Twins Dannette and Jeannette Millbrook Went Missing 30 Years Ago. Their Family Still Wants Answers.
The latest Oxygen true crime documentary, The Disappearance of the Millbrook Twins, is nothing short of infuriating. Premiering on Nov. 23, the two-hour special delves into the unsolved disappearance of 15-year-old twins Dannette and Jeannette Millbrook in 1990. In the almost 30 years since the teens inexplicably vanished from the parking lot of a local gas station in Augusta, Georgia, their case has gone virtually uninvestigated, robbing their family of closure. It is a vexing and heart wrenching example of how the institutions meant to protect people, particularly law enforcement and the news media, often fail black children.
The Disappearance of the Millbrook Twins follows former federal prosecutor Laura Coates and former homicide detective Page Reynolds as they try to finally get to the bottom of the mystery. The duo interviews various experts, the girls’ relatives, and even a potential eyewitness to the disappearance in pursuit of the truth. In doing so, they also expose the severe injustice of the way Dannette and Jeanette’s case was mishandled all those years ago.
When the girls’ mother, Mary “Miss Louise” Sturgis, called the sheriff on March 18, 1990 to report her daughters missing after they failed to come home from the neighborhood Pump ‘N’ Shop, she was dismissively told by Detective Jim Schipp that they probably just ran away. After that, there was basically no investigation. Miss Louise says that Schipp and the sheriff’s office had made up their minds that the teens were runaways, and they simply didn’t care enough to investigate other possibilities. Their younger sister, Shanta Sturgis, refuses to accept this explanation. “I used to sleep in the bed with these girls, sleep in the same room with these girls, we used to take baths together, we used to go places together,” she explains. “Nobody’s gonna make me believe that they ran away from home.”