Who Killed Amber Hagerman? What We Know About the Still-Unsolved Case That Inspired AMBER Alerts
It's been almost three decades since Amber Hagerman was abducted and killed in Arlington, Texas.
On Jan. 13, 1996, 9-year-old Amber and her younger brother, Ricky, were riding their bicycles around a parking lot. Ricky decided to return to their grandparents' house, but Amber did not make it back with him. Her body was found four days later near a creek roughly six miles from where she had been abducted, per The New York Times.
"Finding Amber's body is a sad moment I'll never forget," Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson previously told PEOPLE. Despite efforts by investigators and her family, the case is still unsolved.
In response to Amber's heart-wrenching case, a Texas mom named Diana Simone had the idea to create an emergency system for abducted children, similar to a weather or civil defense alert. After the pitch was picked up by the Child Alert Foundation, AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) Alerts were created. The system went into development in 1996 and is still used today.
"It's a shame my daughter had to be butchered and had to go through what she went through for us to have the AMBER Alert, but I know she would be proud of it," Amber's mother, Donna Williams, told Yahoo News in 2016.
On the 25th anniversary of her disappearance, in January 2021, Arlington Police held a news conference in the parking lot where Amber was abducted. They honored the young girl's legacy and assured her family and the public that they were still looking for Amber's killer.
'I miss her voice. I miss her touch. I miss her hugs,' Williams said, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. 'I remember everything about her. There's nothing I've forgotten about her."
Here's everything to know about Amber Hagerman and how her murder led to the creation of AMBER Alerts.
Amber Hagerman was born on Nov. 25, 1986, in Arlington, Texas, to Richard Hagerman and Donna Williams (at the time of Amber's disappearance, Williams went by the name Whitson). Williams left Hagerman in 1994, according to WFAA-TV.
Amber was 9 years old when she was abducted. Williams described Amber to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2021 as an 'innocent and sweet little girl' who loved being like a 'little mommy' to her younger brother, Ricky.
She was a Girl Scout who loved writing, Barbies, the Disney princess Pocahontas and her pink bike. Her third-grade classmates at Barry Elementary in Arlington described her as 'pretty' and 'nice," according to a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) blog post.
Months before her abduction, Amber, Ricky and Williams, who at the time was a single mother working toward her GED, were interviewed by WFAA-TV for a special on welfare reform. In the piece, Amber showed off her scrapbook, which included awards for good grades and attendance, and Williams said Amber 'loved school.'
"Amber was just a very sweet, innocent child, and that's the memory we got to hold onto as we investigate," Arlington Police Sgt. Grant Gildon told PEOPLE in 2022. "That this is someone who was doing something as innocent as riding a bicycle, and evil found her that day."
On Jan. 13, 1996, Amber and her 5-year-old brother, Ricky, took their bicycles to a parking lot in Arlington, Texas.
After a few minutes, Ricky decided to go back to their grandparents' home, about two blocks away. Before Amber could join her brother, according to one witness, a man in a black pick-up truck pulled into the parking lot, snatched Amber off her bicycle and took off. The abduction took place in broad daylight, at 3:18 p.m. local time.
One month after Amber's murder, Williams visited her daughter's elementary school classmates. A boy asked what time Amber left on her bike, and Williams told him 3:10.
'It just took eight minutes,' she said, according to a 2021 NCMEC blog post. 'So you guys stay close to home, okay?'
In 2016, 20 years after his sister's murder, Ricky told reporters that at the time, he 'didn't quite understand what was going on," per The Seattle Times.
'I just knew my sister was taken from us,' he said with tears in his eyes. 'She was my best friend, like a second mother.'
A man named Jimmie Kevil was the only witness to come forward after Amber's abduction. He claimed to have seen the abduction from his backyard, telling police that a 1980s or 1990s single-cab black truck had been parked earlier at a nearby laundromat. The assailant allegedly drove up in the truck, kidnapped Amber and traveled away from Highway 360 towards the center of Arlington.
'I saw [Amber] riding up and down,' Kevil told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth in January 2016. 'She was by herself. I saw this black pickup. He pulled up, jumped out and grabbed her. When she screamed, I figured the police ought to know about it, so I called them.'
Sgt. Ben Lopez, who was a rookie on the Arlington police force when Amber disappeared, acknowledged at a 2021 press conference that police knew there may have been undocumented residents at the laundromat who were afraid to come forward but 'if there is a witness or witnesses who have that concern, we are not interested at all in pursuing any kind of deportation.'
Kevil died in May 2016.
Four days after her disappearance, Amber's body was found in a drainage ditch with cuts, including to her throat.
Amber's body was spotted by a man behind the Forest Ridge apartment complex, about six miles from the parking lot from which she was taken.
