“People don’t just disappear.” It seems like an obvious statement, but it’s one that Alyssa Taylor’s family continues to press to investigators in the wake of her 2022 disappearance.
In September 2022, 25-year-old mother of three Alyssa Taylor was living on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. “She loved going to the beach and the water park and taking her boys to the zoo,” Krista Taylor, Alyssa’s mother, told Dateline. “She was just a wonderful person. She would give you the shirt off her back.”
Alyssa was surrounded by family. She and her children lived with her mother, and they were within a 10-mile radius of her aunts, Shelly and Sabrina. “We were very close,” Krista said.
Shelly Payton, Krista’s sister, described a close-knit bond between the women. “I was only 11 when Alyssa was born, so Alyssa was just like everybody’s baby growing up,” Shelly told Dateline. “She was just this amazing little soul. She was just amazing, a good-hearted girl.”
“She loved Halloween,” Sabrina Taylor, Krista’s sister-in-law, told Dateline. Actually, all three women took care to mention Alyssa’s love of the holiday. “That was one of her favorite holidays. She loved dressing up,” Sabrina said. “She had three beautiful boys, and she loved to dress them up on Halloween.”
In the wake of separating from her children’s father, Alyssa was navigating young adulthood and being a single mother. “She was in her early twenties, still trying to figure life out,” Shelly said. “After she had kids, she enjoyed cooking. She actually had dreams one day to become a baker, and she started baking all these cakes and cupcakes. That was her biggest thing — that one day she was going to have her own shop.”
On September 13, 2022, Alyssa texted her mom to let her know she was going to join her friend Danny McNeal on his two-day trucking route to North Carolina. “Just to get out of the house,” Krista recalled. Alyssa’s trip didn’t alarm her mother. She had taken similar trips with McNeal in the past. “She just told me she loved me and that she was going on a trip with Danny. I texted her back and said OK, and I love her.”
Krista was in Florida on vacation at the time. Days passed without hearing from Alyssa. “I kept calling her — calling her, texting her. I couldn’t get ahold of her,” she said. She wasn’t worried, though, since it would sometimes take a couple of days to hear back from her daughter. “I didn’t think nothing of it until we were leaving Florida,” Krista said. Finally, on September 16, she went online to look for any activity from Alyssa. “And as soon as I got on Facebook, everyone kept saying prayers to Danny McNeal.”
In the early morning hours of September 14, Danny McNeal died in a tractor-trailer accident in the Hillsborough area of Orange County, North Carolina. According to the autopsy report obtained by Dateline from the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, McNeal’s tractor veered from the road, colliding with an overpass abutment, and then caught fire. McNeal had a blood alcohol content of 0.32%, four times the legal driving limit. There was no soot in McNeal’s airways, so the medical examiner concluded his death most likely occurred prior to the fire. No other remains were found in the wreckage.
Krista called her sisters up in Virginia. “She was hysterical,” Shelly said. “She was screaming, she was crying, you know? And she was telling me that she couldn’t get ahold of Alyssa, and Danny was dead, and we didn’t know where Alyssa was.”
The desperate search for Alyssa began. “We posted on social media, asking if anybody had heard from her to please let us know, and we were getting nowhere with that,” Shelly said. On September 20, Krista’s aunts went to the Accomack County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia to file a missing persons report.
The North Carolina State Highway Patrol was in charge of the investigation into McNeal’s accident. Krista, Shelly, and Sabrina traveled to the Hillsborough area to visit the crash site and see what was left of the wreckage, which had been collected by Moore’s Trucking. Krista says she identified items she knew belonged to her daughter. In particular, she found Alyssa’s pink, fireproof hunting blanket seared to the dashboard of the cab.
According to Sabrina, highway patrol contracted a North Carolina towing company to collect the remaining debris, which was taken to a landfill. She says investigators took cadaver dogs to the dump site. “To our understanding, everything was buried over 50 feet underneath the ground, and the dogs that they brought in can only do, I think it’s 10 or 15 feet, so they couldn’t even if they wanted to. There’s nothing they could have done without digging everything up,” Sabrina said. “And they didn’t do it.”
Dateline reached out to the North Carolina State Highway Patrol for comment and received a written statement from their public information officer, First Sergeant Christopher Knox.
“During our continued collision investigation, subsequent searches took place of the involved commercial motor vehicle, the crash scene and at a landfill which reportedly housed debris from the crash. The State Highway Patrols specialized Collision Reconstruction Unit was called in to head the ongoing investigation and further forensic test[sic] were conducted. The State Highway Patrol has worked with outside partner agency’s[sic] from the local, state and federal level to assist with our collision investigation. While we cannot provide further specifics as to the investigative techniques and findings, we can say that a comprehensive process has taken place.”
