A powerful hurricane was sweeping across Mississippi in the summer of 1992 when 13-year-old Leigh Occhi was left home alone for the first time.
Within an hour, she had vanished.
When her mother returned, she found a horrifying scene: fresh blood smeared across the walls and carpet, with a pool of it outside Leigh’s bedroom.
The house was otherwise silent. Leigh’s voice was nowhere to be heard.
Her nightgown was later discovered in a laundry basket, soaked with blood. A bloodstained bra was found beside it.
In the bathroom, investigators found evidence that someone had tried to clean up the scene.
What followed was a baffling chain of clues: Leigh’s glasses appearing inside an envelope, a skull mistakenly identified as hers and a church leader convicted of [sexual assault] only months after her disappearance.
Leigh’s mother, Vickie Felton, also faced intense scrutiny. She failed three polygraph examinations as investigators tried to determine what had happened to the blonde-haired teenager. Felton has never been charged and has never been named a suspect.
It was the beginning of a mystery that would haunt Tupelo for decades. The case reached a legal turning point in 2024, when Felton filed an amended petition asking for Leigh to be declared dead.
‘I just decided that I wanted to do it,’ Felton told the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal at the time. ‘I felt it was time to do it.’
The investigation was thrust back into the spotlight last year after FBI agents descended on the area surrounding the former Occhi family home. They appeared to search near a drainage ditch with shovels and K-9 units.
Yet the reason for the renewed search soon became another mystery. Authorities have not said what investigators were seeking or whether anything was found.
Now, 34 years after Leigh disappeared, the questions raised on that stormy morning remain unanswered.
Is Leigh alive or dead? Will anyone ever be charged? And will her remains ever be recovered?
The blood has dried. The leads have faded. But one question still hangs over the case:
Pictured: Leigh Occhi
What happened to the girl who disappeared during a hurricane?
Torrential rain battered Mississippi on the morning of August 27, 1992, as Hurricane Andrew moved through the Southeast, leaving 23 people dead.
Inside the Occhi home, the morning initially seemed ordinary.
Leigh and her mother had breakfast together and discussed plans to attend an open house at Leigh’s school before stopping at Taco Bell for dinner that evening.
The school year had not yet started when Felton left for work shortly before 8 a.m. She left Leigh alone at home, something that would happen only once.
As the Category 5 storm approached Tupelo, the town where Elvis Presley was born, and a hurricane warning remained in effect along the Gulf Coast, Felton became worried. Less than an hour after arriving at work, she called home.
She used a signal shared by mother and daughter: two rings followed by a hang-up, telling Leigh it was safe to answer. This time, however, nobody picked up.
Felton spent only a few minutes at the office before turning around and driving the 1.5 miles back to 105 Honey Locust Drive.
When she arrived, the garage door was open and its automatic light was still burning, even though it was wired to switch off after five minutes.
‘That was very strange because the light doesn’t turn on unless someone triggers the door,’ Felton told CNN at the time.
Whatever had happened appeared to have occurred shortly before Felton returned.
‘I came in the house and there was blood on the side of the wall,’ Felton told the outlet.
‘I started calling for Leigh and going through all the rooms. Then I went into her bedroom,’ she said. ‘Her favorite blanket was crumpled up on the floor and I was very scared.’
A small pool of blood was found in the hallway outside Leigh’s bedroom, with additional blood spattered across the adjacent wall. Felton searched the bedrooms, backyard, pool and shed before calling 911.
Tupelo police arrived quickly. Captain Bart Aguirre, one of the first investigators assigned to the case, went directly to Leigh’s bedroom.
There, police found a laundry basket containing the nightgown Leigh had been wearing when Felton left for work. It was covered in blood.
‘There was some indication Leigh had sustained some kind of injury,’ Aguirre said at the time, according to The Associated Press. ‘You couldn’t tell how bad the injury was. You couldn’t tell where the injury was.’
Blood and hair were found on a door frame, suggesting Leigh may have struck her head against it, possibly more than once. Investigators said the blood was still wet and that the pattern was consistent with head trauma involving someone of Leigh’s height.
‘It looked like the blood had dripped down onto her nightgown, you would think the injury had to be above the neck possibly,’ Aguirre said.
