With daughter’s vanishing a mystery, mother’s death is sad reminder of lost teen

In the summer of 1972, when Joan Sessions Tengelsen was 39, her daughter Carlene disappeared from the Westgate Mall.

Carlene was 16 and had just gotten her driver’s license. She had dropped by the mall on her way to pick up her younger sister at a Mercer University day camp. But Carlene never arrived.

Her car, the family’s station wagon, turned up that night in the mall parking lot. Carlene never did. And never has.

In the 44 years since, not so much as a trace of her has surfaced. There were no suspects, no clues. When I first heard about the case years later toward the end of the 1990s, I was surprised to find that at the time of Carlene’s death there had been little news coverage of her vanishing. The Vietnam War was on. The ’60s had just ended. The comings and goings of young people didn’t always catch the attention it should have from the authorities.

Even so, I was intrigued when a Bibb County sheriff’s investigator, Lt. Mike Smallwood, mentioned the case to me in passing in 1998. Smallwood said that his wife, when she was a child, had lived in the same west Macon neighborhood as the Tengelsens. They lived on the same street — Easy Street — just off Log Cabin Drive.

What stood out to Smallwood was what the Tengelsens did when they moved away for a time and lived in other states. They left a telephone connected to their home number in a closet at the house where Smallwood’s wife lived. Just in case Carlene — or someone who knew where she was — happened to call.

On occasion, the phone rang. Smallwood’s wife’s family dutifully answered. But it was always a wrong number.

Carlene’s disappearance was nearly three decades cold when I learned of it. Some of what intrigued me most about the case was how her mother and father, her family, had gone on living in her absence. So often we see the immediate shock, the pleas for information when a person goes missing. Rarely do we read of the long-lived aftermath, the anguish and torment of not knowing what happened to the kin left behind.

Now Carlene’s mother will never know. At least not in this world.

Joan Tengelsen died in December, four days after Christmas. She was 83.

Her husband, Carlene’s dad, Arnold “Ting” Tengelsen, who once sold suits at J.C. Penney, died in 2004.

Joan was 39 the summer Carlene disappeared. At her funeral on Jan. 2, a preacher spoke of Joan’s lively spirit, how she loved watching the Atlanta Falcons, how she’d remind him on game days that her team was playing, and how she remained a dedicated follower of the University of Miami, her alma mater.

She had, it seemed, even in the face of unthinkable loss, found things in life to look forward to. She was an avid reader. For years, she scanned the Telegraph obituaries and sent notes to mothers of the slain and the missing.

Over the years, I wrote a handful of stories about Carlene’s vanishing. Perhaps the most telling was a two-part piece called “The Miracles of Loss.” The reporting took hours of sitting and listening to the Tengelsens tell me about their lives. They shared the saddest parts that had consumed them and yet, somehow, had not.

You often hear how mothers of the dead or lost are “strong” or “rocks” for their families.

Joan was that for sure, but she also exuded a peace, a confidence, that still makes me wonder how.

She told me how she had given her troubles to God, how she learned to live by a certain philosophy, one that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful.

“You look at the beauty of a tree that’s lost its leaves,” she said. “You look and see the shape of the tree.”

One day while reporting that first story, I was sitting on her sofa when she motioned to a Bible on her coffee table. She wanted me to open it.

On one of the pages toward the back, Joan had written a note that she wanted read when she died. The note wasn’t mentioned at her funeral, so I will share it here:

June 21, 1972, my heart was so broken in two that I knew it would never mend again completely till I held my Carlene in my arms. This is the day she disappeared. This is a day part of me died too.

Joan is buried in Macon Memorial Park. The grave lies half a mile from Easy Street and the driveway that to this day bears the childhood hand print of her lost daughter.

This story was originally published January 18, 2017 at 1:33 PM with the headline "With daughter’s vanishing a mystery, mother’s death is sad reminder of lost teen."