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.
The location is chosen for traffic. U.S. 45, which runs along that service road toward Moffett Road, carries commuters between Mobile and the county’s rural northern tier every day, and the billboard’s spot near the exit puts Avera’s face in front of drivers who live in the communities where any answers would most likely be found — Mount Vernon itself is only a few miles away. Roadside billboards have become a favored tool of cold-case advocates for exactly this reason: they reach the local public that notices things, not just the online public that scrolls past them.
“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.”
Hoover’s phrasing — that after 44 years the family only recently connected with an advocacy group — captures how isolated long-unsolved cases can become. Organizations devoted to cold cases now exist across Alabama, but reaching one requires a family member to keep searching, decade after decade, for the right door.
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.
The revelation reframed the entire history of the case. A missing person report is the mechanism that sets everything else in motion — the entry into state and federal missing-persons databases, the assignment of an investigating agency, the paper trail that later investigators inherit. A case that never had one did not merely start slowly; it started nowhere, and everything that followed was work reconstructed decades after the fact, without the contemporaneous records a report would have generated.
That the family believed otherwise for 38 years is also part of the story. Trusting an institution’s assurance that a report had been filed was, under the circumstances, reasonable — the hospital was the state’s facility, the patient had vanished from its grounds, and families assume the administrative machinery did what machinery does. Discovering in 2020 that it had not turned the family’s long vigil into a fresh investigation by default.
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.
The sheriff’s office that now holds the case is a different institution than the one a 1982 disappearance would have encountered. The Mobile County Sheriff’s Office serves the county’s unincorporated areas and small municipalities — Mount Vernon among them — and modern cold-case practice treats old files as reopenable assets: evidence preserved in storage can be retested with techniques that did not exist in 1982, and institutional knowledge can be rebuilt from records, interviews and the memories of people who are still alive.
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.
The family’s skepticism rests on that description. A patient who could not speak and could barely walk, by her sister’s account of the last visit, is not a plausible solo escapee — able to evade institutional security, cross the hospital’s grounds and leave the area without assistance or notice. The official account of an escape, in other words, described an act the family says the patient was physically incapable of performing, which is the core of their four-decade insistence that other people were involved.
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.”
Her appeal is aimed precisely at the population most likely to hold an answer: people who worked at the hospital or knew those who did. Institutional cases — disappearances from state facilities, schools, long-term care — are solved, when they are solved, almost always by someone from inside the institution’s orbit coming forward years later, once retirement, conscience or the passage of time loosens whatever kept them quiet.
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.
The hospital’s history explains why the case is so hard to build. Searcy occupied the grounds of the former Mount Vernon Arsenal, a state military site from the nineteenth century, and grew into one of Alabama’s principal psychiatric hospitals — by its later decades a sprawling campus housing hundreds of patients, with its own cemetery and the bureaucratic weight of a century of state record-keeping. When the state closed it in 2012 as part of a broader consolidation of mental health services, the workforce dispersed, the paper records went into storage, and the institutional knowledge that could answer questions about 1982 moved further out of reach with every passing year.
Mount Vernon itself, a small town in the county’s rural northeast near the Washington County line, has watched the campus stand vacant since the closure, a landmark of the town’s identity and its economy gone quiet. For a community of that size, the hospital was for generations the largest employer and the largest institution, and its presence shaped everything around it — including, in the eyes of investigators, what happened there in 1982 and who might still remember.
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.
The organization’s point about small details is the working theory of all cold-case work. Cases this old are rarely advanced by a single dramatic revelation; they move when fragments accumulate — a former employee’s recollection of a night, a name that appears in more than one account, a detail about the hospital’s operations that changes what investigators thought they knew. The billboard’s purpose is to keep the fragments arriving.
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.
Four decades is long enough for the case to have passed out of living memory for most of the public — but not for everyone. People who were young hospital employees in 1982 are in their sixties now. Neighbors who heard talk around Mount Vernon that summer are still alive. The billboard stands where those people drive, carrying a face, a name, and a telephone number, making the case findable again for whoever has been carrying a piece of it in silence.
For Hoover, who was the last family member to see her sister alive at Searcy, the campaign is the continuation of a promise she has kept across two-thirds of her own life: “I’m not going to let it fade. I will never stop looking for our sister.” The billboard now does what she has done since 1982 — puts Diana Avera’s name where someone who knows something cannot help but see it.