A blood trail led from the hallway through the living room toward the back door. Fresh blood was also visible on the walls, carpet and countertop in the bathroom.
‘It’s pretty obvious to us that someone tried to clean up the scene or the countertop,’ Aguirre said, referring to a ‘light pink haze’ left on the surface. But investigators could not locate the item used to wipe it clean.
‘We couldn’t find the rag or towel that had been used. We couldn’t find it anywhere,’ Aguirre said.
Authorities later said the countertop tested positive for blood, indicating that whoever cleaned it had taken the rag or towel away, potentially removing an important piece of evidence.
A new outfit, including a bra and underwear Leigh had received for her birthday the previous week, was also missing.
So were Leigh’s glasses and the sleeping bag she kept in her bedroom.
The missing clothes raised the unsettling possibility that Leigh had changed, or that someone had removed and replaced her clothing.
There was no evidence of forced entry. Her parents insisted Leigh would never have opened the door to a stranger.
Bloodhounds and search teams combed the neighborhood, beginning in the yard before moving into nearby ditches and fields. But the hurricane’s rain and wind made following a scent extremely difficult.
‘We covered a half-mile radius from the house that morning with the dogs and could not come up with anything,’ Aguirre said, according to CNN.
‘It was raining and it was storming and blowing pretty good. Had our dogs not had that bad weather to work in, they probably could have gotten on good scent.’
Jordan Morse, Leigh’s middle-school boyfriend, attended a nearby school that was already in session. According to the AP, he called her as soon as classes ended, as he did each afternoon.
‘I rushed off the bus to call her like I always did to call her soon as I got home from school and her mom picked up the phone,’ Morse told the outlet.
‘I asked where Leigh was and Vickie said she was missing. I don’t know what missing is. I’m 12 years old. What do you mean missing?’ he said. ‘She said, “We don’t know where she is. We can’t find her.”‘
The investigation
Police initially focused on the people closest to Leigh: her mother, father and stepfather.
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Her father, Donald Occhi, was serving in the military and stationed in Virginia. Her stepfather, Barney Yarborough, had separated from Felton and recently moved out of the family’s ranch-style house.
There were rumors that Yarborough had abused Leigh, including claims that she had gone to school with bruises and a black eye. Those allegations were never substantiated.
Police soon ruled Yarborough out after he ‘passed’ a polygraph examination and provided a confirmed alibi. He died in 1996. Leigh’s father, who died in his sleep in 2024, was also eliminated early as a suspect.
Occhi said he did not learn that Leigh was missing until the following day, when Felton told him their daughter had run away. She did not tell him about the blood or the disturbing condition of the house.
According to the AP, he returned to Tupelo in mid-September and spent roughly a month searching for Leigh before his military leave ended.
‘People called me and contacted me all the time. It was mostly stuff about like she was a great little girl. Or look at her mother, look at her mother,’ Occhi told the outlet. ‘I already was doing that. I don’t know if her mother was involved.’
Investigators questioned Felton repeatedly after Leigh disappeared and asked her to take a lie-detector test within hours. She failed the first examination and took two more over the following weeks.
Retired detective Ronny Thomas said the results of all three polygraphs, including two administered by the FBI, indicated signs of deception.
Felton later discussed the failed tests with CNN. ‘I couldn’t tell you why,’ she said. ‘They measure changes in your body and when your daughter has gone missing and they strap you up to things, I can’t imagine anyone’s body not reacting.’
She said she understood why detectives had pressed her for answers.
‘But, unfortunately, they wasted a lot of time with it,’ she said.
Meanwhile, searches of the surrounding woods produced nothing. DNA testing was still in its early stages in 1992, so investigators relied largely on blood typing. Every blood sample recovered from the house matched Leigh’s blood type.
Search crews continued looking across Tupelo, including an open pasture, for evidence that Leigh might still be alive.
They searched areas where an injured, frightened or disoriented child could have hidden or become lost.
‘Over the course of the first few weeks, that started to change into a concern they were looking for a body, not a live girl anymore,’ Rick Hammond, the Daily Journal crime reporter in 1992, told the AP.
Chilling clues
Eight days after Leigh vanished, a college student believed she had seen the girl in a truck at a McDonald’s drive-thru in Booneville. Investigators later determined the person was someone else.
