AR AR - Anthony 'Tony' Allen, 16, Fort Smith, 1 Oct 1978

Anthony Ross Allen
Missing since October 1978 from Fort Smith, Sebastian County, Arkansas.
Classification: Endangered Missing



Vital Statistics

• Date Of Birth: February 7, 1962
• Age at Time of Disappearance: 16 years old
• Height and Weight at Time of Disappearance: 6'1" - 6'2"; 135 lbs
• Distinguishing Characteristics: White male. Brown hair; brown eyes.
• Marks, Scars: Small mole on his cheek close to his nose. A cyst on his calf. Water on the knee.
• Dentals: Available
• Clothing: Wore Levi jeans, size 28x34 (or 35). Shoe size 10.5 or 11.
• AKA: Tony
• Other: Date of Disappearance entered as 10-01-78 in NCIC

Circumstances of Disappearance
Allen has been missing from Fort Smith, Arkansas since October of 1978. He was staying with friends nearby. His family was told that he had traveled to Hartshorne, Oklahoma and was last seen there. However, law enforcement and family members have never been able to locate anyone in Oklahoma who remembers ever seeing him. Family and law enforcement were later told that he was seen in Ft. Smith again. This was the last information ever received. He has never been seen or heard from since. He was extremely independent, but still very close to his family. It was very out of character for Allen not to call or stay in touch. Foul play is possible.

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1197dmar.html

Laura Hood continues to take the search for her missing brother to the Internet.

Anthony Ross Allen of Fort Smith, then 16, went missing on Oct. 1, 1978. He had been staying with friends in Cedarville before he went missing after traveling to Hartshorne, Okla., a small town near McAlester.

At first, Fort Smith police viewed Allen as a runaway. Years passed before the search started again in earnest a few years ago when family members began using Internet resources. Hood posted her brother's picture on the Doe Network.

Hood appeared on the Internet radio program called "Missing Pieces" on Oct. 10. For those who missed the show, it is archived at www.MissingPieces.info.

"Who knows, maybe it will generate a lead," Hood said. "Our fingers are crossed."

Hood once served as the Doe Network family/loved one liaison. She uses her experience with having a missing loved one to help others.

http://www.pressargus.com/articles/2006/10/21/news/news03.txt

(I have permission from the author and her editor to reprint the entire article.)

http://www.swtimes.com/articles/2006/10/30/news/news08.txt

Monday, October 30, 2006 8:53 AM CST
‘18 Wheel Angels’ Helps Spread Word On Missing

By Wanda Freeman

TIMES RECORD

Like thousands of others, Laura Allen Hood and William Felter watch the road, the news and the phone for their missing loved ones — and they follow every lead that comes their way.

Felter, of Dallas, hopes a phone call he recently received from Roland will lead to his mother, Faith Van Nortrick, last confirmed to be in Sallisaw two years ago.

Hood, a Fort Smith resident, hopes a program called 18 Wheel Angels will help lead to her brother, Anthony “Tony” Allen, who disappeared 28 years ago.

Sponsored by Project Jason — a nonprofit organization founded by Kelly Jolkowski of Omaha, Neb., whose elder son disappeared at age 19 in June 2001 — 18 Wheel Angels is a volunteer program in which truck drivers and other highway travelers print off posters of a featured person and distribute the posters along their routes.

“Kelly has a missing son, Jason, and I have a missing brother, Tony. ... There’s a whole Internet community of the families of the missing,” Hood said. Hood’s brother disappeared at age 16 after leaving his mother’s Fort Smith home in October 1978. He would be 44 now.

The 18 Wheel Angels program is one of several Project Jason initiatives that connect with truck drivers and the trucking industry, Jolkowski said.

“I was looking for a program that was not expensive to run, and I would hear from truck drivers who knew about Project Jason and would call saying, ‘I put out posters of your son on my route,’” she said. Those contacts inspired her to create 18 Wheel Angels. Jolkowski said she has heard of posters showing up as far away as Alaska.

Two 18 Wheel campaigns run each month, from the first through the 15th and from the 16th through the 31st. During a given campaign, a poster containing one or more likenesses of the featured person and text providing contact information is posted on the Project Jason Web site, where volunteers may download five or more copies for distribution.

Each 18 Wheel poster is also published in Through the Gears, a trucking trade magazine published out of Alabama.

A table of statistics keeps track of posters downloaded for each person featured. A recent update of the Web page showed 337 posters downloaded for Jason Jolkowski, who was featured during Campaign 18.

Anthony Allen is featured in Campaign 56, running through the end of October. Hood said an age-progression picture depicting her brother in his mid-40s is paired with a school picture taken when he was 14. While that picture provided good information about bone structure and other characteristics used to develop the age-progression picture, she said a later photo showing Allen at 16, with longer hair and facial hair, is more accurate.

Kelly Jolkowski said another trucking-industry sponsor donates space on his Web site for the Project Jason Forum, where volunteers around the country post news about missing people.

“It’s like a case history,” Jolkowski said. “And it does become a record of the case, as well.”

