Cold Case Files Revisited: Questions linger in mysterious 2001 disappearance of Mena Star newspaper reporter

Gloria White Moore McDonald

The wind off the Ouachita ridge carried a bite sharp enough to pink the cheeks, but the sun was high and the sky a polished winter blue. Gloria White Moore McDonald stepped out of the family car at the Queen Wilhelmena State Park in a bright yellow jacket that made her easy to spot against the browns and grays of January, 2001..

She was 68, five-foot-six, 120 pounds and fit from years of courthouse staircases and deadline sprints. A reporter for the Mena Star, she covered bond hearings and murder trials with the same crisp eye she now turned on the trail ahead. Her husband, stepson, and the stepson’s girlfriend started down the path to Lover’s Leap.

One hundred fifty yards in, storm-felled pines lay like pickup sticks across the route. “I’ll wait at the lodge,” Gloria said. “Go on without me.” She turned back alone. That was the final confirmed sighting.

By 4:30 p.m. the others returned, laughing about the view, expecting Gloria at a gift-shop table with coffee and a notebook. The restaurant was nearly empty: six park employees, a handful of waitstaff, a lone rented room.

Sheriff Mike Oglesby later told the Mena Star, “We accounted for every soul on the mountain that weekend.”

Searches began at dusk with flashlight beams slicing fog, voices echoing off limestone bluffs. Bloodhounds arrived the next morning. They locked on Gloria’s scent from the trailhead, tracked it past the gift shop, down a service drive, and onto the asphalt loop below the lodge.

There the trail died.

No tire marks in the soft shoulder. No discarded jacket. No struggle in the pine needles. Just the sudden silence of a scent that ends at pavement.

Gloria’s beat was the Polk County courthouse, where she transcribed testimony in longhand and filed stories under tight deadlines. Colleagues remember her as “quietly relentless.” After she vanished, two friends combed her desk drawers and clipping files for anything that smelled of threat.

They found nothing. No angry letters, no marked-up drug indictments, no late-night tips scribbled on napkins. Yet the family’s theory took root anyway: the mountains around Mena have long carried rumors of airstrips carved into clearings, of drop zones for bundles wrapped in duct tape and burlap.

A journalist poking where she shouldn’t could become a liability. “Gloria asked questions for a living,” her stepson said in 2001. “Maybe she asked one too many.”

Arkansas State Police Senior Special Agents Lynn Benedict and Hays McWhirter logged hundreds of hours. Tips trickled in including a woman’s scream heard near Talimena Drive, a yellow jacket snagged on a cedar twenty miles away (wrong size, wrong shade). Each lead collapsed under scrutiny.

The file moved from active to cold, but never closed. It sits in a cabinet in Little Rock and inside the FBI’s missing-persons database, tagged: NO SUSPECTS. NO REMAINS. NO ANSWERS.  

Drive up Arkansas 88 on a November afternoon and the lodge looks much the same—stone walls, steep roof, steam curling from the kitchen vent. Hikers still pose at Lover’s Leap for selfies. The gift shop sells the same postcards. B

The case number is still live. A single detail like an overheard conversation, a vehicle seen that day, a flash of yellow in the wrong place could restart the clock.

Gloria’s last byline ran three days before she disappeared, a routine account of a plea deal in a methamphetamine case. The final sentence: “Justice, like truth, sometimes arrives long after the cameras leave.”  

Twenty-two years later, both are still en route.

Gloria White Moore McDonald remains missing. Anyone with information is urged to come forward, no matter how small the detail and cpontact the Polk County Sheriff’s Office st (479) 394-2511.