Circumstances of Disappearance
Akers was last seen on the night of February 7, 1977. She told her mother she was going out to meet her friend, Angela Rader . She was gone when her parents came home, and neither Akers nor Rader showed up for school the next day at William Ruffner Junior High School.
They were never heard from again.
Akers had run away with Rader previously.
Akers and Rader both worked for a friend of their families at the time they disappeared.
Detectives questioned the man in 1980, after two young women said they were at a party a couple of years earlier where the man drunkenly fired a gun and sobbed that "he wished he hadn't hurt Tammy."
Police learned nothing from their interview with the man, who was known to party with young girls. They watched him closely for a few years. In 1984, he was charged with sexually molesting a girl younger than age 13, but was acquitted.

The man has since been convicted for the 1994 murder of a family of four, and was executed in April 2003.
The suspect has always maintained that he had nothing to do with what happened to Tammy Akers and Angela Rader. No one has been charged in their disappearance.