A forum posting about Anthony Allen, originated in March 2005, has received several updates as news articles appear, and contains that more-accurate picture Hood described.

The forum also shows a copy of an Oct. 22 article in the Sequoyah County Times about Felter’s mother, who disappeared from her Hitchcock, Texas, home in August 2004 and was arrested several days later in Sallisaw. The article shows a color picture of Van Nortrick, whose 44th birthday passed Oct. 19 without word from her.

The forum can be accessed from the ProjectJason.org Web site or directly at www.truckingboards.com/trucking/upload/project-jason/

Police are investigating a 28-year-old missing persons case involving a Fort Smith man. Anthony Ross Allen disappeared when he was 16 in October of 1978, and police are using new technology to shed new light on this cold case.

Allen's family asked police to re-open the investigation in 2004; Sgt. Adam Holland says right away, they hit a snag.

"The records storage facility was destroyed in the 1996 tornado. So a lot of the old archives or records where we'd be able to search and find tidbits of information were lost," he says.

Those records included interviews with friends of Anthony's who may have seen him or knew where he was going in 1978. So investigators are making the best with what they have: photographs, DNA, and the internet. Allen's information was entered into the National Crime Information Center, along with a sample of a family member's DNA, which would match Anthony's if he was ever found. Fort Smith Police also contacted the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to create a composite photo of what Anthony would look like, now that he's 43.

http://www.kfsm.com/Global/story.asp?S=6352987

Bumping for Anthony

this is one of the 3 or so cases of a person missing from fort smith ark or the immediate area where the circumstances mention that the person was going to visit someone in hartshorne oklahoma. this is strange to me as i have lived in both places. fort smith is a city but hartshorne is a very small town. i would like to find out who anthony allen was going to see down there.

Status Missing
First name Anthony
Middle name Ross
Last name Allen
Nickname/Alias
NCMEC number 1006737
Date last seen October 01, 1978 16:38
Date entered 12/12/2008
Age last seen 16 to 16 years old
Age now 52 years old
Race White
Ethnicity
Sex Male
Height (inches) 73.0
Weight (pounds) 135.0

https://www.findthemissing.org/en/cases/1/
Not a typo. NamUs Missing Person Case Number 1.

http://swtimes.com/news/special-reports/series-family-looking-answers-after-fort-smith-teenager-s-disappearance

Tony, a Southside High School student, was a likable but restless and energetic teenager. He often would leave his home for spells at a time, although he was still very close with his family. Around the time he was last seen, he was living with a friend’s family in Cedarville, Marilyn Allen said. “He wasn’t just a terribly rebellious boy; it wasn’t like that at all,” she said. “It was just like he didn’t want to be tied down.”

In October 1978, a friend had dropped Tony at the mall. That was the last time anyone has reported ever seeing him, his mother said. Sometime after that, Tony’s friends told police they thought he had gone to a restaurant/motel their aunt and uncle owned in Hartshorne, Okla., in Pittsburg County.

One police report states that officers went to a residence in Hartshorne, and that two people believed to be Tony Allen and a friend had escaped through the window on foot, apparently spooked that the police were looking for them, said detective Jeff Taylor with the Fort Smith Police Department...

Years later, Marilyn Allen learned that someone claiming to be Tony had gotten in touch with his older sister within months of his being reported missing. He told her he was in Hartshorne, but when she went to go find her brother, he wasn’t there. She never heard from him again.

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Charley Project: http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/a/allen_anthony.html

Current NAMUS link: The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs)

(Still Case Number 1)

Arkansas MP site: Details

Missing-person case remains unsolved after 42 years


Age Progression

It has been 42 years since Anthony Ross Allen was last seen. To this day the case remains unsolved.

At first Allen was classified as a runaway, but the Fort Smith Police Department website lists the case as possible foul play. An earlier report states that FSPD Detective Jeff Taylor has looked over the case and doesn't find anything that could back that up.

In 1996, a tornado struck the police station in Fort Smith and destroyed the records leaving many details gone from the case. In 2004, at the request of Allen's family, the case was reopened.

Tony's mother, Marilyn Allen, claimed that her daughter received a phone call from someone claiming to be Tony. He also told her that he was in Hartshorne. She then attempted to go to Hartshorne to find him, but the search turned unsuccessful.

Today, not much else is known about where Allen may be. In 2018, the Center for Missing and Exploited Children released an age progressed photo.

Bump

Found an article on the Doe Network from 2008 mentioning this fella, such a shame that he still hasn't been identified. Fingers crossed for Tony and Laura, I hope she gets reassuring news at some point.

Amateur sleuths name anonymous dead - March 30, 2008​

Laura Allen Hood of Fort Smith, Ark., was searching for her brother.

For years, Hood refused to speak about Tony, who vanished without a trace in 1978 while visiting friends in Oklahoma. He was 16, two years older than his sister. Her parents tried to shelter the family from the pain, tried to make life for his siblings as normal as possible. But, she says, "it never leaves your mind."

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