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Tennessee Mom Vanishes After Halloween Party, Before Shocking Discovery and "Chilling New Clues"
Friends say Karen Swift wasn't having a good time at a country club Halloween party in Dyersburg, Tennessee. The next morning, she went missing from her home.
For a mother of four who attended a Halloween party in 2011, the real terror began after she left the event.
Karen Swift mysteriously vanished in the early morning hours of October 30, 2011 after arriving home from the party at a country club in Dyersburg, Tennessee, a chilling case explored in an all-new Dateline airing Friday, November 1 at 9/8c p.m. on NBC.
What happened the night before Karen Swift vanished?
“It was October 29, two nights to Halloween, when they gathered in their costumes and their masks, to hide their secrets perhaps? Including a woman named Karen Swift, life of the party, usually,” Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison says in the voiceover in a haunting preview of the episode, titled "After the Halloween Party."
On the night of the gathering, partygoers said Karen wasn’t acting like herself.
“She just said she wasn’t having a good time,” Karen’s friend Jenny Gurien told Dateline.
Karen, who was 44, got a call just after midnight from her daughter Ashley Swift, 9 years old at the time.
“I was at a friend’s house and I wanted to come home,” a now-adult Ashley told Dateline.
"A Very Strange Missing Persons Case"
Karen’s husband, David Swift, "stayed up late to make sure they got home safely, but when he woke up the next morning, Karen was gone," Morrison says in a voiceover.
It sparked a years-long quest for answers.
“It was a very strange missing persons case,” reporter Janice Broach told Dateline.
As Morrison said in the preview clip, "The mystery of what happened to Karen Swift was becoming bigger than anything this town had seen."
A Shocking Discovery
Karen’s body was discovered about six weeks after she vanished in a cemetery about two miles away from her home, according to an NBC News report, but the grim discovery wasn’t enough for investigators to put the pieces of her disappearance together.
For years, the community was left to wonder what happened to the missing mom in her final moments. The investigation soon went cold, until authorities got an unexpected break in the case.
“Nearly a decade later, a private investigator claims to uncover chilling new clues that turn the town upside down,” reads a synopsis of the "After the Halloween Party" episode.
Private investigator Heather Cohen told Dateline that she “came in, and I stirred up the hornet's nest,” revealing dark secrets that had been hidden for years.
In addition to featuring interviews with Cohen, Broach and Ashley Swift, the episode also includes commentary from attorney Jason Creasy, and Terry McCreight, an investigator with the Dyer County Sheriff’s Office.
To find out more about what happened to Karen in the aftermath of the Halloween party, watch Dateline on Friday, November 1 at 9/8c p.m. on NBC or stream the episode on Peacock after it becomes available the next day.
And for even more Dateline, sign up for the show's official newsletter and check out its podcast.
The newsmagazine is now in its 33rd season and is the longest-running series in NBC primetime history.
