7-Year-Old Quadruplets Vanished in 1992 — 21 Years Later, Their Shirts Were Found in a Buried Bunker | HO

Swainsboro, Georgia — On the morning of June 14, 1992, Gene Hayes stepped out to feed her chickens, leaving her four granddaughters—Tasha, Tanya, Tamika, and Tia—sleeping in their shared bedroom. The girls, identical quadruplets, had just celebrated their seventh birthday. When Gene returned, the farmhouse was silent. The girls were gone.

There were no signs of forced entry, no broken windows, no muddy footprints. Their shoes and toys remained untouched. The only things missing were their matching white long-sleeve shirts, each emblazoned with a bold red “T.” The beds were neatly made, the pillows fluffed, and the house was wrapped in a silence that would haunt the Hayes family for decades.

For 21 years, the disappearance of the Hayes quadruplets remained an open wound in Swainsboro, a rural town in east Georgia. The case was quietly closed by police just months after the girls vanished. No Amber Alert was issued. No press conference was held. The official story: the four girls had likely wandered off, or been picked up by someone they knew. Behind closed doors, suspicion fell on Gene herself, or the girls’ mother, Leah, who worked nights as a janitor in Augusta.

But the Hayes family never stopped searching. Every Sunday, Gene laid out four church dresses across the girls’ beds. On their birthdays, Leah set out four slices of pound cake. “They didn’t take their shoes,” Gene would say, “that’s how I know they didn’t leave on their own.”

A Town That Moved On—A Family That Couldn’t

As the years passed, the rest of Swainsboro moved on. The girls’ faces faded from missing posters, replaced by lost pet signs and yard sale ads. Leah quit her job and moved back to the farmhouse, unable to scrub another hospital floor knowing her daughters were missing. Grief settled over the house like dust. Gene wrote letters to the governor, to civil rights lawyers, to anyone who might listen. She never heard back.

In 1998, Leah begged police to reopen the case, citing new stories of rural abductions and trafficking. She was told the case was “too cold to reheat.” The official file was just six pages long. “Unable to locate missing juveniles. No sign of criminal activity.” What it didn’t say: four Black girls raised by an elderly grandmother in the woods, quietly written off by the system.

Gene’s memory began to slip. She died in 2004, never knowing what happened to her granddaughters.

A Discovery in the Woods

The case might have remained a footnote in local history, if not for a chance discovery in the summer of 2013. A pair of hikers near Tate’s Bluff, 15 miles east of Swainsboro, stumbled into a sinkhole. Beneath the earth, they found a rusted steel door—the entrance to a bunker. Inside, among debris and tree roots, were four small white shirts, folded carefully, each with a red “T” on the chest. The fabric was stained, mildewed, but the letters were still visible.

It took two days for authorities to connect the shirts to the Hayes case. When Leah saw the photograph, she collapsed—not because of the shirts, but because she recognized the way they’d been folded. “That’s how Mama folded their clothes every Saturday before church,” she whispered.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) took over. The shirts were not randomly dumped; they were arranged in a square, facing inward. Four small plastic bowls sat at the bunker’s edges, each facing the center. There were no fingerprints, no DNA, no obvious signs of violence. But to Special Agent Karen Darby, the scene was chillingly deliberate. “This wasn’t abandonment,” she said. “It was ritual.”

Old Suspicions, New Evidence

Darby reopened the investigation from scratch. She combed through the original sheriff’s report—two brief interviews, no search grid, no evidence logs. The girls had been treated as runaways, not victims. She walked the property with Leah, who described the day the girls disappeared: Gene left to feed the chickens; the girls were awake, excited to practice a gospel song for Sunday school in their matching shirts. When Gene returned, the house was silent. The back door was unlocked. The girls were gone.

Darby searched the woods between the Hayes farmhouse and the nearest neighbor, the now-abandoned Delroy house. Under pine needles, she found a rusted wagon with a dark stain inside. Soil samples were taken, but tests were inconclusive.

Then, a second sinkhole opened near an old grain silo. Inside a sealed, rusted box, investigators found four pink cloth hair bands, each wrapped around a single baby tooth—labeled with the girls’ names in faded black ink. The handwriting was precise, almost loving. “Why would someone do this?” Leah asked. Darby had no answer.

Forensic analysis suggested the box hadn’t been underground for long. Someone had kept these items—possibly indoors—for years before burying them.

The Keeper

A criminal behavioral analyst dubbed the unknown subject “The Keeper.” The care, symmetry, and labeling indicated pride and obsession—likely male, possibly someone who lived near the family in 1992.

Darby dug into old tax records and emergency calls. She found a name: Nathan Klyurn, a white man in his 30s who lived four lots down from the Hayes property in 1991. His trailer burned in a mysterious fire months before the girls vanished. He left town two weeks after their disappearance. Darby tracked him to rural South Carolina, where he’d lived quietly for two decades.

When confronted, Klyurn was evasive. He refused to let Darby search his property. Days later, his house burned—again. In the wreckage, Darby found a locked freezer filled with old newspaper clippings, children’s drawings, and a coloring page from Sunday school. On it: “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” with the girls’ names written in crayon.

Behind a false panel, she found a footlocker with a burned white shirt, stitched with a red “T.” No blood, no hair, no DNA. But it was enough to add arson and obstruction to the case.

The Town Remembers

The discoveries reignited old wounds. Headlines screamed “The Keeper Still Haunts Georgia Town.” The GBI held a press conference, but offered little new information. Leah refused to attend the memorial march that followed. Instead, she searched through Gene’s old photos, finding a Polaroid from 1992: the four girls in their white shirts, and in the corner, a man’s arm and a cheap stainless steel watch—the same watch found in Klyurn’s burned house.

Darby returned to Tate’s Bluff with ground-penetrating radar. She found a second, unfinished chamber beneath the soil, suggesting the bunker was part of something larger. No remains were found.

Klyurn, hospitalized after an apparent overdose, refused to speak. Leah waited outside his room, torn between wanting answers and fearing the truth.

Grief Without End

Leah never got the closure she craved. The GBI’s final statement: “No human remains found. No conclusive forensic evidence. Investigation remains open.” The shirts, the teeth, the photographs—each was a fragment of a story that would never be whole.

On the 21st anniversary of their disappearance, Leah sat alone in the empty church where her daughters once sang. She lit four candles and whispered their names: Tasha, Tanya, Tamika, Tia. For a moment, she imagined them dancing in their white shirts, still laughing, still together.

She knew they weren’t coming home. But she also knew they would not be forgotten—not as long as she remembered, not as long as the candles burned.