Tiffany Whitton

In 2016, journalist Tom Junod wrote an article about the case in Esquire, seeing the media silence on Whitton's case as an exception to what is called missing white woman syndrome. While Whitton is white, her troubled past and criminal record made her a less attractive subject to report on, he noted; her mother complained that some television shows that devote airtime to these cases had told her they were not interested in her daughter's disappearance. Junod also reported that Whitton's half-brother Blake said he received a phone call from her in January 2014, almost four months after she was last seen.

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources brought in sonar and found a large object under 40 feet (12 m) of water below the bridge damage. When state patrol divers went down to look, however, the object turned out to be a large chunk of concrete from the bridge's construction. This is to date the last official attempt to find Whitton, and in 2016 Marietta turned the case over to the county's new cold case squad.

In April 2016 Esquire magazine published an article about Whitton's disappearance. Reporter Tom Junod was interested in the cases of women who do not trigger what has sometimes been called "missing white woman syndrome", where the media devotes excessive coverage to their cases. Even though the women are white, Junod believes they are ignored due to their troubled backgrounds. "[M]edia outlets ... tend to prefer women who are white, pretty, and, above all, innocent", Junod wrote.

In 2015, Caudle pleaded guilty in Cherokee County to charges of possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute and possessing a firearm while a convicted felon. He was sentenced to 10–20 years in prison, a minimum he was told by the judge resulted from a belief that he was not cooperating fully in the Whitton investigation. As of September 2018 he is serving his sentence in Dooly State Prison at Unadilla.

In mid-2015 the case was transferred to a third detective when Moeller, distressed over her inability to close the case, left the detective bureau to teach at the city's police academy. Her replacement, Mike Freer, managed to get what seemed to be a major break in the case later in the year when the Cobb County district attorney said a meth trafficker he had been prosecuting had heard from some of his friends that some time after Tiffany disappeared Caudle and some friends had driven up to Lake Allatoona north of the Atlanta area and thrown a concrete-filled barrel off the Bethany Bridge. The informant described damage to the bridge that matched what Freer found when he visited it.

At the time, Whitton, who had a criminal record, was jobless, addicted to heroin and crystal methamphetamine, and in a difficult relationship with her boyfriend, Ashley Caudle, who was at the Walmart with her. He noted her failure to return that night, going to a nearby restaurant where she had worked to look for her, but did not contact the police or her family. Whitton's mother, who was used to her frequent and sometimes lengthy unexplained absences, went to the police in January 2014.

The video of the incident shows the loss prevention officers waiting at the door, expecting Whitton to return, as she had left her footwear and bag behind. Caudle, who had watched Whitton's apprehension passively from the door, is seen talking to her. Later, however, he told people he had gone to the truck, where he was charging his phone, gotten a weapon—a gun or a knife, in different accounts—and confronted the loss prevention officers, who let her go, whereupon she escaped out the door. He explained in 2016 that he had told those stories only to impress the people he was telling them to, Weinstein and a woman who visited him in prison.

The next morning Caudle drove back to the Powder Springs house where he, Whitton and his daughter lived. He spent the next several days trying to find her—calling old boyfriends of hers, hospitals and jails in the area, calls verified by phone records. Two weeks later, he told his own probation officer that he had not been able to locate Whitton since that night, which records of the meeting confirm. Caudle also cleaned the truck, which later investigators took note of, but he insists he did that regularly due to the drug-related waste, such as used and discarded paraphernalia, left in it.

Caudle, and later Whitton's mother, made some efforts to locate Whitton on their own in the months after September 13, believing she was alive and might eventually return, as she had after dropping out of sight in the past. In January 2014, after Whitton had not made any contact with Lisa Daniels or anyone else in the family, to her knowledge, she informed the police.

Daniels called Caudle before Thanksgiving; he told her of his calls to jails and hospitals in the days after Whitton disappeared. Daniels believed that perhaps, with the approaching winter holidays, her daughter would at least call her family. However, she did not, and in January 2014 Daniels and Boyette reported Whitton missing to the Marietta police.

Many of the other residents of the house besides Caudle had known Tiffany; Moeller believed that if Caudle did not know or would not tell police anything, others might. As a result of information developed from that raid, the same group of officers executed a search warrant in July 2014 on Caudle's mother's house in Marietta. Despite extensive excavation and searches with cadaver dogs, they found nothing that provided them with any leads.

He chose Whitton's case from 13 stories of similar women he was aware of, all of whom had gone missing over a three-year period with only three of them found—and all of those dead. Daniels told him she had tried to interest the producers of some shows that devoted segments to missing persons cases in covering her daughter's disappearance, and they told her they were not interested. She likened the process to an audition.

Daniels has long believed Whitton is dead and Caudle is responsible, due to his failure to let her or the police know of her disappearance. "He knows what happened to her and he knows where she is", she told The Atlanta Journal–Constitution in 2017. "Of that I have no doubt."

If foul play did befall Whitton, Caudle has a suspect of his own, a former boyfriend of hers who also was a heavy meth user. He notes that after he and Weinstein returned to the latter's house in the morning after they had looked for Whitton and taken more drugs, the friend stayed out in the parking lot. In December 2013, the man, having an apparent psychotic episode, kicked down the door of a neighboring house at 4 a.m., insisting that he was being chased by armed men bent on exacting revenge on him for something they believed he had done to a woman, until he was taken away by the police.

Whitton was sentenced to a short prison term in late 2012. Daniels practiced tough love, raising her granddaughter and telling Whitton she could not talk to her again until she overcame her addictions and turned her life around. Her grandmother, Anita Boyette, remained in touch, picking Whitton up when she was released. She entered a drug rehabilitation facility shortly afterwards.

In March 2011 Whitton, then living in the North Georgia town of Dalton, along with several others, was arrested and charged after a home invasion. Whitton told police that the victim had stolen $60 from her earlier that evening and she was merely trying to get it back; investigators, however, suspected it had been payment for drugs that the victim purportedly failed to deliver.

Boyette knew too that Whitton often went on long drug binges, and that since she had been apprehended for shoplifting while still on parole from the 2011 charges, she was probably also trying to lower her profile for a time. Nevertheless, she called Caudle and learned not only of the September 13 incident that had prompted the letter but that he, too, had not seen Whitton since then.

As she reached adulthood, Whitton grew more rebellious. She dropped out of high school during her sophomore year, putting an end to early ambitions of becoming a veterinarian. She relinquished for adoption a child from a teenage pregnancy, and she would later say that she was permanently affected by the experience. By 2008 she had had another child, a daughter, and started using drugs. She became addicted first to OxyContin and was caught shoplifting a pair of flip-flops from Walmart. Intermittently, she worked as a waitress or bartender; on Facebook she described herself as a Hooters waitress living in Kennesaw.

Tiffany Whitton (born January 30, 1987) is a waitress who disappeared after an incident with Walmart loss prevention officers in Marietta, Georgia, United States in the early morning hours of September 13, 2013. After being observed apparently shoplifting, she had been confronted at the store's exit, but after a brief struggle broke free and fled. She has not been seen since.

Tiffany Michelle Whitton was born to Lisa Daniels in 1987; she and Whitton's father divorced soon afterwards. Daniels recalls her as "happy-go-lucky" and "rambunctious" during her early childhood in Kennesaw, a western suburb of Atlanta, but she also saw signs of her daughter's later issues. When Whitton was two, Daniels told Esquire in 2016, "I'd find things in her toy box that didn't belong to her." Her daughter said that someone at day care had given her the toys; Daniels stated her daughter became a more accomplished liar as she got older.