Yvonne Boggs never let a day pass by without speaking to her daughter Charlotte. “Not one single day,” Yvonne said.
Charlotte Eliza Trego was Yvonne’s youngest child. She has three older children, but Yvonne said Charlotte made sure to stand out. “She was more loud than the rest of them,” Yvonne said. “She'd like to have a lot of fun.”
And fun she had, in Chillicothe, Ohio, where she and her siblings were raised. Yvonne told Dateline that although there isn’t much to do there, people take full advantage of the great outdoors. “There's a lot of hiking and boating, canoeing,” Yvonne said. “We'd go fishing a lot.”
Charlotte in particular loved to be outside. Yvonne said her daughter was adventurous and would jump at every opportunity to roll around in the dirt. “She was a tomboy,” Yvonne said. “She liked climbing trees and playing in the creek.”
But what Charlotte loved more than anything was her father, Richard Trego. The two were extremely close. Yvonne said their family would often spend their weekends supporting him at the tracks. “My husband drove a stock car and the kids enjoyed going racing -- watching him,” Yvonne said.
Richard and Yvonne divorced when Charlotte was very young, but Charlotte remained a daddy’s girl. So when Richard died in 2002 after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, Yvonne said Charlotte took it particularly hard. “She took it the worst,” Yvonne recalled, “I mean, because she was really close to her dad.”
For 13-year-old Charlotte, the death of her father was almost more than she could bear. “After that, she kind of started drifting off,” Yvonne told Dateline. Charlotte’s grades began to slip and Yvonne said she noticed her daughter was changing.
Some might call it typical teenage behavior, but Yvonne said she knew her daughter. The outgoing, loud child she once knew slowly began to lose her voice. She was suddenly quiet, reserved. Distant from her family. And, Yvonne said, “She kind of got messed up with the wrong crowd.”
At 16 years old, Charlotte gave birth to her first child, Chloe. The father was someone from Charlotte’s high school. Yvonne said the boy wanted to marry Charlotte, but Yvonne put a stop to it.
“It wasn’t proper,” Yvonne said. “You know, the situation he was in.” Yvonne told Dateline that the boy had a record with drugs and she wanted to keep drugs away from her home and family.
But for Charlotte, it was already too late. Yvonne said that by then, most of Charlotte’s friends were into drugs, and so was she.
“She smoked weed when she was younger, which, you know, I tried to talk to her about it,” Yvonne said. “I think she started taking pills then and it just spiraled down from one thing to another.”
Yvonne told Dateline that Charlotte’s problem hit a peak when she began to ask her for money. “I said ‘Charlotte, I'm not going to pay your drug bills.’”
Yvonne said Charlotte then told her that she owed a drug dealer some money. Yvonne remembers telling her daughter that if she didn’t quit, she would “end up missing or dead.”
In May 2014, Charlotte went missing.
On May 3, Yvonne took Charlotte and Chloe out to dinner. Yvonne said Charlotte told her she had plans after dinner. “She said, ‘'I’ve got a date, I'm gonna go out,’” Yvonne remembered. “And she seemed, you know, pretty high-spirited.” Chloe stayed with Yvonne.
Later that night, Yvonne called her daughter to ask about the date. Charlotte told her it didn’t go well. “She wouldn’t, you know, go into any detail or anything,” Yvonne said, adding that she didn’t press her daughter on it, because there was a more urgent topic to discuss.
“The last conversation I had with her was about the rehab,” Yvonne told Dateline. She had put Charlotte in rehab before, she said, but she relapsed. This time, though, it was Charlotte coming to her for help. “She says, ‘Mom, will you get me into a lockdown rehab?’ I said absolutely,” Yvonne remembered.
That was the last time Yvonne spoke with her daughter.
When Yvonne didn’t hear from Charlotte the next day, she immediately knew something was wrong. Yvonne told Dateline that despite her daughter’s struggles, they never went a single day without speaking to each other. “When I didn't hear from her on the 4th, I was calling around everywhere trying to find her,” she said.
Yvonne told Dateline the detective assigned to Charlotte’s case following her disappearance, Detective Shawn Rourke, informed her that Charlotte and the woman she had been staying with, got into a heated discussion on May 3. “She got into an argument with her and said Charlotte took off walking,” Yvonne said, and the woman told Det. Rourke she hadn’t heard from Charlotte since that night.
