What happened to missing Virginia woman? Family searches NC interstate for answers.

The group of women — an aunt, a friend and cousins — carefully climbed down the sharp boulders off Interstate 85, poking at a tangle of briers and grass, looking for a cell phone or some other sign.

Alyssa Taylor’s mother, Krista, stayed close to the top of the hill near the interstate on-ramp about 20 miles north of Henderson. She found a pair of mostly black, Muruchan ramen noodle pajama bottoms by the guardrail and lifted them with a stick and a pink-gloved hand, before returning them to the ground.

Those didn’t belong to Alyssa, Krista Taylor said, but she took a picture in case they belonged to 51-year-old truck driver Danny McNeal.

It’s been almost 18 months since McNeal’s tractor-trailer ran off I-85 in Hillsborough, hit a guardrail, flipped over and slammed into a bridge, bursting into flames. Alyssa had texted her family that she was riding with him, on a two-day trip to deliver frozen chickens.

McNeal’s body and that of his dog, Blu, were found in the wreckage on Sept. 14, 2022.

Alyssa was never found or heard from again.

What happened to Alyssa Taylor?

Alyssa’s family suspects emergency crews missed the remains of the 25-year-old mother of two under the frozen chickens that spilled onto the highway. Others have suggested she was murdered or taken by human traffickers, or that she just left with plans to never come back.

The family has met with local, state and federal law enforcement officials, and shopped the case to TV stations, newspapers and true crime podcasters. They created a Facebook group to share information, and suffered online attacks from strangers, fake social media pages, and pressure from McNeal’s family and friends to stop.

Some days Lori Taylor, who has led the search for Alyssa from the beginning, knows in her gut that her niece died in the crash.

Other days, she wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about the possibilities.

“I find myself sometimes going down a road, and it hits me, you know, and I don’t get upset and cry, but it’s just like this gnawing feeling that you just know that you’re missing something,” she said. “I just I feel like I let her down and I let Krista down.”

In January, the two women met with a medium who claimed to speak with dead people. They were skeptical, but the medium shared details about Alyssa and her family that were not public, Lori Taylor said.

She told them Alyssa was scared and had jumped from McNeal’s truck, landing in a field, where she died from a head trauma and internal bleeding, she said. Alyssa wanted her family to know they could look for her, but she would be hard to find.

Timeline of events before truck crash in NC

The News & Observer obtained Facebook and text messages from Alyssa’s family; Facebook messages that McNeal’s friend, who declined to comment, posted on her Facebook page; and crash investigation reports and videos to create a timeline of the crash:

Sept. 13, 2022

6:35 a.m.: Alyssa texted McNeal, who was a friend, about joining his run from Delaware to North Carolina. He replied he’d pick her up that afternoon.

1:15 p.m.: Alyssa texted her mother to say she was “riding with Danny in tractor trailer for two days.”

2:08 p.m.: McNeal texted Alyssa that he was “coming up on ya need to know where to go.” Taylor gave him her mother’s address in Oak Hall, Virginia. From there, the truck headed north to Delaware to pick up its load.

5:40 p.m.: Alyssa made her last post on Facebook.

8:20 p.m.: McNeal stopped to get food from a friend’s house in Exmore, Virginia.

9:02 p.m.: An Exmore police officer stopped behind the truck and talked with an unidentified woman in the passenger seat. McNeal returned to the truck, and the officer warned him not to park in the road. McNeal drove away at 9:08 p.m. Alyssa’s family identified her voice from the police bodycam footage, but the image was blurry and the officer who stopped that day couldn’t confirm whether the woman was Alyssa, Exmore Police Chief Angelo DiMartino said.

9:17 p.m.: McNeal talked by phone with his girlfriend’s daughter, Malinda Spady, who told The N&O she had heard a woman’s voice during the call but wasn’t sure who it was.

9:42 p.m.: McNeal’s truck stopped at the Royal Farms gas station in Cape Charles, Virginia.

