Investigator Mike Matthews sat with thick Greensboro police case files bearing the aspiring teacher’s name on the day she would have turned 28.
Williams’ case has captured a large social media following partly because of the eight-year-old unsolved mystery of what happened to the Dudley High School graduate.
Her story has been featured on Investigation Discovery’s “The Vanishing Hour,” the “Black Girl Gone” crime podcast and a special NBC News report on the missing.
But the media attention hasn’t resulted in much. Then or now.
Williams was 19 years old at the time — she had just enrolled in college — when she stepped outside her Stoneybrook Apartments home off Webster Road about 8:30 p.m. on a frigid January night in 2016. She was to meet a friend in the same complex. The 5-foot-5, 120-pound Williams was dressed in blue Levis, a black jacket, a pink shirt and a royal blue toboggan.
But eight years later, Williams is still on the list.
Matthews is one of two retired detectives who have been rehired to revisit old cases and was the lead investigator on such high-profile crimes as the Old Navy killing of an armored truck guard in 2008.
After he was hired, someone did call with information they had been holding in the six years Williams had been missing at the time.
“Sometimes it just eats at people that maybe I should have called,” Matthews explained.
The information was vetted, but police could not make a connection to Williams’ case.
Still, it could have, and Matthews is hopeful that there may be others who know something that may lead to what happened.
“No detail is too small,” he said.
Williams’ mother is working with police but has stopped giving interviews after appearing on the front pages of newspapers and on numerous television news shows. In January, on the anniversary date her daughter went missing, she asked people to “continue praying, continue searching, continue hoping” on the Help Find Tyarra Cacique Williams Facebook Page, which has 24,000 followers.
Another birthday has passed with Tyarra Williams still missing. It would've been her 28th.
greensboro.com