The reference letter was typed on the official letterhead of a church in Memphis, Tennessee, and it described a woman named Carol Sims as dependable, warm, experienced with children, and enthusiastically recommended for any child care position by the congregation’s family services coordinator.
The letterhead was genuine.
The church was a real institution.
The family services coordinator whose typed name and signature appeared at the bottom of the letter was a real employee of that real church.
But Carol Sims did not exist.
The woman who had used that letter to secure a babysitting position with the Devo family in Garland County, Arkansas in the spring of 1986, and who had vanished on the night of June 4th of that year along with 8-year-old twins Michael and Cassandra Devo was not Carol Sims.
She was someone else entirely, operating under an identity she had assembled with enough care and specific knowledge to survive the screening of two thorough and cautious parents who had done everything that reasonable due diligence required.
It would take 38 years, a fingerprint database expansion that integrated 12 previously separate state criminal record systems.
A cold case detective who approached identity fraud with the same seriousness she brought to homicide and the Devo twins themselves grown adults now in their mid4s alive and raising children of their own to finally establish who Carol Sims actually was and what she had actually wanted from the Devo family on the evening of June 4th 1986 Garland County Arkansas in 1986 Six was resort and lake country centered on hot springs and the thermal baths that had drawn visitors for a century.
Oaklan Park and the horses that brought a different kind of visitor from late January through April and the summer lake economy that kept the county turning from Memorial Day through Labor Day.
Thomas Devo had worked as a maintenance supervisor for one of the Lakeside Resort properties for six years by 1986.
And his wife Diane was a radiological technician at the county hospital, a position she had held for 9 years with no intention of leaving.
They were methodical, careful people, the kind who read the fine print and paid their bills the same date every month.
They had moved to Arkansas from Missouri in 1975 and had put down the kind of roots that careful people put down.
Church membership, school board committee participation, a savings account treated as a genuine priority rather than an afterthought.
The twins, Michael and Cassandra, had turned 8 in February of 1986 and were finishing second grade at Jefferson Elementary School, where their teachers independently described them in nearly identical terms, attentive, thoughtful, and unusually kind to other children in ways that teachers notice and remember.
The Dear Rose had used a small number of babysitters for the twins over the years, all of them known to the family through church or neighborhood connections.
When their regular sitter moved to Little Rock in March of 1986, Diane Devo began asking within those same trusted circles for recommendations.
A hospital colleague mentioned a notice on the EMPA community board, a woman offering child care with a Memphis church reference letter available on request.
Diane called the number on the notice.
The woman who answered, called herself Carol Sims.
She was warm and professional, asked careful questions about the children’s routines and preferences, and mailed the church reference letter.
Within two days, Diane showed the letter to Thomas.
Thomas called the church in Memphis directly and confirmed that the family services coordinator, whose name appeared on the letter, did in fact work there.
They hired Carol Sims for three evenings over three weeks in April and May of 1986.
The children liked her.
She was reliable.
She arrived on time, maintained the household routines Diane had specified, and left the house each evening in the same condition she had found it.
On the evening of June 4th, 1986, Thomas and Diane Dero attended a hospital foundation benefit dinner that ran until 11:15.
Carol Sims had arrived at the Devo home at 6:00.
She was alone with Michael and Cassandra for just over 5 hours when Thomas and Diane returned.
The house was unlocked.
The lights in the kitchen and living room were on.
The television was playing a recorded children’s movie from VH.
Two dinner plates, washed and stacked, sat in the dish rack alongside two small juice glasses.
The children’s pajamas had been laid out on their beds in the way a conscientious sitter might arrange them, ready for bedtime at the appropriate hour.
Carol Sims was not in the house.
Michael and Cassandra Devo were not in the house.
Thomas Devo checked the property in the six minutes between entering the house and picking up the telephone.
Every room, the backyard, the detached garage, the neighbor’s side of the fence.
At 11:29, he called the Garland County Sheriff’s Department.
He did not yet know that his children were alive.
He would not know that for 16 days.
Michael and Cassandra were found on June 20th, 1986 at a budget motel in eastern Oklahoma by a housekeeper who noticed that the two children in room 11 appeared to have been alone for more than 24 hours.
The woman registered as their aunt had checked in 6 days earlier and had not been seen since the previous morning.
The children were unharmed.
They were dehydrated and had exhausted the vending machine options available to two unsupervised eight-year-olds.
They were frightened and they were alive.
Carol Sims was never found.
The name was a complete fabrication.
