Leah Rachelle Peebles – The Charley Project
Details of Disappearance
Peebles moved from Fort Worth, Texas to Albuquerque, New Mexico on May 5, 2006. She was temporarily residing with friends in the vicinity of the 2100 block of Erbbe Street northeast when she disappeared on May 22, 2006.
She left the home to go on a date with a man she'd met at the Flying Star Cafe, where she planned to start working the following week. She never returned and has never been heard from again. Her vehicle was later found abandoned.
Peebles grew up in a middle-class, Christian home in Fort Worth. Her parents stated she was molested by a distant relative as a toddler and raped by an acquaintance she was fourteen.
She was initially a good student at Carter-Riverside High School and active as a cheerleader, in drama and on the yearbook staff, but by her sophomore year she had begun abusing drugs and alcohol and dropped out of her extracurricular activities.
When Peebles was eighteen, her parents put her in the Fort Worth Teen Challenge, a Christian residential drug and alcohol treatment facility for women. She stayed in the program for 21 months, graduated from cosmetology school and took a job at a beauty salon, but soon relapsed and began using a variety of illegal drugs.
She was convicted of drug offenses twice and served two short jail sentences. Peebles was fired from her job at the salon after the second arrest, as her drug use had made her an unreliable employee. Her parents wanted her to return to rehab, but she decided to move to Albuquerque instead. She hoped to get a new start in life, make new and better friends, and stop her drug and alcohol abuse.
After Peebles disappeared, there were sightings of her reported in the Albuquerque area. The witnesses reported Peebles was calling herself "Mia" and working as a prostitute for a pimp called AJ. who supplied her with crack cocaine. Police questioned AJ, whose real name is Donald Sears, after he was arrested in Bakersfield, California, and he said he'd never heard of Peebles.
Her father made about eleven trips to Albuquerque as well as Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada to search for her. The last credible sighting was in the fall of 2006, and her father thought she may have been sold to a pimp in another city.
Peebles's father was killed in an accident in South Dakota in 2014. In his obituary, Peebles is listed as having survived him. Her case remains unsolved.