Frances Graham Now “Missing” Five Years
Fifth Anniversary of Disappearance Tuesday
Skeletal remains of Franny Graham identified by Illinois State Police on 12/17/2009 more on this breaking news
At the time of her disappearance, Frances Graham was a 72-year-old senior citizen athlete who was active in the Senior Olympics and events at the Cora Veal Senior Citizens Center in Madisonville. She was a 20-year-plus companion of then 85-year-old Floyd Dockery of Coker Creek, living with Dockery at his Highway 68 home that was also occupied by Dockery’s then 58-yearold son, Arthur Dockery.
September 18, 2005, was a Sunday, and Frances Graham and Arthur Dockery left Coker Creek together, bound for Blount County on a planned shopping trip from which neither returned that day. It was the last known time anyone saw Graham alive.
Four days later, on Thursday, September 22, Arthur Dockery appeared at the Blount County Sheriff’s Department, claiming he and Graham had been abducted from a local restaurant’s parking lot and loaded in separate vans. He said his abductors were females who continuously kept the van traveling and who also sexually assaulted him repeatedly in the van. One female, he said, shaved his entire body except his back.
He told Blount County detectives he managed to escape his captors in Jellico and hitch-hiked back to Maryville. He said he hadn’t seen Graham since the parking lot kidnapping.
Later, investigators learned Dockery made a cell phone call to his sister in Michigan on Monday, September 19. The call was traced to a cell tower in Mount Vernon, Illinois, about ten miles from the ditch in Massac County, where the female body was discovered.
Dockery refused polygraph tests in Maryville but remained steadfast in the details of his story, maintaining he knew nothing about Graham’s disappearance.
Before the body turned up in November, Dockery was charged in Blount County with filing a false police report on October 14. On November 1, when he bonded out of the Blount County Justice Center, he was arrested and charged by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department with driving on suspended license.
On November 21, one day before the body was found, Dockery was charged with aggravated assault by domestic violence when he discharged a weapon at his father’s home, a charge that was dismissed in a preliminary hearing on December 6 when Floyd Dockery refused to testify against his son, and Arthur Dockery was set free.
