Disappearance of Alissa Turney

Alissa Marie Turney, of Phoenix, Arizona, was born on April 3, 1984, to Barbara Farner and Stephen Strahm. After her parents divorced, her mother married Michael Turney, who adopted Alissa and her older brother John and later had a daughter, Sarah, with Barbara. Barbara died of cancer when Alissa was nine, and Michael raised all six children alone. By 2001, Alissa was 17, worked at the fast-food restaurant Jack in the Box, had a boyfriend, and lived with Michael and her half-sister Sarah in Phoenix.

May 17, 2001, was the last day of Alissa's junior year at Paradise Valley High School. According to Michael Turney, he dropped her off that morning and picked her up around lunchtime, when the two argued and she stormed off. He and Sarah later found a note in Alissa's bedroom stating she was running away to California, but she had left behind her cell phone and other personal items, and she did not attend a party she had been planning to go to that night. Turney filed a missing person's report the same day. On May 24, 2001, Michael Turney said he received a phone call from a California number during which Alissa swore at him before hanging up. In 2008, he stated that Alissa had been killed by two people connected to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and buried in Desert Center, California.

In the days after Alissa vanished, police did not suspect foul play and no investigation opened. In 2006, a man already imprisoned for an unrelated killing told a prison guard that he had killed Alissa; Phoenix police investigated and concluded he had no contact with her, and he later said he might have confused her with a different victim. The case was reopened in 2008. That December, detectives told Sarah that her father was their primary suspect, and investigators raided the Turney home, seizing more than two dozen improvised explosive devices, 19 firearms, two homemade silencers, a van of gasoline, and a manifesto describing a planned attack on a Phoenix building belonging to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Michael Turney was arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to 10 years in jail on charges related to those seized items; he was released in August 2017.

Public attention around the case grew after Sarah Turney began the podcast Voices for Justice in June 2019, drawing on more than 3,000 pages of Phoenix Police Department case documents, and later posted about the case on TikTok. In August 2020, Michael Turney was arrested in Mesa, Arizona, and indicted and charged by a Maricopa County grand jury with second-degree murder in Alissa's death. He has consistently denied any involvement in her disappearance. All charges against him were dismissed in July 2023. As of 2026, Alissa's body has not been found and no one has been convicted in connection with her disappearance.