10:08 p.m.: The truck’s GPS shows it leaving the gas station.

10:10 p.m.: McNeal’s phone shows a missed a call from Alyssa. Some people have said that proves she got off the truck and either left or was picked up by someone else. A psychic — not the medium who met with them in January — told Alyssa’s family last year that human traffickers took her to Mexico, but Virginia investigators haven’t found anything to back up that claim.

Alyssa’s family thinks she called to ask McNeal to get her something from the gas station, but he was already returning to the truck.

10:18 p.m.: McNeal’s girlfriend, Angel Stevens, talked to him by phone for over two hours. Accomack County Sheriff’s Lt. Joshua Marsh told The N&O that “an individual” talking with McNeal during this time asked about a female voice heard multiple times during the call.

“McNeal advised that it was the CB, but the individual did not believe him due to not hearing feedback or static,” Marsh said.

Sept. 14, 2022

1:08 a.m.: Alyssa’s cell phone and the truck’s GPS pinged the same tower north of Henderson in North Carolina.

1:17 a.m.: Stevens talked again with McNeal for about 15 minutes.

2:12 a.m.: A 911 caller reported the truck crash and explosions at the bridge in Hillsborough.

Family gathers to remember

Alyssa and McNeal were friends. Text messages provided by her family, in which McNeal asks if he had picked her up at the same address before, hinted this wasn’t the first time she had gone somewhere with him.

Autopsy reports showed McNeal had a 0.32 blood-alcohol level that night — four times the legal limit for a driver in North Carolina and eight times the legal limit for a commercial driver. His company, Moore’s Trucking Co. in Virginia, had a no-rider policy.

Alyssa had worked at a Holiday Inn Express but was unemployed at the time of the crash and struggling with mental health issues, Krista Taylor said, but she was in almost daily contact. Krista Taylor was helping her daughter with expenses and making sure she had a place to stay, she said.

Alyssa shared custody of her sons, now 7 and 8, with her ex-husband, her family said. She loved the boys and wouldn’t have left them, they said. Alyssa’s Facebook page is filled with photos of them on family outings, at birthday celebrations and dressing up for Halloween — her favorite holiday, her aunt said.

Last summer, family and friends gathered in Exmore to celebrate Alyssa’s life. In the fall, they went on fall harvest and Halloween outings, dressing up and picking apples and pumpkins with her boys, because “we’re all missing (her) so much,” Lori Taylor said.

“I don’t want her forgotten, and I feel bad for the kids, because it’s just saying that she’s gone, you know, without that official proof,” Lori Taylor said. “It just sucks.”

‘Never going to give up’

As the group loaded into their cars Saturday off Exit 229 near the North Carolina-Virginia state line and headed south to Hillsborough, where they spent a few more hours searching the crash site, the sky darkened and rain started to fall. The day that had first hinted at spring turned cold.

They collected a few weather-worn and fragile bones from the crash site and nearby woods. They were probably from a deer, but they will take them back to Accomack, which has DNA samples collected from Alyssa’s belongings, they said.

“We feel defeated, more than anything,” Lori Taylor said, “like there’s nothing else we can do.”

She’s sent six emails to Virginia State Police, trying to get Alyssa’s name added to a missing persons list, she said. The family is frustrated and angry that North Carolina didn’t do more to help, and that both states have yet to bring in federal authorities, she said. The N.C. Highway Patrol has closed the case, concluding it was a driving while impaired crash that killed one person.

“I’m sure we’ll be back and keep on searching and keep on pushing law enforcement,” Lori Taylor said.

It hurts to look for answers and find nothing, but she can’t move on, said Krista Taylor, who also has two younger sons. Sometimes, she just sits and cries.

“I just feel like we’re never going to get any answers,” she said. “But we’re never going to give up.”

NC Reality Check is an N&O series holding those in power accountable and shining a light on public issues that affect the Triangle or North Carolina. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email realitycheck@newsobserver.com