More than 43 years have passed since Ina Arnall, a 47-year-old mother-of-three, vanished in Poteau, Oklahoma.
“Honestly, time does help, but it’s -- it’s still there and it’s very present to the -- to the three of us children,” eldest daughter Debbie Barber said. “It is a — truly — a living nightmare.”
Ina grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. She married Henry Arnall when she was in her early 20s. Their three children, two girls and a boy, soon followed. “She was a stay-at-home mom,” Debbie said. “She was kind of like the safe parent—the safe place parent, you know? That’s who we would go to if there was an issue.”
The family moved to Poteau when the children were young, where their father worked in oil and gas. “I think I was going to go into first grade when we moved there,” Debbie said. “We grew up kind of out in the country, a little bit. We had horses and cows. We had, like, a farm.”
When Debbie was old enough to leave the nest, she headed to Tulsa — about a 2-hour drive from Poteau.
On Thursday, May 28, 1981, Ina visited her daughter in Tulsa to celebrate then-26-year-old Debbie’s impending nuptials at a bridal shower. “It was a week before my wedding,” Debbie said. “We went back to my house after the shower and then she left from my house driving back to Poteau.”
“I don’t think she got in to Poteau until probably 5:30 or so,” Debbie said.
The following day, May 29, Debbie received a call from her father. “My phone is ringing off the wall,” she said. “It’s Dad wanting to know if I had seen Mom. I said, ‘Well, no. She [went] home. She left me yesterday and was coming home to you.’”
Debbie says her father told her that Ina had returned to Poteau the night before, but the evening took a turn. “This is what he says: ‘She came here, and we went out to your brother’s property,’” Debbie remembered. Debbie’s brother had just bought a new house out in the country, but on the night of May 28, 1981, her brother wasn’t home. “He wasn’t there. He was working,” Debbie said. “‘And when we were driving back, your mom got mad and when we got back to my office, she just -- she got in her car and left,’” Debbie recalled, quoting her father. “And he said, ‘So you haven’t heard from her?’ I said, ‘No, I haven’t heard from her-- not a single thing.’”
Debbie grew concerned — this wasn’t like her mother.
That weekend, Debbie and her father located Ina’s car — a brown Oldsmobile — at the Tulsa Airport. “At first, it was kind of relief, thinking ‘Oh, OK. So she’s gotten on a plane,’” Debbie said. “We were able to get the manifest—whatever, all the incoming and outgoing flights.”
There was nothing listed on those flight records that would lead them to believe Ina left on a flight that weekend. “That kind of, you know, blew us out of the water right there -- her name wasn’t on anything and no aliases that we would recognize,” Debbie said.
They checked with Ina’s friends and her sister, who still lived in Indianapolis, to see if maybe Ina had gone to visit one of them. “They hadn’t seen her,” Debbie said.
Debbie decided she needed to alert the authorities. “I reported her missing here in Tulsa,” she said. Dateline reached out to the Tulsa Police Department for information about the early stages of the investigation, but has not yet received a response.
Just days after Ina vanished, Debbie was set to be married and her mother was still absent. “I got married on June the 6th,” she said. Debbie put on a smile, all the while worrying about her mother. “I think I deserve a Grammy award for that, let me tell you.”
In January of 1982, seven months after Ina vanished, the Tulsa Police Department transferred her case to the Poteau Police Department. Dateline spoke with Poteau Chief of Police, Billy Hooper, who says Ina’s case is currently a joint investigation between his department and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations (OSBI). “We have a great working relationship with OSBI, so that helps,” Chief Hooper said. “They have resources that we do not and can really help us out.”
One of the things Tulsa PD did as part of their investigation, according to Chief Hooper, was check the flight records, too. “And that came up with nothing,” he said. “There’s really no evidence that she was ever found anywhere [else],” either.
Hooper also confirmed that Tulsa PD processed Ina’s car. “There was cigarette ashes found in the ashtray. There was mud and a broken necklace that was found in the car -- her broken necklace,” he said. “The seats were pushed back, and the Tulsa police report stated that they didn’t believe that she would have been able to -- due to her size -- that she would have been able to properly drive that car in that manner.” Ina was less than five feet tall. The chief says investigators also checked fingerprints from the car. “Of course, of all the family that had been in the car,” he said.
Chief Hooper says authorities have no evidence that would lead them to believe foul play is involved in Ina’s disappearance. However, he acknowledged how unusual it is that 43 years have passed with no communication. “You don’t go missing that long and not have contact with daughters—or family,” he said. Hooper confirmed that Henry Arnall was the last person to have seen his wife before she disappeared. He would not comment on whether the department considers him a person of interest or suspect in the case.
Henry Arnall died in 1992. Debbie Barber does believe her father was responsible her mother’s disappearance. “Honestly, I thought my dad had something to do with it,” she told Dateline. According to Debbie, her mother had recently confided in her that she had learned her husband was having an affair. Debbie believes that may have had something to do with Ina’s disappearance.
“It’s almost like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You get little bits and pieces,” Debbie said. “Of course, in a small town, lots of people talk and you get, you know, you have to weave through the stuff that, you know, that’s absolutely not true.”
Chief Hooper told Dateline the same thing. “There’s been a lot of rumors throughout the years,” he said, adding that his department has run down a lot of leads over the past four decades. “In 2014, the previous chief had a gentleman come forward and say that he remembered when he was a little boy seeing a grave -- what he thought was a grave -- over in this area-- in a wooded area,” the chief said. That man has since died. The department took the tip seriously and conducted a search in the area he had indicated. They also tried to search the area again, earlier this year. “Nothing of great value” was found during those digs, Hooper said.
The chief acknowledged the difficulties they face in the investigation due to the age of the case and the fact that multiple departments and detectives have been involved. “That much time going by, it’s hard,” he said. “You lose a lot of evidence, a lot of people pass away or forget things that they know.”
Ina Arnall’s case is the only cold case in Poteau, Oklahoma. “Just trying to piece everything together is where we’re at and it’s still an open case,” Chief Hooper said. “Any new leads or any new information, we would love to have, um, and we just want closure for the family.” He encourages anyone to come forward with information. “Even if people believe that, you know, ‘Well, this is old information,’” Chief Hooper said. “We would love to have it to be able to follow leads, just have somewhere to go.”
If you have any information about Ina’s disappearance, please call the Poteau Police Department at 918-647-8620 or the OSBI at 1-800-522-8017. You can also submit a tip via email at tips@osbi.ok.gov.