Five days later, on the 13th day of the search, an envelope addressed to Leigh’s stepfather arrived at the family home. Both his name and the street name were misspelled.
The envelope bore six stamps, twice the postage required, and had been mailed from Booneville, about 30 miles north of Tupelo.
Inside were Leigh’s glasses.
Police hoped the package might lead them to Leigh or her abductor. But the stamps had been moistened with water rather than saliva, and forensic testing found no useful evidence on the envelope.
Aguirre eventually believed the glasses may have been planted to misdirect investigators.
There was no ransom demand, note or accompanying message.
‘It was just those glasses,’ he said, according to the AP. ‘You would think if it was an actual kidnapping, you would have expected a little more to come along with that.’
He later told CNN that the envelope was the final significant lead in the case.
A little more than a year later, a farmer found a human skull in a ditch near a soybean field in Monroe County. Two days afterward, dental records led the coroner to identify the remains as Leigh.
That identification was quickly withdrawn. The skull belonged to 27-year-old Pollyanna Sue Keith, who had disappeared from Shannon in March 1993.
Pictured: Oscar McKinley “Mike” Kearns
Theories
As one lead after another disappeared, Felton’s failed polygraphs and what some investigators described as her detached demeanor fueled speculation that she might have been involved.
In a 2017 interview with true-crime blogger Anthony Wayne, Occhi said he met Felton while she was studying Korean and interrogation techniques in California. He said she had been trained as an interrogator.
‘I had my concerns,’ he said about the way Leigh’s case was handled. ‘I don’t think they had dealt with someone with Vickie’s intelligence before.’
‘She was a trained interrogator. She knew how to act regarding questioning. She had interrogated Koreans while in the army. She failed three polygraphs. I mean, how many did she have to fail?’
Occhi described Leigh’s relationship with her mother as ‘strained at best.’ Asked whether Felton had a temper, he replied: ‘Yes, a very bad temper.’
He also questioned why an abductor would place Leigh’s bloody clothing in a hamper, calling it the behavior of a ‘neat freak.’
‘I told them Vickie was a neat freak,’ he said in the interview.
Occhi maintained that someone attacked Leigh inside the house in the early morning and that she never left Tupelo.
‘There wouldn’t be enough time for someone to come to the house when Vickie left, kill Leigh and attempt a clean up and leave before Vickie came back home at 845,’ Occhi said, explaining his theory.
‘This is all while a hurricane is going on,’ he added. ‘Who comes into a house, kills someone, then attempts to clean up the scene? Why clean it up?’
Felton has consistently denied any role in her daughter’s disappearance. On the 25th anniversary of Leigh’s disappearance, she told the Daily Journal: ‘That has been discussed over and over before, and I won’t go through it again.’
Instead, Felton has spent decades identifying another possible suspect: Oscar ‘Mike’ McKinley Kearns.
Kearns taught Sunday school and Vacation Bible School at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Tupelo, where Leigh and Felton attended. He and Leigh both loved horses, although accounts differ about the closeness of their relationship.
Less than nine months after Leigh disappeared, Kearns drove to Memphis and kidnapped a 15-year-old girl he had met through the church. He lured her by offering what appeared to be a ride to school.
He drove her into the woods, held her at knifepoint and [sexually assaulted] her. The girl later told police she had known Kearns all her life and had never seen any warning signs.
She said Kearns grabbed her by the neck and threatened her with a knife, details that some investigators considered similar to the way Leigh’s attacker may have controlled her. His blood type also matched blood recovered from Leigh’s home.
Kearns pleaded guilty to [sexual assault] and received a 24-year sentence, with 16 years suspended. He was released in October 1997 after serving less than half of his eight-year term.
Eighteen months later, he was in trouble again. In 1999, he pleaded guilty to kidnapping a Union County couple and raping the wife, a crime that kept him incarcerated until 2019.
Investigators tried repeatedly to question Kearns about Leigh, but he refused. He once agreed to take a polygraph, then withdrew after consulting his attorney.
He never provided answers about Leigh’s disappearance and died in 2021, two years after his final release.
The Daily Mail has contacted the Tupelo Police Department and the FBI for comment.
