Daughter seeks help finding mother 25 years after her disappearance

WEST PALM BEACH — No one vanishes into thin air, said Sadarrin Rowe, her voice and expression hard. She spoke into a microphone at the West Palm Beach Police Department, two framed photos of her missing mother beside her.

They're the only images she has left of Kawana Holmes, who was reported missing to police in 1997 — more than a year after her family last heard from her. Rowe has sparked renewed interest in solving the decades-old case with the help of West Palm Beach Police detectives, who held a press conference Dec. 12 to ask for the public's help.

Holmes, a 21-year-old mother of three at the time of her disappearance, was often on the move, her mother, Shirley Chery Johnson, told detectives. Holmes left her two young daughters and son in Johnson's care and called regularly to check in on them, said Johnson, who lived in Jacksonville.

In 1996, the calls stopped.

A year would pass before Johnson, Rowe's grandmother, reported her daughter missing to police in West Palm Beach, where Holmes was born and rumored to have last been seen at the Good Samaritan Medical Center on Flagler Drive before traveling to Liberty City in Miami in the company of an unknown man.

Holmes' name and disappearance remained out of the public eye for decades, existing only in the missing person flyers Rowe, now 30, carried with her from Jacksonville to West Palm Beach, and in the few online networks that catalog missing person reports. A search for her name in the archives of newspapers across Florida yields no results.

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The police department declined to say Monday what action its investigators took upon learning of Holmes' disappearance in 1997. It blamed what few leads it has now on the yearlong delay between her last contact with her mother and the date she was reported missing. No one appeared to know how robust of an initial investigation was launched.

"I don't know," said Police Chief Frank Adderley. "Anybody here know the answer?"

The handful of detectives gathered in the conference room looked between one another and then back at the chief, silent. Andrea Izzo-Higgins, lead detective on the case since 2020, said nothing.

Izzo-Higgins has the original case file, which she said contains the steps the first investigator, Bobbi Conklin, took to sleuth out Holmes' disappearance. She could recall none when asked for specifics a second time after the press conference.

"There's not much to it," she said. "There's a case file, but there's not a lot of substance to it."

Conklin, who is credited with handling hundreds of cases a year in the Missing Persons Unit before her retirement in 2018, could not be reached for comment.

Details the police provided at Monday's press conference were vague and, at times, inconsistent for reasons detective Izzo-Higgins did not explain. The West Palm Beach Police said the last known activity traced to Holmes was on Feb. 28, 1996, though Duval County court records indicate that she was picked up by a law enforcement agency in Jacksonville that month and returned to Palm Beach County on a fugitive arrest warrant on March 18.

Izzo-Higgins said later that she is aware of the arrest, though neither it, nor the possibility that Holmes was in custody in Jacksonville when police say she was last heard from, were mentioned at the press conference.

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The detective declined to discuss specifics of the open case and excused herself from the conference room when attention returned to Holmes' daughter, Rowe.

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Twenty-five years without her mother have been traumatizing, she told reporters. There aren't words strong enough to describe the feeling. Only now that she has children of her own does Rowe feel equipped to search for her mother in earnest — ideally with the help of the public.

"I know that somebody knows something," she said. "She didn't just vanish. She didn't just disappear."

Anyone with information about Holmes' whereabouts is asked to contact the West Palm Beach Police Department at 561-822-1968.

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Daughter seeking clues in West Palm mom's decades-old cold case