After searching, waiting, and hoping her daughter would return, Yvonne officially reported Charlotte missing on May 18, 2014.
Around the time Charlotte disappeared, several other women in Chillicothe, Ohio, did as well. One of them was Charlotte’s best friend, 30-year-old Tameka Lynch. The two met in high school. Tameka was reported missing by her husband on May 20, 2014. According to a May 2014 news release from the Ross County Sheriff’s Office, a body was found in a lake at Paint Creek State Park on May 24, 2014. Two days later, the sheriff’s office confirmed the body was identified as Tameka Lynch. NBC’S Columbus affiliate NBC4 reported that investigators said Tameka likely died of a drug overdose.
In 2016, two years after Tameka’s death, her mother, Angela Robinson, spoke with NBC4 suggesting her daughter was killed. “Someone put her in the water,” she said. “Tameka was scared to death of the water and the woods.”
Several other women were found dead, murdered, or reported missing from the Chillicothe area around the time of Charlotte’s disappearance and Tameka’s death in 2014.
They include: Timberly Claytor, who was found dead after going missing from Ross County. Tiffany Sayre and Wanda Lemons are both still missing from that same area. In nearby Franklin County, Holly Logan and Jayme Bowen are also missing. Jayme was featured in Dateline’s ‘Missing in America’ series, as was Megan Lancaster, who disappeared in the same time period in the Chillicothe area.
Yvonne said Charlotte knew some of those other women. She said they ran in the same crowd -- a crowd that, unfortunately, may have put them in danger. To this day, many of the families are still pushing for justice and looking for answers.
Yvonne said Chloe, Charlotte’s daughter, is one of those people looking for answers. “I mean it just absolutely destroyed Chloe that she was gone,” Yvonne said. “And it still does.”
Disappointed in the lack of progress by law enforcement, Yvonne hired a forensic intelligence analyst to help get answers. Angela Clemente told Dateline that she is a forensic intelligence analyst who specializes in corruption cases. She’s working for Yvonne pro bono. She is also working with the families of Wanda Lemons and Tiffany Sayre. Clemente believes Charlotte is dead and says she has uncovered what happened to her, and where her body can be found.
“We have the evidence. We have what we need,” Clemente told Dateline. “We've solved the case. So we're ready to go forward, if we have somebody that actually tells the truth.” In her interview with Dateline, Clemente alleged that the Chillicothe Police Department and the Ross County Sheriff’s office are purposely trying to not solve Charlotte’s case because, she believes, those responsible for Charlotte’s death are police informants.
Clemente said she has sought help from FBI. “We've had meetings with the Department of Justice on this,” Clemente told Dateline. “I actually talked to the BCI,” she said referring to the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Clemente said that despite her efforts, the case is still being shoved to the side. Dateline reached out to the attorney general’s office and was referred to the Chillicothe Police Department.
Dateline has reached out to the Chillicothe Police Department more than a dozen times since April, but has not yet received a response. Dateline also reached out to the Ross County Sheriff’s Office multiple times and has not yet received a response.
Even though Yvonne believes she already knows what happened to her daughter, she said she will continue to fight for Charlotte to receive the justice she deserves. She said she will also continue to fight for the families of the other missing or dead Chillicothe women. “We had vigils together,” Yvonne told Dateline. “We’ve all been in this together.”
At the time of Charlotte’s disappearance, she was around 5’6”, had dark brown hair, blue eyes and weighed 160 lbs. Yvonne said that Charlotte was last seen wearing jeans shorts and flip-flops.
The Ohio Attorney General's Office has a directory on their website dedicated to missing persons’ cases in Ohio, which says that Charlotte was wearing jeans, a t-shirt and camouflage tennis shoes when she disappeared. She would be 35 years old today.
“There's more to it than meets the eye,” Yvonne said. “Charlotte, deep down, was a good person. She would do anything in the world for anyone. She didn't deserve what she got.”
Anyone with information about Charlotte’s disappearance can contact the Chillicothe Police Department at 740-773-1191, or reach out to forensic intelligence analyst Angela Clemente’s colleague, RaVae Edwards, at 202-819-3643.