- “We feel like we’re stepping in the right direction,” Jeff Highsmith, Melissa’s 42-year-old brother, told Fox News Digital of the search for his sister more than five decades after she vanished. “We’re moving closer to finding out where she is and what’s going on.”
- Melissa disappeared from Fort Worth, Texas, on Aug. 23, 1971, when she was just 21 months old, according to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which has been working with the Highsmith family to find Melissa and keep her face — a digitally age-progressed face — in the news.
- On Nov 6, for what would have been Melissa’s 53rd birthday, the Highsmith family hosted a “celebration of life” for Melissa at the local police station not far from where she was kidnaped all those years ago.
