MOUNT VERNON, Ala. — More than four decades after Diana Avera vanished from Searcy Hospital in Mount Vernon, a newly erected billboard along the west service road of Interstate 65 is renewing public attention on one of Mobile County’s oldest unsolved missing-person cases.
The billboard, positioned just before the Moffett Road exit, marks the first time Avera’s case has been given roadside visibility since she disappeared in 1982. It was put up through a partnership between Avera’s family and Alabama Cold Case Advocacy, a nonprofit organization that works with families of long-unsolved cases to generate new tips and keep public pressure on investigators.
“After 44 years, we’ve just finally been able to make contact with the Alabama Cold Case Advocacy,” said Becky Hoover, Avera’s sister. “I’m not going to let it fade. I will never stop looking for our sister. She’s out there somewhere.”
A Case Family Says Was Overlooked From the Start
Mary Storm, vice president of Alabama Cold Case Advocacy, said the organization began looking closely at the case after being contacted by the family and quickly identified gaps in the original investigation.
“The case was not really given serious attention, I don’t think, at the beginning,” Storm said.
According to Hoover, the family long believed that Searcy Hospital, the state psychiatric facility where Avera was a patient, had filed a missing person report after she disappeared. It wasn’t until 2020 — nearly 40 years later — that the family learned no such report had ever been filed.
“We were understanding that [Searcy Hospital] had filed a missing person report on her, which they did not. So from there, we started talking to the sheriff’s department out of Mobile County,” Hoover said.
Sheriff’s Office Revisiting Old and New Leads
Since that 2020 conversation, the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office has taken a renewed interest in the case, according to both Hoover and Storm. Investigators are said to be reviewing evidence and leads gathered over the years alongside any new information the billboard campaign generates.
“They are showing some new interest in a few items that they have been looking at through the years,” Storm said.
For Hoover, even incremental movement offers a measure of relief after decades of uncertainty. “It breaks some of the anxiety knowing that they still have the case open,” she said.
Questions About How She Vanished
Accounts from the time held that Avera escaped from Searcy Hospital one night, but her family has always been skeptical of that explanation. She had been involuntarily committed to the hospital for roughly three months before she disappeared, and relatives say her condition at the time makes an unassisted escape hard to believe.
“The last time I seen her alive myself was at Searcy Hospital. She was a total wreck. She was like a total zombie. Couldn’t speak, could barely walk,” Hoover said.
Hoover said she has long suspected other people may have been involved in her sister’s disappearance, though she stopped short of naming any specific theory. What she has not stopped doing, she said, is hoping for a break in the case.
“I hope people maybe that have worked at Searcy Hospital, or know someone that worked at Searcy Hospital, or may just see the billboard and have heard something — you know, reach out with any kind of lead at all,” Hoover said. “I just pray that somebody can come forward and give us some enlightenment on, you know, where she’s at, because somebody knows something.”
Who Was Diana Avera
Avera was 22 years old at the time of her 1982 disappearance from Searcy Hospital, a former state-run psychiatric facility in Mount Vernon that has since closed. She would be 66 years old today.
Searcy Hospital operated in Mount Vernon for decades before the state shut it down in 2012, and records and institutional memory from that era have made cold cases tied to the facility especially difficult to reconstruct.
How to Help
Anyone with information about Diana Avera’s 1982 disappearance is asked to contact the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office at 251-574-8633 or to submit a tip through the department’s online CRIME TIP form. Alabama Cold Case Advocacy says even small details — a name, a rumor, a half-remembered conversation from the early 1980s — can help investigators move the case forward.
Avera’s family says the billboard is meant to do one simple thing: keep her name, and her case, in front of the public until someone comes forward.