The reference letter, while produced on genuine church letter head with the genuine coordinator’s name, had been created without that coordinator’s knowledge, authorization, or participation in any way.
The coordinator, reached by investigators within days, confirmed she had never met or corresponded with anyone named Carol Sims.
The pay phone number on the original IMA notice led nowhere.
The physical description provided by the Devo family, white female, approximately late 20s, medium height, brown hair, matched no person in any system investigators could access in 1986.
The investigation that followed was conducted by Garland County Sheriff’s Department with FBI involvement given the interstate element once the children were recovered in Oklahoma.
The lead investigator was Garland County Detective Harlon Moss, 52 years old, who had spent 21 years in law enforcement and who approached the Devo case with the methodical intensity that a deliberate false identity crime produces in a thorough investigator.
The instinct that a person who invests this much specific planning in concealment is concealing something that has a history, a name, and a reason that precedes the event itself.
Fingerprints recovered from the Devo home were submitted to the Arkansas State Criminal Database in June 1986.
No match.
They were submitted to the FBI’s National Fingerprint System within the same month.
No match returned.
Investigators interviewed the church family services coordinator twice.
They researched every utility record, vehicle registration, and employment record they could legally access under the name Carol Sims and found nothing that connected to any real person.
The case was classified as a kidnapping without ransom demand, compounded by a deliberate and sophisticated identity fraud.
No motive was formally established.
Michael and Cassandra, debriefed separately by child welfare investigators in the days following their recovery, described Carol Sims in similar terms.
She had been kind to them throughout.
She had taken them to a McDonald’s in the first hours after leaving the Devo home and told them they were going on a trip and that their parents knew about it.
When she disappeared from the motel in eastern Oklahoma, she had left $60 in cash on the nightstand, the television remote within reach on the bedspread, and a bag of pretzels and two cans of juice on the dresser.
She had not hurt them.
She had not contacted the Devo family for ransom at any point.
She had taken two children from their home under a fabricated identity, driven them across a state line, installed them in a motel room, and disappeared from the situation entirely without explanation.
Harlon Moss worked the case for 4 years after his retirement in 1990.
He was drawn back to it repeatedly, convinced that the specific knowledge behind the manufactured reference letter, the internal organizational details of the Memphis church that only someone with some direct familiarity would know, pointed to a prior connection to that institution.
He interviewed former congregation members who had relocated to Arkansas between 1983 and 1986.
He found no match to the physical description.
He died in 2001 with the case entirely unsolved.
Thomas and Diane Devo never fully left June 1986.
Thomas retired early in 1999, citing chronic stress related health issues.
Diane continued at the hospital until 2008.
They remained married and remained in Garland County.
And remained the kind of people who checked the locks on their doors twice before bed, even after Michael and Cassandra were adults with children of their own.
The twins grew up knowing they had been taken and returned, and that the woman who had taken them had a name that did not belong to any real person, and no further explanation had ever followed from that fact.
By 1995, 9 years after the incident, the fingerprints from the Devo home had been resubmitted to the National Fingerprint Database twice as the system expanded and was modernized with additional records.
No match had returned either time.
By 2003, 17 years, the FBI case file remained formally open.
Garland County’s cold case unit reviewed the Devo file in 2008.
And again in 2015 and reached the same conclusion both times.
The path forward depended entirely on an identity match from the fingerprint evidence and no available database had yet produced one.
By 2018, 32 years had passed since the June evening when Thomas Deo had walked through his unlocked front door.
Michael and Cassandra were 40 years old.
Between them they had six children.
They had discussed the 1986 incident with each other in private and at length, far more than they had ever discussed it publicly, and what they felt about it had shifted across the decades in ways neither of them had anticipated.
In their 20s, they had felt mainly a residual and inexplicable fear of strangers.
In their 30s.
Something more like confusion, a cognitive discomfort with the fact that the central unanswered fact of their own shared childhood had no resolution available to it.
In their 40s, something that had clarified into a specific and quiet anger, the anger of people denied an explanation they are certain they deserve.
Garland County cold case detective Janet Frisbee assigned herself the Devo case in 2019 as part of a county review of pre990 open cases.
She was 41 years old, 12 years in the department, eight of them in cold cases.
She read the original file in its entirety and then read Harlon Moss’s personal notes, which the Moss family had donated to the department archives after his death in 2001.
She noticed that Moss had circled a single observation in the original file and written a question mark beside it in pencil.
The church reference letter had demonstrated a familiarity with the church’s internal organizational structure.
The correct department name, the correct coordinator title, the correct internal format that suggested the author had personal familiarity with the institution at some prior point.
