Do you know what happened to Francine? On a cold evening in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 44-year-old Francine Frost, a white female, left her home on February 16, 1981, to go grocery shopping at a local Skaggs Alpha Beta. She never returned. The following day, her husband, Malcolm, discovered her car in the grocery store parking lot at 21st Street and Memorial Drive. The keys were still hanging from the driver's side door lock, but Francine was nowhere to be found.
Foul play was immediately suspected, and a missing person report was filed with the Tulsa Police Department.
For nearly two years, Francine's family held onto hope, searching for answers. Then, in January 1983, partial human remains were discovered in a rural area of Muskogee County, near Martin, Oklahoma, following an anonymous phone call to police. Unbeknownst to the Frost family, these were the remains of Francine. However, due to a lack of communication between law enforcement agencies at the time, a connection was not made to the missing persons case in Tulsa. The remains were buried as a 'Jane Doe,' and the case grew cold.
Decades passed without any new leads. The mystery of Francine's disappearance haunted her family. It wasn't until her grandson, Corey, took it upon himself to investigate that a breakthrough was made. He began searching online databases for unidentified persons and found a Jane Doe case from Muskogee County whose clothing description—a prairie denim jean skirt and a white girdle—matched what his grandmother was wearing the night she vanished. This crucial discovery led to the exhumation of the remains in 2015. DNA analysis confirmed in August 2016 what Corey had suspected: the Jane Doe was indeed Francine Frost. The medical examiner determined that she had been brutally murdered, having sustained gunshots to the back of her head.
Despite the identification of her remains and the determination of her cause of death, Francine Frost's killer has never been brought to justice. There have been no arrests, and no suspects have been publicly named in connection with her abduction and murder. The case remains an open and active cold case investigation. In the wake of their tragic loss and the decades-long wait for answers, Francine's family championed 'Francine's Law' in Oklahoma, which now requires law enforcement to enter missing persons and unidentified bodies into a national database in a timely manner, in the hopes that other families will not have to endure the same prolonged uncertainty they faced.
