March 18, 1990, started as a normal day for 15-year-old twin sisters Dannette and Jeannette Millbrook, according to their younger sister, Shanta Sturgis, who was 12 at the time.
Although they are twins, Dannette and Jeannette each had her own unique personality. Shanta said that Jeannette was a sweet girl who loved kids and animals and was quieter and more reserved than her twin. Dannette, Shanta said, was a bit louder and was always the one to stand up for Jeannette if she needed it. Shanta described both of them as good girls. “They really didn’t go anywhere, you know, they didn’t hang out or nothing like that,” she said. “If they did, it would be, you know, all of us together with my mom.”
And that’s how it was that Sunday, all of them together. Shanta told Dateline that, as usual, the family went to church in their hometown of Augusta, Georgia and then returned home to have lunch. Shanta remembers that her sisters had been sent to pick up the family’s order from a nearby Church’s Chicken. When the girls returned home, the family sat and ate lunch together for what would end up being the last time.
At lunch, the twins mentioned that they needed bus fare to get to school for the upcoming week, so Shanta says their mother told them to go to their godfather’s house to ask him for bus fare. After lunch, they set out for his house, which was only a short walk away. Shanta says the twins made it to his home, collected the bus fare, and were given a few extra dollars to get some treats for their walk home.
The Richmond County Sheriff’s Office states on their website that the girls left the area at around 4:00 p.m. on March 18. Shanta told Dateline that something later stood out to the family about the sisters’ walk home from their godfather’s place that day. They learned from other family members that Dannette and Jeannette had stopped at both a cousin’s house and their older sister’s house on the way back, asking if someone could accompany them back home. Shanta said this was an odd request, as the twins knew the area and had walked alone before. “I’m gonna assume something had to [transpire] for them to want somebody to walk home,” Shanta said.
Shanta told Dateline that when the twins didn’t arrive home that night, their mother got nervous and began calling around town seeing if anyone had seen them.
Their mother, Mary Louise Sturgis, who goes by Louise, called the nearby Pump-N-Shop gas station, then located at 12th Street and MLK Boulevard, then Milledgeville Rd., in Augusta, as that was a place the family went to frequently. The attendant there recognized her daughters and let her know that they had indeed stopped by the store that day.
The attendant told Louise that the twins arrived at the Pump-N-Shop with treat money in hand. She could not remember which way the teens had walked off, or if they had gotten into a vehicle after they left. According to the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office’s records, this final sighting of Dannette and Jeannette happened at about 4:30 p.m.
When the family asked if the girls had been acting strangely, the attendant told them they had not been. “They was acting normal,” Shanta said of the attendant’s response. “She told us what they bought. She said they came here and bought something to drink and some candy and some chips.”
Louise Sturgis called authorities to report the pair missing that evening. It was two weeks before their 16th birthday. Shanta told Dateline that when their mother called, she was told she had to wait 24 hours before filing a missing person’s report for the girls. Shanta said that after the 24-hour hold, on March 19 an officer came to their home to collect information about her sisters.
Shanta told Dateline she does not remember what the official search efforts for the twins were, but the family and some of their friends from church did go around the area hanging up posters that The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) had made in the year after the twins vanished.
Their 16th birthday came and went. No Dannette and Jeannette.
“The whole year of 1990, we didn’t get no information, you know, about them,” Shanta said. “They really didn’t get no media attention. They were put on the news once.”
Three more birthdays came and went. No Dannette and Jeannette.
Then, according to Shanta, on April 8, 1993 -- six days after the twins’ 19th birthday -- the investigator on their case came out to the family home to tell their mother that the case was being closed because Dannette and Jeannette had been located.
Shanta alleges that the investigator had also reached out to the NCMEC, asking them to remove Dannette and Jeannette from their database, but never gave the family any other information. “If he had located them, he said he couldn’t make them come back home because they were 17 years old,” Shanta recalled. If the twins were out there, or had been located, their family believes they would have contacted them in some way. Dateline reached out to the NCMEC to check if the girls had been unlisted on the site and later relisted. They said they would research the history of the listing and respond with details when they become available.
