March 2, 1957

Maud Crawford, a sixty-five-year-old lawyer with the firm of Gaughan, McClellan and Laney in Camden (Ouachita County), disappeared mysteriously from her home, leaving behind her purse containing cash, and her car, with doors to the house unlocked and all the lights on. The disappearance was first believed to have been a kidnapping by the Mafia to intimidate Senator John L. McClellan, a former partner in the law firm, who at the time was chairman of a high-profile Senate investigation into alleged mob ties to organized labor. That theory was eventually abandoned. Later investigation seemed to point toward Crawford’s research into a fraudulent land deed case, but the matter of her disappearance was never solved, and her body was never found.