Crum was seated inside of a pickup truck in Dallas, Texas on December 26, 1983. The truck belonged to her mother's boyfriend, James B. Monroe. It was parked outside of McDonald's Grocery at approximately 9:45 a.m. that morning. Monroe says he went inside the store to purchase soft drinks and paper towels and left Crum in the truck alone. When he returned a few minutes later, she had vanished. Crum has never been heard from again.

Three weeks after Crum's disappearance, police filed murder charges against Monroe in connection with her case. A judge dismissed the charges a short time later on grounds of insufficient evidence, and they were never refiled. Monroe maintains his innocence in Crum's disappearance. In 1986, investigators checked the fingerprints of a girl who was abandoned in California that same year. The girl matched Crum's general physical description and was about the right age. Their fingerprints did not match, however.

In 2007, authorities announced they considered David Elliot Penton a person of interest in Crum's disappearance and in the disappearances and murders of several other young girls, including Angelica Gandara and Ara Johnson. Photographs of Penton are posted below this case summary. He is has been incarcerated in an Ohio prison since 1987. He also signed a plea agreement admitting to the murders of three girls in Texas. The Texas victims disappeared over a period of 18 months in the Dallas area, and ranged in age from 4 to 9 years old. Penton was also convicted of manslaughter in the child abuse death of his own infant son in 1984; he fled while free on bond pending the outcome of his appeal, and remained at large until 1987, when he was charged with the murder of a friend's 9-year-old niece in Ohio. He was later convicted of this crime.

Penton's cellmates went to investigators and claimed he had implicated himself in the disappearances of Johnson, Crum and Gandara. He has not been charged in connection with any of these disappearances, however. All the cases, including Crum's, remain unsolved.

Above: David Elliot Penton, circa 2007