Amber Rae Johnston was a 36-year-old woman who was reported missing from Bullhead City, Arizona, with NamUs-based reporting listing August 17, 2021, as her date of last contact. Amber was described as approximately 5 feet 6 inches tall and about 150 pounds, with blonde or dishwater-blonde hair and green eyes. At the time she disappeared, she had been living in an apartment in Bullhead City, far from her family in Pennsylvania.
Her disappearance initially appeared to center on whether she had left Arizona voluntarily and where she intended to go. Early missing-person information suggested she might have traveled toward Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where her boyfriend had gone, or possibly returned to the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area. What began as uncertainty over a woman traveling across the country would eventually become a years-long search spanning Arizona, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
Investigators gradually reconstructed more of Amber's movements after she left Bullhead City. Her boyfriend had departed Arizona around the same period and traveled toward Myrtle Beach, and Amber was expected to travel east by Greyhound bus. Later investigation showed that her plans apparently changed during the journey. Bullhead City investigator Scott Sharpe told North Carolina authorities that Amber had purchased a bus ticket carrying her from Arizona as far as Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and that she subsequently changed her intended final destination from Myrtle Beach to Pennsylvania. She purchased a ticket that would have taken her from Winston-Salem toward home, but investigators determined that she never boarded that bus. Other reporting indicated that Amber had posted a live video from a bus during her journey, providing evidence that she had indeed traveled east after leaving Arizona. Her phone later registered activity in North Carolina, with investigators saying it last pinged at a truck stop along U.S. 74 in Union County before being deactivated in the Charlotte area. After that point, there were no confirmed communications from Amber to her family, a silence that was especially troubling because her mother and children said remaining in contact with them was important to her.
Only a short distance away, in Anson County, North Carolina, a private trail camera captured haunting images of a woman walking through a heavily wooded area near Anson High School Road in Wadesboro. The photographs were recorded in the early morning hours and showed the woman barefoot and only partially clothed, wearing what appeared to be a bra and leggings and using a large branch as a makeshift walking stick. At the time, no one publicly knew who she was. The location was more than 2,000 miles from Bullhead City but was close enough to the route Amber had taken through North Carolina to later become critically important. Investigators subsequently determined that clothing visible in the trail-camera images was consistent with clothing later recovered with unidentified human remains. Another puzzling detail emerged from the same wooded area: months later, rabbit hunters reportedly found a backpack near where the remains would eventually be discovered. They said money was removed from it and the backpack was left behind, but investigators were unable to recover it afterward and could never establish with certainty that it belonged to Amber or was connected to the unidentified woman. The mystery surrounding that evidence added another unanswered question to a case already filled with gaps.
Human remains were discovered on May 12, 2022, in a wooded area behind the North Carolina National Guard Armory in Wadesboro during work involving a land survey in the area. The remains were badly decomposed and became known for years simply as the Wadesboro or Anson County Jane Doe. Investigators knew that the deceased was an adult White woman, and pieces of a black bra and leggings or pantyhose were recovered with her. Authorities eventually connected the unidentified woman to the trail-camera photographs taken in the same general area. As the photographs were circulated more widely and ultimately added to the Jane Doe's NamUs profile, people familiar with Amber's disappearance began questioning whether the unidentified woman could be her. Amber's mother, Sharon Johnston, came to believe that the woman in the photographs was her daughter. Law enforcement in Arizona and North Carolina began working together, comparing what was known about Amber's movements with the circumstances surrounding the unidentified remains. Dental comparisons proved inconclusive, in part because there was not enough available information to either definitively include or exclude Amber, so investigators turned increasingly to DNA. Family reference samples were submitted, including DNA from Amber's relatives, while investigators worked to have the unidentified woman's DNA entered and compared through national databases.
The effort finally produced the answer Amber's family had feared. In March 2025, Sharon Johnston was contacted by an investigator with the Anson County Sheriff's Office and informed that DNA had linked the unidentified Wadesboro woman to Amber. Early public reporting described the CODIS result as an extremely strong potential match that still required final procedural confirmation, but subsequent reporting, missing-person databases, and the Anson County Sheriff's Office treated the identification as confirmed. Amber's missing-person case was closed after nearly four years of uncertainty, and the woman who had been known only as Jane Doe was finally given back her name. For Sharon and Amber's five children, the identification brought a painful form of closure: they finally knew where Amber had been, but they still did not know exactly what occurred between her arrival in North Carolina and her death. Her mother spoke publicly about the devastation of learning that Amber had spent so long unidentified, while also expressing gratitude that her daughter could finally be brought home and laid to rest near family members.
Questions nevertheless remain about Amber's final journey. Investigators have not publicly established exactly how she traveled from the Winston-Salem, Charlotte, or Union County area to the woods near Wadesboro, why she was barefoot and missing most of her clothing when the trail camera recorded her, or what circumstances left her wandering through the woods with a stick for support. There were also questions about the use of Amber's benefits card after her disappearance; a woman who reportedly used the card said it had been sold to her by Amber's boyfriend, but publicly available information has not established that this transaction was connected to Amber's death. Most importantly, later reporting stated that the Anson County Sheriff's Office did not suspect foul play, while investigators were still awaiting an official determination of the cause of death. The precise date of Amber's death has not been publicly established with certainty, and it would therefore be misleading to assign her an exact date of death based simply on the trail-camera photographs or the later discovery of her remains. Amber Rae Johnston's case is ultimately the story of a woman who left Bullhead City on a cross-country journey intending to reconnect with family, disappeared somewhere along the way in North Carolina, was unknowingly photographed during what may have been her final hours or days, and remained unidentified after her remains were discovered until DNA finally reunited her name with her family. Although the missing-person case is now closed because Amber was found deceased, the final chapter remains incomplete: investigators and her loved ones know where she was found, but the circumstances that brought her to those woods and the exact cause and timing of her death remain unanswered in the public record.Last Seen: Aug 17, 2021
