99-year-old man beaten over parking spot 1
Inmates hides dope in his rolls of fat 2
Customer kills armed liquor store robber 3
By Steve Huff in missing persons, unsolved
Monday, Sep. 22 2008 @ 12:10PM

jleehampton.jpgInvestigators in Knoxville, TN are trying to find a young Alabama woman who vanished last Friday while staying at a local Days Inn.

Twenty-one-year-old Jennifer Lee Hampton, from Florence, Alabama, was last seen around 9 on Friday night. Sadly, Knoxville police believe they have evidence that something bad happened to Jennifer.

A search is going on today in and around Turkey Creek and Lovell Road in Knoxville, near the junction of Interstates 75 and 40. [View the Days Inn location here, on Google's Street View.]

Hampton was employed by a chain restaurant, Mama Blues. A new location is opening on Kingston Pike and Jennifer was there to assist in the training of new employees. She checked into her room at the Days Inn on Thursday, September 18, and co-workers took three other rooms in the same establishment.

Cops have told local media that they don't believe Jennifer left her room Friday evening. Since she's missing, we can probably assume they mean she didn't leave of her own volition. By Saturday, Jennifer's fellow employees knew that something was wrong and they reported her missing.

The 5'3", 110 lb. brunette posted more photos of family than of herself on her MySpace. The photos Jennifer did place in her album there showed a young woman who probably looked younger than her years in person, especially since she's also been described as having a thin build.

Her profile quote read, "life is too short to hold grudges so love the people that treat you right an ignore the people that dont..."

If you examine the Street View of the location from which Jennifer Lee Hampton disappeared, you can see there's a large truck stop just down the street from the Days Inn. I lived in Knoxville for 4 years, and know the area -- it's changed a little since the early 90s, but it was always busy, due to the Interstates.

My point in mentioning this is that Jennifer and her Mama Blues co-workers were staying at a perfectly decent hotel in an area that draws a huge variety of transient traffic every day -- truckers going north to south on 75 and east to west on 40, just to name the most common traffic at that location.

The odds are that eventually, one innocent person passing through such a location might end up running into someone else passing through who has anything but innocent drives or motivations.

Normally I might withhold such speculation, but police have already said that they believe Jennifer Lee Hampton was the victim of foul play. If so, they may have a tall order ahead of them, if all of Hampton's co-workers check out. They will have to trawl through receipts and security tapes from the hotel, the nearby truck stop and any other restaurant or customer-oriented business in the area.

If you were in the area on Friday night or on Saturday and think you have any information that might help, call the Knoxville Police Department at 865-215-7014.

[Knoxville News Sentinel and WATE.com.]