Alissa Turney vanished from her Phoenix, Arizona, home on May 17, 2001, the final day of her junior year of high school.
Michael Turney, her stepfather, claimed to have picked Alissa up early from school that day before leaving to run some errands. Then, once he returned home, he supposedly found a note from 17-year-old Alissa saying she was going to California.
Police initially believed Michael, who stated that his stepdaughter was a rebellious teenager. Yet she left all of her belongings behind, including her car, and was never seen or heard from again.
It took years for investigators to turn their attention to Michael after Alissa’s loved ones voiced shocking accusations against him.
Alissa’s Early Life
Three years after Alissa was born, her mother, Barbara Strahm, met and quickly married Michael Turney, who was a former deputy for the Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff’s Office.
From the outside, their blended family seemed picture-perfect. Barbara brought two children into their marriage, Alissa and her older brother; meanwhile, Michael had three sons from a past marriage. Then, in 1988, the couple had a daughter together, Sarah.
However, once Michael had an accident while working as an electrician, things were never the same.
“He’d been on a roof. The guy holding the ladder slipped, and the ladder shattered his knee. I can’t ever remember him being in a cast, but from that point on, he never worked again. Some of it had to do with his mental health, though. He’d always had mental health problems,” Sarah detailed.
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At only 34-years-old, Alissa’s mother, Barbara, also passed away due to lung cancer. This exacerbated tension in the Turney household, and Michael began to watch Alissa closely.
He would look through her things, spy on her at work with binoculars, monitor her phone calls, and even set up surveillance cameras around their home to keep an eye on her.
Michael thought Alissa was a rebellious teenager who needed to be corralled, particularly because she smoked and would skip school from time to time.
Others in Alissa’s life knew she wasn’t a bad kid but simply a young woman struggling with the grief of her mother’s death.
The Investigation Into Her Disappearance Is Reopened
Leading up to Alissa’s disappearance, she reportedly spoke to her older brother, James, and asked to move in with him. She apparently expressed fear of Michael and didn’t feel safe in her home.
And even with all the strange, obsessive behaviors that Michael displayed, the police didn’t consider Alissa’s disappearance as anything but a runaway case until years later.
Five years after she went missing, Thomas Albert Hymer, a self-proclaimed serial killer, confessed to murdering Alissa and 20 other people. Authorities only knew for sure that she’d killed Sandra Goodman, a 30-year-old woman who worked at a video store.
Following his confession, it became clear that Thomas didn’t actually know anything about Alissa. This led him to concede that he might’ve been mistaken about his victim’s identity.
The false confession may have been untrue, but it reinvigorated interest in Alissa’s disappearance and prompted the police to reopen their investigation. Authorities conducted interviews with Alissa’s friends and heard various allegations against Michael, her stepfather.
Sarah then received a call from investigators in 2008, who informed her that her father was a suspect in Alissa’s disappearance. Michael’s property was soon searched by authorities, who discovered numerous incriminating items.
Over 24 homemade explosives, 19 assault rifles, and two handmade silencers were found, along with a van that was filled with gasoline.
And when Michael was apprehended, he was found to have two loaded guns, multiple magazines of ammunition, and a knife on him.
Additionally, investigators found “Diary of a Madman Martyr,” a 98-page manifesto that Michael had written, describing how he intended to drive a van filled with explosives into the electrical workers’ union hall. Afterward, Michael planned to shoot any survivors and himself.
Authorities uncovered more clues in relation to Alissa’s case, too. Surveillance footage that Michael had captured of his stepdaughter was discovered, some of which showed romantic moments Alissa shared with her boyfriend. Curiously, there was no footage from the day she went missing.
Homemade contracts, which Michael forced Alissa to sign, also came to light. One contract from 1999 stated that Michael had never assaulted Alissa. According to her friends and one teacher, though, Michael had assaulted her on multiple occasions.
Despite these chilling findings, investigators lacked enough evidence to charge Michael in connection with Alissa’s disappearance. Rather, he was charged with the unlawful possession of pipe bombs and sentenced to 10 years behind bars.
Following Michael’s prison release in 2017, Sarah met with him at a Starbucks. She confronted him about Alissa’s case, and in response, he reportedly tried “to be emotionally manipulative.”
“It was pathetic. He went off on crazy tangents about his childhood. But the two most noteworthy statements were that he’d give me all the honest answers I want to hear on his deathbed and that he’d confess to everything if the state agreed to give him lethal injection within 10 days,” Sarah recalled.
“This wasn’t a slip. He intentionally made two separate statements about the conditions in which he’d confess.”
In 2020, Michael Was Charged With Second-Degree Murder, But It Didn’t Stick
Another three years passed by before Michael was arrested on charges of second-degree murder in relation to Alissa’s case.
Yet, in 2023, his trial lasted only six days before he was acquitted. The judge believed there wasn’t enough evidence proving Michael had murdered Alissa.
“There’s no justice in the system for her. It failed her 100 percent,” said Michael’s son, James, following the acquittal.
Michael, on the other hand, maintains that he never hurt Alissa and that all of his surveillance was to keep her safe.
Sarah Continues To Seek Justice
In the wake of Alissa’s unsolved disappearance, Sarah now views her childhood “in a different light.”
She thinks that Michael was “terrified” of Alissa becoming an independent young woman, which led him to control “every aspect of her life by design.”
She claims that Michael placed cameras in vents to watch Alissa and even gave her friends’ parents legal contracts before Alissa could go over their houses.
“He wanted to make sure that she was only engaging in activities that he felt appropriate for her,” Sarah explained.
Sarah further claimed that Michael would “constantly talk about how Alissa was going around the neighborhood and blabbing our secrets to everyone, telling ‘our family secrets.'”
Sarah hasn’t given up the fight for justice in Alissa’s disappearance. She’s gone on to launch a Facebook group, a podcast, an Instagram account, and a TikTok account, all of which are aimed at raising awareness about Alissa’s case and relationship with Michael.