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What Happened to Cleashindra Hall?

What happened to Cleashindra Hall? She vanished after a shift in Pine Bluff in 1994; a delayed search and mishandled evidence left her family without answers.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · August 12, 2026

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Everything Sucks: A True Crime-ish Investigative Podcast

Laurell Hall was waiting on the couch with a book. Her daughter Cleashindra, known as Clea, was at work nearby and would call when she was ready for a ride. They had followed that routine for about a year. On May 9, 1994, the last call never came.

What happened to Cleashindra Hall remains unknown. The 18-year-old spoke to her family from her after-school job in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at about 8 p.m. Her employer said she left around 8:30. No one has established where she went after that. She has never been found, and no one has been charged in her disappearance.

What happened to Cleashindra Hall on May 9, 1994?

The day began with school. Clea was a senior at Watson Chapel High School, about two weeks from graduation. In the episode “4: MISSING - Cleashindra Hall” of Everything Sucks: A True Crime-ish Investigative Podcast, host Shanique Woodley describes a weekend full of plans: prom on Friday, then Mother’s Day with the family.

Clea had more plans ahead. She had been accepted to Tennessee State University and hoped to become a pediatrician. She played drums and saxophone in the school band. She loved to read. A summer internship in Boston was lined up before college.

That Monday, Laurell drove her daughter to the home office of Larry Amos on Faucett Road. Clea did part-time clerical work there. Amos ran a business that supported child-care providers; despite the title “Dr.,” he was not a physician.

At about 8 p.m., Clea called home to ask if anyone had called for her. Laurell and one of Clea’s brothers answered. Woodley says Clea told them she would stay a little longer and call when she was ready to leave. She did not make that second call.

Willie Hall came home from work after midnight and checked the children’s rooms. Clea was missing. He woke Laurell, who called Amos. Laurell later told the Pine Bluff Commercial that Amos checked a time card and said Clea had left at 8:30 p.m. He did not know who had taken her.

That time card matters. It records a departure time, as Amos reported it. It does not establish that Clea reached the street, got into a car or arrived anywhere else.

Did Cleashindra Hall leave work with someone?

Amos has said Clea left his property that night. Accounts of what he said about her departure differ. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reports that he told Laurell an unknown person picked Clea up. In a taped police interview described by the Pine Bluff Commercial, Amos said he did not know she had left until he heard the garage door close.

Neither account identifies a driver. No confirmed witness has publicly placed Clea in a car after her final call home. Woodley asks a fair question in the episode: was the sign-out entry checked against Clea’s handwriting? The public accounts used for this story do not answer it.

Clea usually called Laurell for a ride. Woodley says she had left her purse and identification at home that day, which made an unplanned trip seem less likely to her family. Those details help explain why the Halls doubted that she had chosen to disappear. They cannot, on their own, tell us what happened.

Amos was a focus of questions because Clea worked at his house and he gave the account of her leaving. He has denied involvement. Police did not name him a suspect when they searched his property in 2012, and the search did not lead to an arrest. Suspicion about a person is different from evidence that proves what that person did.

How did Clea’s family search for her?

At first, Laurell tried to imagine an ordinary reason Clea had stayed out. Morning made that harder. Clea’s brother went to school and learned she was not there. She had missed the place where her family thought she might turn up.

The Halls checked with people who knew her. They searched near Amos’s home, including a wooded area across the road, and put up missing-person flyers around Pine Bluff. Woodley recounts how quickly the family began looking while they waited for police to take the case.

Accounts differ on the exact hour of the first report. Woodley says the family was told to wait until Clea had been gone 24 hours. The Charley Project also reports that police refused an initial report because Clea was 18, though its stated time for the family’s call differs from the episode’s. The point on which those accounts agree is troubling: the family sought help and was told to wait.

“Clea never called.”
— Shanique Woodley, on Everything Sucks: A True Crime-ish Investigative Podcast

Clea had no history of running away, and she was looking forward to graduation. Investigators later said they did not believe she had left of her own accord. The family kept searching anyway. Flyers went up; Laurell spoke publicly about her daughter. A missing-person report could be delayed. The worry could not.

Why did police search Larry Amos’s house in 2012?

Nearly 18 years passed. Police carried out a warrant-backed search of Amos’s home on March 29, 2012, after two men who had worked on the property years earlier gave investigators information. One described marks on insulation that he thought looked like blood. The other reported an unusual smell while filling a hole in the backyard.

Those were witness reports, not lab findings. They were serious enough to help support a search warrant. Officers searched Amos’s house and an adjacent property, then took four items from a living-room wall for testing. They found no body.

The search gave the family something they had long wanted: investigators examining the place where Clea had worked. It also showed how much time had passed. A wall can be opened years later. It cannot tell investigators everything they might have seen there in May 1994.

Early accounts of the search left open whether the suspected stain was blood. Testing later found no blood on the recovered items. That result undercut the workers’ reported observation; it did not establish where Clea went after work.

What went wrong with the evidence from the house?

The four items sat for a while. Police said the material would go to the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory, but more than a month passed before it was sent.

The Pine Bluff Commercial reported that Police Chief Brenda Davis-Jones told a city council meeting on May 7, 2012, that the lab had not returned results. The items were sent to the lab on May 8. Her statement had left the public with the impression that testing was underway when the material had not yet arrived.

An internal review led to a five-day suspension for the crime-scene technician who collected the items. The lead detective also received a three-day suspension, which a civilian review panel later overturned. The newspaper reported that the items tested negative for blood. Police said they would be sent for DNA testing, but the paper found no later public statement saying whether that testing happened or what it showed.

Woodley gives a harsher account: he says the evidence sat in a detective’s car for about six weeks. The newspaper’s reporting supports the month-long delay before submission to the lab, but it does not establish Woodley’s six-week account. The documented delay is enough to raise a blunt question: why was collected evidence left waiting?

There is room for care here. A negative blood test does not prove that no harm came to Clea inside the house. It also gives no basis to say that harm did occur there. The search did not settle the case.

Is Cleashindra Hall’s case still open?

Yes. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children still lists Clea as missing. In September 2026, Pine Bluff police Lt. Keith Banks told the Pine Bluff Commercial that state police and federal investigators had the full case file for cold-case review.

Banks also explained a limit on DNA testing. Investigators did not have unidentified DNA evidence in Clea’s case to compare with a person or family sample. New technology cannot make a match without material to test. Police said they remained open to new evidence.

Woodley discusses possible motives involving Amos’s business and people connected to his home. She labels those ideas as speculation. No public finding establishes that Clea found wrongdoing in the books, or that anyone at the house harmed her. Those theories should not become the story of her final night by repetition alone.

The Halls have kept Clea’s name in view. In May 2026, a balloon release was planned at St. Peter’s Rock Missionary Baptist Church to mark 32 years since Laurell dropped her daughter at work. Woodley says the family chose pink because it was Clea’s favorite color.

Anyone with information can contact the Pine Bluff Police Department at 870-541-5300. Clea’s missing-person poster still carries her photograph. The balloons carry her face, too.

The full episode of Everything Sucks: A True Crime-ish Investigative Podcast is on Underdog Podcasts, with the rest of the network's shows.