Five years later, family still looking for answers in disappearance

About 7 that morning, she talked to Krystina, then 14, on the phone. Krystina had spent the night with a friend.

Ms. Shuttleworth took her son, Ryan, to Warrenville Elementary School, telling the then-9-year-old that she was going to see a friend that day.

About 8 a.m., an acquaintance spotted her at the Pit Stop convenience store on Pine Log Road. She must have stopped to get gas, her mother said.

She'd borrowed a white car from a friend, Neal Durden, who is now deceased. She called him at about 10 a.m., Mrs. Mabrey said, and also told him that she was expecting a guest.

All phone calls after 10 a.m. went unanswered, Mrs. Mabrey said.

Mr. Durden went by the house later that afternoon and found the Beech Island home locked tight. When Ryan got home from school, Mrs. Mabrey said, Mr. Durden brought the child to her house.

Mrs. Mabrey said that her daughter rarely missed meeting her son at the bus stop after school.

When Mrs. Mabrey, her husband and Ryan went back to the home with a key, they found both her daughter's car and the loaned white one in the driveway and a pot of tea on the stove.

Her purse was gone.

Someone took Ms. Shuttleworth, Mrs. Mabrey said.

"That's what we're thinking, that she left with someone and all signs say that she was planning to come back," Mrs. Mabrey said.

Ms. Shuttleworth, who would have turned 37 in June, would not have deliberately abandoned her children, Mrs. Mabrey said.

"She was an excellent mother."

Both Krystina and Ryan are now in the custody of their maternal grandparents.

Mrs. Mabrey is heartened by a new way a tipster can tell authorities what he or she knows, without fear of repercussion and with the hope of receiving a reward of up to $1,000. When her daughter disappeared three years ago, she said, Crimestoppers of the Midlands didn't operate in Aiken County.

Even if there are no eyewitnesses to what happened to her daughter, Mrs. Mabrey said she believes the person will eventually slip up and tell someone about being involved.

"If somebody has done something to her, how can they keep that inside

lorrainemabrey@searchingforlisashuttleworth.1colony.com    

joybatchelor@searchingforlisashuttleworth.1colony.com