77-year-old Vaughn Callenback has been missing since July 5, 2024.
Joanie Knight says she last saw her father on the night of July 3, 2024. Vaughn drove from his home near Lake Burton in Georgia, to her home in Franklin, North Carolina.
“He just came in and wanted to pawn a gun to my husband,” Joanie told Dateline, explaining that Vaughn planned on depositing the money from the gun into the bank the next day. “I fed him and they exchanged money and the gun and I told him — I said, ‘Just stay here; it is too dark for you to go.’” So he stayed the night.
“He was gone by the time I got up at eight,” Joanie said. “I assumed he realized the bank wasn’t open on the fourth. But he did go on the fifth, which was the last time anybody seen him.”
Joanie describes her father as a “simple country man,” explaining he doesn’t own a phone and they would often go weeks without talking to each other. “He was backwoods country,” she said. “So if I would come into town, I would always swing by — go check on him, see whatever he needed, or vice versa.”
According to NBC affiliate 11Alive, Vaughn was last seen leaving the United Community Bank in Clayton, Georgia, on July 5. However, it wasn’t until July 13 that Joanie learned her father was missing. One of her half-siblings, who lives near Vaughn, alerted the family that he hadn’t seen his stepfather in more than a week.
Joanie headed to her father’s house immediately after learning he was missing. When she got there she found Vaughn’s seven dogs and dozens of chickens. “They hadn’t been fed,” she said. “It’s like you could tell he has not been there.”
Joanie says her father would never have abandoned his animals. “He’s a good man,” she said. “He didn’t have much, but he would give you whatever he had. He just wanted his scrap metal, his dogs and chickens, and to be left alone.”
Vaughn’s family reported him missing that evening. At that time, according to Joanie, the family learned that Vaughn’s empty truck had been found nearly a week earlier.
11Alive reported that on July 7, the truck was found “backed down an embankment in a heavily wooded area near the Old Coleman River Road.” Joanie approximates that the area where her father’s truck was found is about 10 miles from his home.
The search for him began the next day.
According to a press release posted on the Rabun County Office of Emergency Management’s Facebook page, officers arrived at the area where Vaughn’s car had been found a week earlier and performed an initial “hasty search.” They conducted additional searches over the next few days. “These searches continued over a period of six days following the initial search operation,” the agency wrote. “Professional, dedicated volunteers with a wide variety of experience returned to the area and performed diligent and thorough search efforts in hopes of locating the missing male.”
Dateline reached out to the Rabun County Sheriff’s Office for an interview but was told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has taken over as the lead agency investigating Vaughn’s disappearance. The GBI declined Dateline’s request for an interview citing the active nature of the investigation.
For the first eight months following her father’s Vaughn’s disappearance, Joanie says she organized and went on searches by herself, with family, and with volunteers. “We’d go over where his truck was found. We walked the roads, we walked the trails, we went over embankments,” she said. “I mean, we looked every place that he used to fish or he would ginseng hunt — everything.”
She also placed flyers across Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Despite her efforts, nothing has brought Joanie any closer to finding Vaughn. “There’s just, like, no evidence of him being anywhere,” she said. “It’s just like he’s vanished.”
Joanie told Dateline she stopped going on constant searches in March. “I was going out every night looking for my dad,” she said. “It took my 10-year-old son crying on the couch saying, ‘Mama, if Papaw can get lost in the woods, you’re gonna get lost — and I don’t want to lose you.’”
Ultimately, Joanie just wants to know what happened to her father. “I can handle it if he is gone, but he deserves to have a proper burial,” she said. “I can say goodbye, but I can’t handle thinking in the back of my head, ‘Is he somewhere starving? Is he somewhere cold?’”
“The not knowing is eating me alive,” she said.
Vaughn is 5’7’’ and weighs approximately 165 lbs. He has grey hair and a long grey beard. He would be 78 years old today.
If you have information about the disappearance of Vaughn Callenback, please contact the Georgia Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-597-8477.
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