She Was Kidnapped Outside Of Her House In 1991 After Getting A Strange Call From A Woman Claiming To Be A Nurse
In 1991, Earl Lawson and his wife, Carolyn “Carrie” Lawson, had only been married for 18 months. Earl, 26, had grown up in Jasper, Alabama, graduating from law school at The University of Alabama and joining a local law firm thereafter. Carrie, who was the daughter of a Tennessee millionaire, also attended The University of Alabama’s law school.
But despite graduating and taking her bar exam, 25-year-old Carrie never got to find out she’d passed. Instead, during the early morning hours of September 11, 1991, she was abducted outside of her home in Walker County.
Carrie and Earl received a phone call at 3:00 a.m. from a woman claiming to be a nurse at Walker Regional Medical Center.
The woman stated Earl’s father, who’d already suffered from medical issues, was fatally ill, and the pair needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible.
The young couple got dressed and rushed out of their house, entering their Ford Explorer, which had been parked in the driveway. At that point, a gunman wearing a mask appeared and demanded Carrie and Earl to exit the car.
“The guy just comes up with a gun. I’m not even sure I had cranked the vehicle. He had a mask on and told us to get out,” Earl recalled.
“In my mind, I’m thinking of simple robbery, and I couldn’t believe we fell for this.”
Earl was then forced to the ground, and Carrie was told to use duct tape to bind her husband. Then, as Earl was lying there on his stomach, the gunman drove away with Carrie. She was never seen again.
It has now been over 33 years since Carrie vanished, and her case has puzzled both law enforcement and community members for decades.
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“This case affected our community. Thousands of people sympathized, empathized with their family,” stated District Attorney Bill Adair.
“It was an event that brought tragedy to our community and brought a lot of attention, and it’s something that still reverberates today. The cases today are looked at through the lens of Carrie’s case. It’s a case that people still talk about.”
Following Carrie’s abduction, Earl was able to free himself from the duct tape. However, he didn’t have the keys to his house, as they’d been in his vehicle.
Earl resorted to kicking in his back door to get inside his residence and phone the police. Afterward, he had to contact Carrie’s parents, David and Harriett Smith, to tell them their daughter had been taken.
Carrie’s parents, who lived in Tennessee, traveled to Jasper and stayed in a motel; meanwhile, the FBI set up a command post inside Earl and Carrie’s home.
Soon after, Carrie’s kidnapper reached out to Earl and demanded $300,000 of ransom funds in exchange for the safe return of Carrie.
At first, Earl felt certain that, as long as the money was delivered, Carrie would come back home. Unfortunately, the kidnapper had other plans in mind.
“He would run you around every night. You’d go to location A, then he’d call you on that payphone and tell you to go to location B, which might be 20 miles down the road,” Earl detailed.
It wasn’t until September 13 that Earl finally delivered the $300,000 to a payphone located on the outskirts of Jasper. And Carrie wasn’t released, as Earl had hoped.
“I remember sitting at my kitchen table. My family and Carrie’s family. And we never heard anything,” he said.
The FBI had audiotapes of the kidnapper’s ransom demands, however, and released them. This helped agents identify the kidnapper as 49-year-old Jerry Bland.
The investigation looked into Jerry’s associates, and Karen Lancaster McPherson, his cousin, was soon honed in on.
Upon searching Karen’s residence, investigators found thousands of dollars, and she ultimately told the police that Jerry had kidnapped Carrie.
As for her role in the abduction, Karen was the so-called “nurse” who’d made the phone call. She also brought Jerry to the Lawson home to carry out the kidnapping and watched over Carrie afterward.
Karen reportedly told investigators that the last time she’d seen Carrie was within 48 hours of the kidnapping, and she was still alive.
Authorities searched Jerry’s home on September 28, and there, they discovered most of the $300,000. However, he wasn’t immediately arrested. Rather, the FBI staked out Jerry’s residence that weekend.
“They had searched his house and questioned him and left him in the house with a bunch of guns. We were all in the kitchen discussing what needed to be done with Jerry Bland. They were saying something about exculpatory evidence that needed to be cleared up,” remembered Carrie’s sister, Margaret Smith Kubiszyn.
“I can remember one of the feds saying, ‘Look, he had marijuana in the house. Let’s just arrest him on a drug charge, get him in jail.’ I remember someone saying he could kill himself.”
That’s exactly what happened on Tuesday morning. At about 4:30 a.m., a single gunshot was heard inside Jerry’s home by agents. He had taken his own life.
Jerry also left behind a suicide note, which hasn’t been released to the public. According to investigators, it only talked about the ransom money being in the attic and mentioned nothing about Carrie.
Karen McPherson was arrested on first-degree kidnapping charges, pleaded guilty, and is currently serving a life sentence behind bars. In 2022, she was denied parole, and she will reportedly be up for parole consideration again in 2027.
Following Karen’s arrest, she signed an agreement with the Smith and Lawson families. In exchange for a meeting with Carrie’s father and sharing everything she knew about his daughter’s abduction, Carrie’s family wouldn’t oppose her parole after 10 years served. But Karen didn’t hold up her end of the bargain.
“He sat down in that jail for four or five hours, and he took the tapes that day to have them analyzed. The voice analyst said she was lying,” Margaret explained.
“And her lawyers called that night and said she was taking her story back. She didn’t say anything that was true.”
Two years after she vanished, Carrie was legally declared dead. In the years since, her family has worked tirelessly to find her.
They hired a private investigator and pleaded with FBI agents to reopen her case in 2000, never giving up the fight for answers.
As Carrie’s case gained nationwide attention, community members also became invested in finding her. For months after she vanished, people joined search parties and held prayer vigils.
Yet, to this day, Carrie’s body has never been found. Her sister, Margaret, isn’t sure if they will ever receive that closure.
“There is always hope that someone will come and say, ‘I know what happened because I was there,’ but we have had people do that before and be just flat out lying about it,” she shared.
In 2019, Margaret admitted that, while she yearns to know what truly happened to Carrie, she has tried to find solace in other areas of her life.
“You can’t let it be your whole life. You can’t ignore what’s going on in your life. You can’t ignore the rest of your family,” she said.
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