What happened to Phoenix Coldon?

According to Phoenix Coldon’s mother, Dec. 11, 2011 was a day like any other for the St. Louis family. They went to church and did some shopping. But then, at about 3 p.m., the 23-year-old drove away from her family home in a black 1998 Chevy Blazer, and was never seen again.

Since then, theories have emerged about what happened to Coldon, a homeschooled fencing champion who, by all accounts, led a sheltered life. Several sightings have been reported, but those all turned out to be either fake, or inconclusive. About a year after Coldon vanished, a man in Texas said he knew where she was, and in the course of following the lead, Coldon’s family spent their life savings and were financially ruined.

That man, however, finally admitted he made it up. “They said he made it up to get attention,” Coldon’s mother, Goldia Coldon said that year. “It cost us dearly and it led absolutely nowhere. It was just his idea of a joke.”

What happened to Phoenix Coldon’s car?

Only a few hours after Phoenix Coldon was reported missing, police found her Chevy Blazer about 25 minutes away from her home, with her personal belongings still inside it. A cell phone bill sent to collections was also discovered in the vehicle. Some reports say the car was still running, but others now say those early reports were inaccurate. What’s for certain, Coldon’s bank account and cell phone activity ceased, as if she had vanished into thin air.

Strangely, Coldon car was impounded as an abandoned vehicle, with no inventory of the items found inside. For some reason, Coldon’s family was not even notified that the Chevy was recovered until much later, when a family friend noticed it by chance at the impound lot.

“I just wish those police had done what they were supposed to do by running those plates and seeing that the vehicle was registered to me,” Phoenix’s mother said. “We would’ve had a two-week start if we’d known where the car was,” Phoenix’s father, Lawrence Coldon, said.

Did Phoenix Coldon run away?

Leading theories about what happened to Phoenix Coldon include sex trafficking abduction, some other form of foul play, or possibly, she ran away. In the years since she went missing, evidence has emerged that Coldon led a double life. She was no longer enrolled in school like her parents thought she was, and she had two cell phones: One on her family’s plan, and another, which no one knew about, she paid for on her own.

Tim Baker, Coldon’s longtime friend, later revealed she lived with her boyfriend, but didn’t tell her religious parents. Meanwhile, she maintained the second cell phone to talk to another man without her boyfriend’s knowledge. (That man was later cleared of any wrongdoing.) Coldon’s best friend, Akira Hogan, also said that Coldon’s relationship with her parents had become strained, and that Coldon had become paranoid.

According to Hogan, Coldon told her one day not long before she vanished that she was leaving. “She was like, ‘I’m just leaving. I’m going to pack up my stuff and I’m just gonna go. Her mental state, like, it wasn’t Phoenix. … That’s not my friend,” Hogan said.

Also supporting the theory she ran away, in a selfie video discovered after she vanished, Coldon seemed in distress, and spoke openly about how she wished she could “start over … I just want to be happy, man. I can’t remember a time when I was happy. Genuinely happy,” Coldon said.

Was Phoenix Coldon ever found?

While investigating Phoenix Coldon’s disappearance, private investigators learned Coldon had two previously unknown birth certificates: One with the name Phoenix Coldon, and another, Phoenix Reeves, Goldia Coldon’s maiden surname and Phoenix’s last name before her stepfather, Lawrence, adopted her. The latter certificate led the investigation to Alaska, but that lead, too, proved to be a dead end. Meanwhile, in 2014, a friend said they saw Coldon with two other men on a flight from Las Vegas to St. Louis, and said she departed the plane with two large, muscular men, but the reported sighting went nowhere.

In 2018, the Coldon family home was in foreclosure due to the financial strain of the private investigation funded by Phoenix’s family. Goldia told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Let them take the house. I don’t care. All I want to know is where Phoenix is.”