decorated with cheerleading pompoms and Blackhawk pennants. At the time of her disappearance, the 20-year-old was enrolled at Wilkes Community College and planned to transfer to Appalachian State University in Boone. She worked second shift at the then Northwestern Bank Data Processing Center on Oakwoods Road. An accomplished pianist and singer, she especially liked to play “You are so Beautiful” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” The sisters would often perform at weddings – Angie on piano, Cheryl singing. Shirley and Jerry were proud of Angie and the things she had accomplished in the few years she was with them. “Angie had just gotten old enough to where she was a good friend, and then we lost her,” Shirley said. “But, there’s no good time to lose a child.” The Hambys have always been active in their church, Pleasant Grove Baptist. “Church was a huge part of our lives,” Cheryl said. “Mom and Daddy took us there every time the door was open.” Church members “offered a lot of good support” after Angie vanished, Shirley said. Phil Chapman, who remains the family’s pastor, was a regular at the home. Marie Nichols, who directed the girls in the church choir, was another source of comfort then. “She’d come by with food and just sit there and listen to us cry,” Cheryl said. Years ago, holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter were hard on the torn family. That pain has ebbed. Saturday, Cheryl sat in the living room of her house next door to her parents on Pads Road. It’s the same house that belonged to her grandmother, Pearl Parsons, who babysat the girls while they were children. The aroma of spiced bread drifted from the kitchen as Cheryl looked at pictures. She showed a photo of her and Angie as toddlers on the front step of their playhouse. “This is one my favorites,” she said.
For Cheryl, the house is full of memories – about her grandmother, her childhood and Angie. When the sisters were 8 and 10, they began piano lessons. Pointing to the next room, Cheryl smiled and said, “We called that the music room. I’d play the piano and Angie would play the pump organ. We’d pretended we were at church and line our dolls up on the couch. They were an attentive audience.” About the same time, the two would listen to old record albums. “We loved to listen to The Beatles and The Monkees,” Cheryl said. “We knew all the words.” They would sing along with the songs and dance under the caring eye of Grandmother Pearl. In the summertime, they’d climb trees, run to the woods and splash in the creek, start softball games in a nearby field or sit and play with their Barbie dolls. As they became older, the individual personalities of the girls began to show. Cheryl said she was the quieter, more studious of the two. “Angie was always the popular one,” she said. “From the time she was in the third grade there would be boys bringing her candy on Valentine’s Day. No one asked me out until I was 17. Angie always had boyfriends.” But as the girls became teenagers and wanted to date, they learned to adhere to their parents’ curfew. When Cheryl left home for Appalachian State University in Boone, the sisters remained close. “She would call me two or three times a day,” Cheryl said. Sometimes Angie would drive up the mountain to help her sister with parties or just to visit. Cheryl married Scott Church in August 1981. It seemed to bother Angie a little that her sister was married. In the fall of 1982, Angie was dating a man. She had gone as far as putting a wedding dress on layaway. After Angie was gone, Shirley paid off the balance on the full-length ivory colored gown. That dress, along with old photographs and the shiny silver car are among the things that remind the family most of Angie. But there are newer members that have never met her. Cheryl’s daughters, Adrienne, 13, and Elizabeth, 10, only know Angie from the pictures and the stories told by their mother and grandparents. “I wish Angie could have met my girls,” Cheryl said. “I know she would have spoiled them. In a way, that’s the saddest thing of all.”
