Thirty years ago, 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was riding her bike in an Arlington parking lot with her 5-year-old brother Ricky when she was kidnapped by a man in a pickup truck.
Four days later, her body was found six miles away in a creek.
Today, more than 1,200 missing children have been safely recovered thanks to the Amber Alert system developed in her honor.
On this latest anniversary of Amber’s murder, police told The Barbed Wire they believe advancements in DNA technology may one day help catch her killer.
The Kidnapping
Saturday, January 13, 1996 was a sunny day with clear skies.
Amber was in the third grade at Barry Elementary School, where she was a Girl Scout who loved writing and playing Barbies, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She smiled in her school photo. Blue eyes below brown bangs, with freckled cheeks and moon-shaped gold earrings.
Her mother, Donna Williams, reportedly told Amber’s elementary school class that Amber and Ricky bicycled over to an abandoned grocery store parking lot at 3:10 p.m.
After a few minutes, Ricky biked back to their grandparents’ home two blocks away, leaving Amber and her pink bicycle alone for mere moments.
Then, at 3:18 p.m., the unimaginable happened.
“I saw (Amber) riding up and down,” the only witness to come forward, Jimmie Kevil, told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth. “She was by herself. I saw this black pickup. He pulled up, jumped out and grabbed her. When she screamed, I figured the police ought to know about it, so I called them.”
Kevil told police he saw it all from his backyard. (He passed away in May 2016.)
Despite Kevil’s account of the black pickup and decades of the family asking the public for information, Amber’s killer has never been found.
“I just knew my sister was taken from us,” Ricky Hagerman told The Seattle Times in 2016. “She was my best friend, like a second mother.”
Police provided a description of the possible suspect at the time of Amber’s murder: a white or Hispanic man in his 20s or 30s, under 6 feet tall with dark hair and a medium build, according to The Dallas Morning News.
In an interview on Tuesday, 30 years after her kidnapping, Sgt. Richard Coleman of the Arlington Police Department told The Barbed Wire that Amber’s case remains active, even though decades have passed.
“We receive lots of tips on the Hagerman case, so much so that it can’t be considered a cold case,” Coleman said.
More than 7,000 tips since she went missing, in fact, said Det. Krystallyne Robinson of the Arlington Police Department, who was assigned to Amber’s case in 2023.
The Murder
Amber’s body was discovered half-submerged in a creek by a man walking his dog four days later, KXAS-TV reported in 1996. A resident at the Forest Ridge apartment complex discovered her body at 11:30 p.m., he told KXAS the next morning, his voice shaking.
“She was exposed from her shoulders down to her feet,” the man told KXAS. “The only part that was really submerged were like her arms and her head. But even so, I could still see the dark hair.”
A medical examiner ruled at the time that Amber had died from having her throat cut, according to the local news report.
KXAS-TV (Television station : Fort Worth, Tex.). [News Clip: Hagerman Kidnapping], video, January 15, 1996; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1939140/: accessed January 13, 2026), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
Crime scene specialists and FBI investigators told KXAS they believed Amber’s body had not been in the creek for long, and had possibly been moved during the overnight rainstorm. Officers were seen the following morning collecting large bags of material from the crime scene.
Investigators questioned residents of the complex door-to-door, according to the broadcast.
In her interview with The Barbed Wire, Robinson declined to comment on the state of Amber’s body when it was discovered or the specifics of the forensic evidence APD has, in order to preserve the integrity of the investigation.
The Legacy of the Amber Alert
After watching the news coverage of the tragic murder, one Texas woman, Diana Simone, had an idea. Alongside former Tarrant County sheriff Dee Andersen, she proposed a system where local law enforcement could partner with media stations to broadcast information about missing children, according to FOX 4.
“Amber stands for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response and was created as a legacy to 9-year-old Amber Hagerman,” the Amber alert website reads. “Other states and communities soon set up their own AMBER plans as the idea was adopted across the nation.”
The alert service is now a national system, allowing information on hundreds of missing children to be sent to phones of individuals in their communities each year. The Amber Alert website says that as of Dec. 31, 2024, 1,268 missing children have been found thanks to the program.
“She’s still taking care of little children like she did her younger brother,” said Amber’s mother, Donna Williams, on the 25th anniversary of Amber’s kidnapping, according to The Dallas Morning News. “I’m very, very proud of my daughter.”
To mark the occasion, the Arlington Police Department held a news conference to give updates on the case. Williams arrived early to lay a bouquet of pink flowers in the parking lot where Amber was taken before speaking to the crowd, The Dallas Morning News reported.
“I miss her every day,” she said. “I want to know why. Why her? She was only a little girl.”
“To Amber’s killer, I’m asking you today: Please, turn yourself in,” Williams continued. “Give Amber justice.”
Holding Out Hope for Justice
One of the most difficult aspects of the case, Det. Robinson said, is reckoning with the differences in technology thirty years ago as compared to today, where video surveillance and smartphones make it much easier to gather evidence.
However, Robinson told The Barbed Wire that developments in genetic testing could still be a possible avenue for finding Amber’s killer.
“We are looking at what is out there, what type of testing,” Robinson said. “Just looking constantly, and reaching out to other agencies and private labs, we’re doing that weekly for this case.”
In recent years, developments in DNA testing have led to breakthroughs on cases that had remained unsolved for decades. After a string of 12 murders and more than 45 rapes in California in the 1970s, the ‘Golden State Killer’ was finally identified in 2018, using a novel method called genetic genealogy, according to Forbes.
The 1974 rape and murder of 17-year-old Carla Walker in Fort Worth was solved in 2020 using the same technology, according to The Dallas Morning News. In September 2025, the culprit in the murder of four teenaged girls in an Austin yogurt shop in 1991 was finally identified thanks to advanced DNA technology, according to ABC News. It was also linked to a cold case in Kentucky, The Austin-American Statesman reported just last week.
Robinson said that the APD continues to follow new developments in forensic labs across the country in the hope that they can also offer answers to the mystery of Amber’s killer.
“Genetic genealogy is great,” Robinson said. “It’s something we’re always looking at.”
Police said in 2021 that they were preparing to build a genetic profile of the suspect, according to The Dallas Morning News, but Robinson declined to give specifics on the current testing of evidence in Amber’s case.
“We don’t have DNA necessarily from a suspect,” Robinson said. “We’re just looking to get forensic evidence from the case tested.”
It remains unclear what evidence APD retained from the crime scene, due to rainfall prior to her body’s discovery and an effort by police to avoid providing any information to the public that might jeopardize the investigation.
Robinson said that she remains in contact with Hagerman’s family to give regular updates on the case, and she keeps a framed picture of Amber on her desk to remind her of the stakes of the ongoing search for a suspect.
“It’s the first thing I look at every morning,” Robinson said. “It’s been a long time, and I know that somewhere out there is the killer. I know the family just wants some peace and some closure.”