The North Carolina State Highway Patrol concluded that Alyssa Taylor was not in the tractor-trailer at the time of the crash. “They claim they’ve done everything that they possibly can do on their end,” Sabrina said.
Meanwhile, Virginia investigators began looking into Alyssa’s disappearance. Dateline spoke to Lieutenant Joshua Marsh and Sergeant Nicholas Kugler of the Investigations Criminal Division for the Accomack County Sheriff’s Office. They were able to identify that Alyssa’s last confirmed whereabouts were with Danny McNeal on the evening of September 13, 2022, in Exmore, Virginia, about an hour from her residence.
McNeal had been parked illegally, and an officer approached his tractor-trailer. Police captured the interaction on bodycam. “The officer spoke to a female inside the truck,” Lt. Marsh told Dateline. “But you cannot view the female inside the car in the body camera because he’s talking to her from the exterior.”
Investigators told Dateline that Krista, Sabrina, and Shelly each identified the voice heard on the footage as Alyssa’s.
According to Accomack County, Alyssa logged into Facebook at 1:05 a.m. on September 14, pinging a tower that matched the truck’s GPS route. “Everything — any kind of digital presence — ceases after that date and time,” Lt. Marsh said.
According to Sabrina Taylor, investigators in North Carolina said that the login proves her niece’s phone was most likely in the truck at the time of the crash, but it doesn’t prove that Alyssa herself was in the truck. Alyssa’s phone has not been found. “Highway patrol keeps saying she could have easily jumped out,” Sabrina said. “But there’s been nothing. No chatter of her. You can’t find her anywhere. Every local hospital gets contacted on a regular basis. There are no Jane Does that match her. There’s just nothing.”
Sergeant Kugler later interviewed McNeal’s girlfriend, who told him that McNeal stopped somewhere near Emporia, Virginia, at 1:30 a.m. on September 14. “She heard a female saying Emporia,” he told Dateline. According to McNeal’s girlfriend, when she asked who it was, McNeal dismissed the voice as someone on the CB radio. But she said she hadn’t heard the static typically associated with the CB. “So whether he had somebody in the truck or not, she does not know,” Kugler said.
Accomack investigators tracked McNeal’s tractor–trailer to the US 58 truck stop near Emporia. “They reviewed footage from that truck stop and did not see anything that would raise suspicion that she got out of the vehicle or some kind of tragic incident happening at that location,” Lt. Marsh said. According to Marsh, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management sent cadaver dogs to the truck stop, but they didn’t find anything in connection to Alyssa.
The differences in the two states’ investigations have led to tension. “They had their determinations and what they believed their evidence was showing, and then we had our belief,” Lt. Marsh said. “So we kind of hit a brick wall with some kind of level of cooperation at that point.” According to the Accomack County Sheriff’s Office, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol closed its report, making the determination that Alyssa was not in the vehicle. “They never officially told us that they closed it,” Sgt. Kugler said. “We don’t have a completed report, start to finish, from their side.”
In their written statement to Dateline, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol responded:
“The current collision investigation report reflects the original findings in that the collision was a single vehicle fatal collision involving a driver only. The report is supported by the initial at scene findings as well as the investigation conducted in the days after the collision. We continue to be open to assisting Virginia authorities in the continued missing persons case and join with all in hoping that this case ends positively for Alyssa Taylor and her family. Any questions specific to the missing persons case would best be directed to Virginia authorities.”
“I just kind of would like for North Carolina and Virginia to get more on the same page with things,” Alyssa’s aunt Shelly said. “To me, it just seems like it’s a contest — who’s right and who’s wrong. I just kind of wish that it would be more working together.”
Alyssa’s family has a hard time believing she would disappear of her own free will. So do Accomack County investigators. “Alyssa was heavily dependent upon her family,” Lt. Marsh said. “To go this long, to believe that she wouldn’t reach out to them, say hi, want to know how her kids are doing — isn’t consistent with her normal behavior.”
Alyssa’s absence looms heavy on her family. “It’s really hard on me not having closure and having answers,” her mom Krista said. “And of course, I would like for her little boys to have answers and closure, too, when they get older.” Alyssa’s two oldest children now live with their father, and her youngest is being raised by her aunt Sabrina.
In Accomack County, Alyssa’s case is still an open missing persons investigation, and her family regularly checks in for new information. “People don’t just disappear. Like, she’s somewhere, and we just want to know where, you know?” her aunt Sabrina said. “If it is in the truck, we want North Carolina to do a thorough search, like, prove to us without a shadow of a doubt. If she wasn’t, then where is she?”
Alyssa Taylor is described as 5’5” tall, weighing 200 lbs., with brown hair and green eyes. She would be 28 years old today.
If you have any information, please contact the Accomack County Sheriff’s Office at 757-787-1131 or 757-824-5666 or tips may be submitted through their website at accomackcountysheriffsoffice.org.
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