TULSA, Okla. — Francine Frost went missing in 1981 from a Tulsa grocery store in 1981.
Her skeletal remains were found just two years later in Muskogee county, but investigators say it took more than 30 years to identify them.
Vicki Frost is Francine’s daughter.
We sat down with the family in 2021 to talk about her mother’s incredible story.
Curl said she fondly remembers her mother as a woman who was guarded but strong.
“My mother was the most private person I have ever known. She was very quiet and reserved,” said Curl.
Little did the family know that one day, their mother’s name would be synonymous with helping law enforcement identify missing and murdered people all across the state.
Curl said she remembers that fateful call that changed their lives forever.
“My dad called me, and he asked me if I had talked to my mom, and I said no, and I asked him why, and he said that she wasn’t home and he didn’t know where she was. He knew her schedule, and so he started driving around, and he spotted her car in the parking lot at Skaggs Alpha Beta,” said Curl.
But Francine was nowhere to be found, until two years later.
“An anonymous phone call made on January 1st of 1983. These remains were found January 5th of 1983, a little less than two years to the day of when she disappeared,” said Curl.
However, the Frost family was never told about the skeletal remains that were discovered and her missing report was never considered.
The state of Oklahoma buried Frost as a Jane Doe, but then years later, her grandson, Cory Curl began praying for answers.
He also began researching his grandmother’s disappearance and found a link to an unidentified female buried as a Jane Doe.
"It had a white girdle and a skirt, a prairie jean, a prairie denim jean skirt, and a white girdle, and I almost fell out of my chair,” said Cory.
The family said they later learned that Francine had been shot in the head multiple times.
Not wanting other families to suffer, Curl took her mother’s story to Oklahoma lawmakers and thus, Francine’s Law was born.
“So this was a law that was enacted in 2019 and what it did was that it required local law enforcement agencies to report missing persons and put them into a database and it also had the medical examiners office submit samples of unidentified individuals to what we call a NaMus system,” said District Attorney, Jack Thorp.
NaMus is the National Missing and Unidentified Person System and investigators said that since local agencies have been required to enter this type of information into the system, it’s made it much easier to find people.
For the family of Francine Frost, they say they will never stop searching for her killer.
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