Frisbee spent six weeks researching former members of the Memphis congregation who had lived in Arkansas between 1983 and 1987.
She found 11 candidates.
None matched the physical description provided by the Devo family with any confidence.
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Now, let’s get back to Garland County because Frisbee’s work was about to crack an identity hidden for nearly four decades.
In 2021, the National Fingerprint Database integrated historical criminal records from 12 states that had previously maintained separate systems.
Among the newly integrated records were fingerprints taken during a 1983 misdemeanor arrest in Shelby County, Tennessee.
A woman who had given the arresting officer a false name at the scene and whose real identity had been established during the booking process at the station.
Those fingerprints integrated into the national system as part of the 2021 expansion were automatically compared against all open case fingerprint submissions in the database.
The fingerprints from the Devo home in Garland County, Arkansas, submitted in 1986 and resubmitted twice since matched the 1983 Shelby County prints with a certainty that the automated system flagged as highly significant.
The match was routed to the FBI’s open case queue and from there to Detective Frisbee’s desk.
The woman’s real name was Sandre Marie Hulcom.
She had been born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1958.
In 1981, the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services had investigated her home following a neighbor’s report and had removed her two children, a girl age six and a boy age four, after investigators documented evidence of chronic neglect.
The children had been placed in emergency foster care and then after a formal court proceeding in permanent foster placement.
Sandra Hulkcom had lost all legal rights to both children in a court ruling issued in March of 1982.
In August of 1983, she had been arrested in Shelby County on a misdemeanor trespassing charge.
She had been found on the grounds of an elementary school during the lunch recess period, standing at the chainlink fence that enclosed the playground, watching the children through the fence, unable to provide the responding officer with a satisfactory explanation for her presence.
She had given a false name at the scene.
She was identified through fingerprinting, processed, and released.
At some point between 1983 and 1986, Sandre Marie Hulcom constructed the identity of Carol Sims.
Obtaining the church letterhead through what Moss had intuited was a prior personal connection, and producing a reference letter specific enough to satisfy two careful parents.
She had completed three uneventful babysitting evenings with the family before June 4th, 1986.
And then she had taken Michael and Cassandra Deo to a motel in eastern Oklahoma and left them there with $60 and a television remote and disappeared completely.
Sandre Marie Hulkcom had died in a Memphis nursing facility in 2009 of congestive heart failure under her own real name.
She was 51 years old.
She had never been questioned in connection with the Devo incident.
She had never in any documented record that investigators were able to locate explained to any person what she had intended to do with the Devo twins or why she had left them in a motel room in eastern Oklahoma after 6 days.
Detective Frisbee informed Thomas and Diane Devo of the identification in April 2024.
Michael and Cassandra were told by their parents before the information was released publicly.
Michael’s response recorded in Frisbee’s case notes with his explicit permission was a single sentence, “She just wanted children.”
It was the interpretation 38 years of living with the unanswered question had produced in the boy who had been 8 years old in a motel room in eastern Oklahoma.
His sister Cassandra’s response was different.
She said she wished Sandre Hulkcom had simply knocked on their door and asked.
No prosecution was possible.
Sandra Marie Hulkcom had died 15 years before her identity was confirmed.
What existed from April 2024 forward was the formal identification of the woman who had entered the Devo home under a false name and left with two 8-year-old children.
And the adults those children had become who had finally after nearly four decades been given a name to attach to what had happened to them.
Michael and Cassandra Devo are in their late 40s now with children who are nearly the age they were in June of 1986.
Thomas and Diane are in their 80s, still in Garland County, still in the same house.
When Detective Frisbee called to tell them, Thomas sat down at the kitchen table in the house where he had stood on the night of June 4th, 1986.
And he was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, “I just needed to know she was real.
I needed to know it actually happened.
She was real.”
Her name was Sandra Marie Hulcom.
And in 2024, 38 years after the night, she drove two children to a motel in eastern Oklahoma and left them $60 and a television remote and walked away into nothing.
She finally had a name that belonged to an actual person in the actual world.
What does it tell us about the nature of grief when the missing piece is not a verdict but simply an explanation?
Simply the answer to who does knowing the name of someone who cannot be prosecuted provide closure or does it only deepen a different kind of question?
And what do we owe to children who grew up carrying an unanswered identity mystery at the center of their own shared story?
Justice came for the Devo family in the spring of 2024, imperfect and postumous as it was.
Stories like theirs remind us that an identity concealed is not an identity erased.
It is preserved, waiting for the database that will one day match it.
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