Beverly Carter, the Little Rock, Arkansas, real estate agent who disappeared after showing a vacant, bank-owned home to a stranger on Thursday late afternoon, is still missing.
Carter, 49, was set to show the river-bordering home located in a small town on the eastern outskirts of Little Rock to an unknown prospective buyer at approximately 5:30 p.m. Central time on Thursday.
After not hearing from her for three hours, her husband rushed over to the house later that evening and found the door to the house open, his wife’s locked car in the driveway and no sign of Carter.
On Saturday morning, a group of approximately 250 volunteers and authorities gathered to scour the area around the home by foot and ATV for clues that could help find the missing agent, according to THV11.com.
News report about Beverly Carter from THV11, the CBS affiliate in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The search party split into two groups. One searched along the road the home sits on and the other combed nearby highways.
As of Sunday morning, the search for evidence has been fruitless, Carl Minden, a spokesman for the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office told Inman News.
“It’s a vast amount of acreage,” Carl Minden, a spokesman for the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office told THV11.com on Saturday. “There’s a lot of farm land, swamp. There’s a lot of waterways.”
The volunteer-aided search for Carter continued on Sunday, Minden said. Volunteers and officials are hunting for clues on land by foot, horseback and ATVs and on the water from kayaks and small boats, he said.
A Facebook page has also been set up to aid in the search for Carter.
Adding to the ominous feeling around the disappearance, Carter’s husband said he received three suspicious text messages from his wife’s phone early Friday morning around 1 a.m.
One read, “Oh, I’m out drinking with some friends,” he told THV11.com. This made him even more worried, because his wife is not a drinker, he said.
The incident has served as a wake-up call to real estate agents and the industry, re-emphasizing the importance of vetting unknown clients at an office before being alone with them.
Large landowners and farmers in the Scott area where Carter was reported missing have been asked to check their properties by the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office.
Anyone with information regarding Carter’s whereabouts should contact the sheriff’s office at (501) 340-6600.