The FBI is assisting in the investigations of three women whose remains were found within the last year in the same North Carolina town where a fourth woman is now missing.
Abby Patterson, 20, told her mother she’d return in an hour when she left the family’s Lumberton, N.C., home on the morning of Sept. 5 and stepped into an old brown Buick parked outside.
Authorities are searching for the young woman — who has not been seen or heard from since — as they also probe the deaths of three other women whose bodies were found weeks apart from each other in a three-block area of Lumberton.
“At this point we don’t know if there’s a connection,” Lumberton Police Chief Michael McNeill said of the women.