Katheryn Ann "Katie" Ferguson, 33, of Cody, Wyoming, was last seen on October 5, 2023, during a police welfare check in a parking lot in Trumann, Arkansas. Ferguson had spent the summer of 2023 living with her mother in Dothan, Alabama, with her two young daughters after leaving an on-and-off relationship with the children's father, Adam Shane Aviles Jr., in Cody. In early October, Aviles traveled to Alabama and the pair began a cross-country drive back to Cody with the children. A Trumann police officer's body-camera footage, later obtained via public-records request, shows Ferguson seated in the passenger seat of Aviles's black 1999 Dodge Durango around 11 a.m., telling the officer they were "just passing through" on their way back to Wyoming; this is the last confirmed sighting of her. Aviles and the two children arrived back in Cody by late October, but Ferguson did not. Her mother, Mona Hartling, reported her missing to the Cody Police Department on November 2, 2023.
Aviles's Durango was found abandoned in the Oregon Basin area of rural Park County on approximately November 4, 2023; deputies who searched it found the front passenger seat removed, a "projectile hole" through the front passenger door concealed with tape, a loaded Glock .45 magazine, and an odor investigators said was consistent with "putrefied blood," later confirmed by lab analysis as human blood from an unknown source. Aviles was arrested and subsequently convicted on a federal charge of being a felon in possession of ammunition; at his October 2024 sentencing, the presiding judge stated the ammunition appeared tied to a more serious offense, and prosecutors have described him as a suspect in a homicide, though he has not been charged in connection with Ferguson's disappearance itself. Ferguson has not been located.
Agency Case # 23-972