Fast forward to 2013. Shanta saw a video on TV of the newly-elected Sheriff of Augusta-Richmond County, Richard Roundtree. “I see him talking on the news, and I’ve seen some of the commercials that they had been making,” she said. “He wanted to help his community and stuff like that.”
Feeling like a fresh set of eyes might be exactly what her sisters’ case needed, Shanta decided to reach out to the sheriff’s office. Shanta told Dateline that her call was later returned by Scott Peebles who was Incident Commander for the sheriff’s office at the time. “I called down there once again after all them years and finally somebody called me back,” she said. “And [he was] the guy that called me back.”
Dateline reached out to Scott Peebles, who remembered having a conversation with Shanta, but would not comment on the case as he is now Chief Deputy of the Richmond County Marshal’s Office and the twins’ case is being handled by the sheriff’s office.
That same year, Shanta remembers receiving a call from the Sheriff’s office saying that they had her sisters’ case files and would be reopening the case because, according to Shanta, “they didn’t like how the case was closed,” having been “based on hearsay,” she said. Shanta believes her persistence may have also been a key reason her sisters’ case was given a second chance. “I’m the reason why they said they reopened the case,” Shanta told Dateline. “You won’t see nothing pertaining to their names until 2013.”
Shanta said her mother and eldest sister gave DNA samples to authorities in 2017. “They got it in the system now but nobody’s -- nothing has come of it,” she said. Shanta also said that The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children updates Dannette and Jeannette’s age progression photos every five years. NCMEC shared their most recent update with Dateline.
In 2013, Shanta was hopeful when investigators reopened the old case. “I thought, you know, by them opening it, maybe they could have found out what happened to them,” she said. They could have got in contact with somebody, really put somebody on the case that was really gonna do an investigation because when they first went missing, it really wasn’t no investigation to our knowledge.”
According to Shanta, after the twins vanished, the arriving officer misspelled her sisters’ names, and mis-recorded their date of birth. Dannette and Jeannette Millbrook are still featured on the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office’s Missing Persons page under Millbrooks.
Dateline reached out to the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office to discuss the case and the search efforts that were done following the twins’ disappearance and in the years since and received an email from Sergeant Randall Amos, saying, “At this time I am going to respectfully decline to comment on this case.” In a follow-up email, the sergeant said that his office “is willing to look into any new evidence/leads that become available.”
“It hurt every day I had to see my mom upset and crying.” Shanta said about growing up. “It’s been 33 years and we’re still going through it right now, you know? And it is bad, because you start to see other people — families — going through it and then some of the little ones get found,” Shanta said. “But mine still haven’t.” And so, she says, she talks to anyone and everyone she can about the case. “I talk about it to people to let people know, even though they don’t know what their faces look like or whatever, I want people to know what happened to my family,” she said.
Shanta runs the Facebook page “Missing Dannette and Jeannette Millbrook” where she shares information and updates in her sisters’ case. There is also a local billboard that directs people to themillbrooktwins.com, where they can submit tips in the case. At this time there is a $50,000 reward for information that helps resolve the case. Shanta told Dateline that the reward will be reduced to $11,000 in August 2023 if they do not reach a resolution in the case before then.
Shanta just hopes there’s still time to find answers. “I want my mom to be able to --. You know, if something were to happen to her, I want her to be able to rest knowing that she found out what happened to her daughters,” Shanta said. In a sad twist, Louise’s eldest daughter, the one whose DNA was submitted in 2017 to help with Dannette and Jeannette’s case, died the following year — on the twins’ birthday.
According to Shanta, on the day of their disappearance, Dannette was wearing white jeans with a white Mickey Mouse shirt and Jeannette was wearing a khaki skirt and a white turtleneck. Both girls have brown eyes and had short Jheri style curls in their hair at the time of their disappearance. They would be 49 years old today.
Anyone with information can contact the Richmond County Police Department dispatch at the non-emergency line of 706-821-1080, or the Criminal Investigations Division at 706-821-1020.