What happened to Vickie Carriere and her child?

In March of 2014, Elaine Carriere told WDSU-TV, “It never gets easier. Every day is harder after you lose a child.”

Journalists first interviewed Elaine in August of 1987 when she told The Times-Picayune newspaper her 18-year-old daughter had vanished one month earlier.

In both interviews, Elaine, and her husband, Scott, begged for news of their missing daughter. “Please, anyone watching, just some input,” Elaine pleaded, “That’s all we ask. Somebody must know something.”

Vickie Lynn Carriere, a petite 18-year-old from Waggaman, Louisiana, expected to have a baby the day reporter Jonathan Eig interviewed her parents. They told him Vickie’s doctor described the mother-to-be and her baby boy as healthy. Scott and Elaine, excited, looking forward to the day they would hold their grandson, paid the hospital bills in advance.

However, that day never came.

According to Joseph Phillips, the father of Vickie’s child, near five in the evening on July 12, 1987, he and Vickie stopped at a Time Saver convenience store at 8692 River Road in Westwego, less than a half mile from Elaine and Scott’s home. Joseph Phillips told police Vickie wanted a Coke, and he wanted chocolate milk.

He went into the store while she waited in the car. He returned to the car minutes later to find his fiancé, along with her bundle of clothes, gone.

After the couple had stayed at the Phillips family’s fishing camp on Bayou Villars Road in Laffite, Joseph Phillips said he was taking Vickie back to her parents’ home.

Scott and Elaine’s small house at 382 Azalea Drive was well-kept. Outside, dogs ran on a green lawn. Inside, four children routinely watched television and prepared their homework for school. After Vickie’s disappearance, visiting reporters found the home decorated with family pictures, including a large photograph of Vickie on the living room wall, her face beaming from a frame of long golden hair.

In the corner of the living room sat diapers, a baby’s car seat, a purple stuffed animal, and gift-wrapped baby shower presents, sitting like a shrine in the corner of the room.

Elaine explained that Vickie not returning from the fishing camp on the day they expected alarmed her family. It was not like her, but they knew something had gone horribly wrong when she missed her baby shower seven days later.

More than three decades later, no one had seen or heard from Vickie Carriere or her baby boy.

Perhaps, the baby arrived on August 7, 1987, as doctors expected, or maybe Vickie gave birth later, or not at all. Neither the authorities nor Scott and Elaine know the answer.

“I’ve heard so many terrible rumors,” Elaine told the television station. “Maybe her baby was cut out of her stomach and is still alive. It’s horrendous not knowing,” she said.

“We can be riding around on weekends, and every blonde we pass, that’s Vickie,” Scott told reporters in 1987. He described running to catch up with various girls he thought were his daughter. “You think everybody looks like your child at this point.”

He said he and Elaine spent their free time “just driving” from Picayune, Mississippi, to places along the Gulf Coast, anywhere their daughter might be.

Elaine described checking waterways and riverbanks in case her daughter had drowned at the fish camp and never actually arrived at the Time Saver.

She followed birth announcements in newspapers, called area hospitals, and checked regularly with the Avondale Marine Shipyard, where Vickie worked as a clerk, asking if Vickie picked up her paycheck.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office initially did not suspect foul play, telling her parents they could not consider her a runaway since she had turned eighteen on September 28.

“At this point,” a sheriff’s representative told reporters that August, “There is little that can be investigated. She is 5-foot-5, 120 pounds, with curly blond hair and hazel eyes. She wore dark blue shorts and a white top with the word ‘Baby’ on it. She has a small rose tattooed on her ankle. She may have a crippled finger on her left hand. That’s all we have to go on.”

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office considers the case an open but cold one. They named Joseph Phillips a suspect in 1988 when he refused to take a polygraph test, but he died in 2002 at age 47.

My research did not find the circumstances of Phillips’ death, but his family purchased a newspaper advertisement following his funeral. The ad read:

“To all search and rescue agencies, friends, and family members of Joseph Phillips… we thank every one of you for comforting us during such a difficult time. Your kindness will never be forgotten. God bless you all.”

Vickie Lynn Carriere’s family still prays daily to learn the truth of what happened to Vickie and her unborn son.