WANDA COTTON

Wanda Cotton Randy Sellers Randy (age-progressed) Tyran Cotton

On August 16th, 1980 Wanda, and her husband John's lives were changed forever. Their oldest son Randy Lee Sellers, who was 17, disappeared on that day and has never been found. Randy had decided to go to the Kenton County Fair that evening with his friends. Wanda and John were  told that while he was at the fair, he became intoxicated. The police said that they took him into custody and made the decision to take Randy home. Their home was in a very remote area of the county, where there wasn't a lot of traffic. The police said that they could not locate the Cotton's home, so they made the choice to give Randy a break and let him out to walk home. The area that Randy was dropped off was within a half-mile of the Licking River, which was near flood stage at the time. An eyewitness came forward stating that he saw Randy, staggering in the road and two police cars parked a short distance from him. Randy never made it home that night, and the eyewitness who saw Randy walking down the road, is the last person we can verify to have seen Randy. Many, many searches in the river and the area where Randy disappeared failed to ever locate any information that would help to find Randy. It was like Randy had disappeared off the face of the earth. When Randy disappeared there was no support or help for parents of missing children. Wanda and John felt as if they had to beg and plead to get the local media to show Randy's picture and tell the details of his disappearance. They sat by the phone waiting for any calls, and tried to locate any one who would be able to help them with their search.

A man by the name of Donald Leroy Evans, who was a convicted serial killer, confessed that he had picked Randy up on the night of August 16th, took him to a state park about 30 miles from our home and shot him in the head with a .45 caliber pistol and buried him in the park. Evans had been convicted of murdering a 10-year-old girl from Mississippi, but claimed he had killed more than 40 people across the United States. Through all of this, Wanda still doesn't  know if Randy was murdered, if he drowned in the river, or if he is walking around somewhere with amnesia. If Donald Evans did murder Randy, Wanda will never know because he was murdered in prison on death row in January of 1999.

Tragedy again would befall Wanda and John. When Randy disappeared, Wanda and John's other son Tyran was age 13. Randy's disappearance completely devastated his life. Ten years after Randy's disappearance Tyran committed suicide by jumping of the bridge into the river where he thought his brother had drowned. It took 4 months to recover Tyran's body from the river.

Wanda is one of the first Warrior parents in the crusade for missing children. About one year after Randy's disappearance, Wanda helped organized and put on the first conference for missing children in Covington, Kentucky that brought Senator Mitch McConnell, John Walsh, Robbie Calloway and other professionals from around the country. At that conference, John Walsh and Robbie Calloway met and went to Washington to start the fight for missing and exploited children. Their fight led to the missing children act that made a monumental step forward in this country's effort to find our children. Many other laws were soon put into act and eventually the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children came about. She also was a founding member in Kentucky of the Exploited Children Help Organization (ECHO). She was trained to provide peer support at Team Hoper/National Center for Missing Exploited Children in 2002.