Karen Deann Hollis, the 23-year-old Alabama woman who vanished from Northport around midnight on May 8, was found dead Saturday in Greene County, roughly 60 miles from Birmingham, after friends and family located her body eight days into a desperate search. Randall Lendell Dejourney, 44, now faces a charge of abuse of corpse, and authorities say additional charges could follow once an autopsy is completed.
The case raises hard questions that remain unanswered: How did Hollis die? What led investigators to Dejourney? And why did it take more than a week, and ultimately the victim's own loved ones, to find her?
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency had issued a missing and endangered person's alert for Hollis, citing a condition that could impair her judgment, though the specific condition was not publicly identified. Despite that alert, it was not law enforcement but Hollis' friends and family who ultimately discovered her remains in Greene County, the New York Post reported.
Hollis' boyfriend, Zackary Slaughter, told CBS42 that his last contact with her came the night she went missing. He described a mundane exchange, a text, a craving, then silence.
"She texted me at 11 p.m. saying she didn't feel good. I tried calling her at 4 that morning when I woke up, and then at 5 a.m. detectives were knocking on my door."
Slaughter said Hollis had mentioned she was going to get a Reese's peanut butter cup before she vanished. By 5 a.m., police were already at his door. He claimed investigators treated him as a suspect early in the case.
He also said a bail bondsman had instructed him not to contact Hollis because of a previous domestic violence charge, though he claimed the two had reconciled. Slaughter expressed anguish over the outcome, telling CBS42 he felt helpless.
"I was one phone call away and she never got the opportunity, and I wasn't there."
Those are Slaughter's claims. Whether investigators have corroborated or challenged his account has not been disclosed publicly. The timeline he described, a text at 11 p.m., a missed call at 4 a.m., detectives at his door by 5 a.m., suggests law enforcement moved quickly once Hollis was reported missing, but it also raises the question of who reported her absence and how fast.
Dejourney's charge, abuse of corpse, is notable for what it is and what it is not. It is not a murder charge. It is not a manslaughter charge. It addresses conduct after death, not the act of killing. Alabama law treats abuse of a corpse as a Class C felony, but the charge alone says nothing about whether Dejourney is suspected of causing Hollis' death.
Authorities have signaled that more charges could come. An autopsy will be conducted, and its findings could reshape the case entirely. Until then, the public knows only that Dejourney is accused of mistreating Hollis' body, a grim detail that deepens the family's grief without offering clarity on how she died.
Cases like this one, where a missing person is found dead and charges trickle out incrementally, test the patience of grieving families and the public alike. A similar pattern unfolded in Los Angeles, where a missing woman's body was found and a homicide investigation opened only after her family went public with their anguish.
Hollis' sister, Brandy, took to Facebook to grieve publicly. Her posts captured the raw weight of loss in plain, unpolished language.
"My heart is hurting. We was planning on hanging out again an going fishing. Please tell our brother tat I miss him n love him. You #forever23 just like him."
The reference to a brother and the hashtag "#forever23" suggest the Hollis family has endured more than one devastating loss. Brandy also wrote: "I want her back so bad. A piece of me left with her."
These are the voices that rarely get amplified in crime coverage, the families left behind, forced to process horror in public while waiting for a system that moves on its own timetable. Hollis was 23 years old. Her sister wanted to go fishing with her.
The discovery of Hollis' body in Greene County, a rural area well removed from where she was last seen in Northport, raises its own set of questions. How did her body end up there? Was she taken there alive or after death? Did Dejourney have a connection to that location? None of these questions have been publicly answered.
Body-recovery cases across the country have followed disturbingly similar arcs in recent months. In Tampa, the body of a missing USF doctoral student was found on a bridge, with a roommate ultimately facing murder charges. In Arizona, a body recovered from a Scottsdale canal was identified as a missing Native woman. Each case carries its own facts, but the common thread is families left to endure agonizing waits while investigations grind forward.
The gaps in this case are wide. No cause of death has been released. No agency has publicly identified itself as the one that filed the charge against Dejourney. The specific facts that connected Dejourney to Hollis, or to her remains, have not been disclosed. Whether Slaughter remains a person of interest, or has been cleared, is similarly unclear.
The autopsy will be the next critical step. It could confirm foul play, identify a cause of death, and potentially open the door to upgraded or additional charges against Dejourney, or others.
In other missing-person cases that ended in tragedy, identification of remains sometimes took far longer. A former Hungarian reality television star's body was found in a Canary Islands ravine and went unidentified for a full year. Hollis' family, at least, did not have to endure that particular cruelty, though the eight days of uncertainty before finding her were cruel enough.
For now, the people of Northport and Greene County are left with an incomplete picture: a young woman dead, a 44-year-old man charged with abusing her corpse, and an investigation that appears far from finished.
Karen Deann Hollis deserved better than to be found by her own family in a county miles from home. The justice system owes her, and them, a full accounting of what happened and who is responsible. An abuse-of-corpse charge is a starting point, not an ending.