Dee Anderson, a spokesperson for the Tarrant County police, said at the time that maintenance workers had been near the creek hours earlier, but Amber's body was not found. It was believed that her body 'moved there during a rainstorm,' according to The New York Times, and that she had been alive for 48 hours after her kidnapping.
"We will find the person who did this," Anderson said. "We never want another little girl, another family, to go through what this little girl, this family, has been through."
Sgt. Gildon described the area where Amber was found as 'very secluded.'
"We do believe you'd have to be somewhat familiar with that area to know where that creek is," he told PEOPLE. "Was there a connection with that location? And was it someone who had a reason for turning back to the center of town? The thought has always been that the easiest way to get out of the area would've been to go to Highway 360."
Police believe the suspect was a local male. Officials described him as White or Hispanic, in his 20s or 30s, under 6 ft. and with dark hair.
"Based on the direction of travel when they left and then based on her being found in Arlington, being abducted in Arlington and just being in that spot, the question has always been, did somebody have a connection with that area where the abduction was?" Sgt. Gildon told PEOPLE.
After Amber's murder, a local Texas mother named Diana Simone kept thinking about how Amber disappeared without a trace.
"I said, 'I can't get over this child. There has to be something we can do,' " Simone told PEOPLE. There were weather and civil defense alerts so, "why wouldn't they do it for this?"
Simone called a local radio station with an idea for an emergency system. The concept was that when a 911 call was placed, radio stations would immediately interrupt programming to broadcast the alert. Fourteen days after Amber's abduction, Simone wrote a letter to the station requesting that if the alert system got put into place, it should be known as Amber's plan.
Dallas-Fort Worth broadcasters and local police then teamed up to develop an early warning system, according to the official AMBER Alert website. The system, officially named AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) Alert, began development in 1996. It was first implemented on July 5, 1997, and the first success story came on Nov. 10, 1998, per Nevada's AMBER Alert website.
The system, which is used in 'the most serious child-abduction cases,' aims to 'instantly galvanize the community to assist in the search for and safe recovery of a missing child,' according to the NCMEC, which manages the program for the U.S. Department of Justice.
The alerts are first issued by law enforcement to broadcasters and state transportation officials. NCMEC is then notified, and they re-distribute the alert to secondary distributors, which include radio, television and road signs. As of 2013, messages are sent to phones through the Wireless Emergency Alerts program (WEA), and alerts are also shared on social media via Facebook, Instagram and X.
Today, AMBER Alerts are used in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, parts of Indian country, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and 45 other countries, according to its website. As of Oct. 31, 2024, they have saved at least 1,221 children in the U.S., according to the NCMEC.
Despite how far-reaching and impactful Amber's case has been, it is still unsolved.
In the three decades since Amber's abduction, police have received over 7,000 tips. Gildon told PEOPLE that they 'continue to have leads' and several that 'we continue to investigate extensively as possible suspects.'
'A lot of people will refer to Amber's case as ... a cold case,' he said. 'But for the Arlington Police Department, it has never been listed as a cold case because we've never gone 180 days without having some lead come in."
Gildon also said he believes the killer is still alive. Police remain hopeful that recent advancements in DNA testing, which have been used on evidence collected in Amber's case, and new tips from the public will help solve the case.
"I remain optimistic that this case will be solved," Gildon said. "I do believe there's definitely someone out there who has the answers that we're looking for and can help lead us in the right direction. So, that's why we continue to work on it. Our goal has always remained the same, and that's to catch who did this and be able to prosecute them."
Williams told Yahoo News that detectives call 'when they get a hot lead or something, but nothing ever comes of it.'
'How can [the killer] get away with this? I can't comprehend how you can't catch someone like that,' she said.
In 2021, 25 years after Amber's murder, Arlington Police held a news conference in the parking lot where Amber was abducted. They honored the young girl's legacy and made it clear that they were still looking for Amber's killer.
Williams also spoke to the media, then directly to the abductor: 'Please turn yourself in. Give Amber justice.'
Amber's mother, Donna Williams, still lives in Texas and is a child safety advocate.
In 2016, she did not own a smartphone and avoided spending time online, but she did hear AMBER alerts when they came through the TV or radio.
'Of course I think of my daughter first,' she told Yahoo News. 'I have to accept that the alerts are always going to be there."
Williams has faced additional tragedies since losing her daughter, including the death of her fiancé in a car accident two months after Amber's funeral, her older sister's 1998 death from a seizure disorder and, in 2009, both her husband's death from a heart attack and her father's death from cancer.
Amber's brother, Ricky Hagerman, is also still in contact with the police and continues to speak out about his sister.
'Every day she's on my mind,' he told reporters in 2016.
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