TULSA, Okla. — Francine Frost disappeared from a Tulsa grocery store in 1981.
Two years later, someone found her skeletal remains in Muskogee county, but it took more than 30 years to identify them.
Vicki Frost Curl is Francine’s daughter. She talked to 2 News in 2021 about her mother’s story.
Curl said she fondly remembers her mother as guarded but strong, “my mother was the most private person I have ever known. She was very quiet and reserved."
Little did the family know 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 the 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 Frost couldn't 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, no one told the Frost family about the skeletal remains and investigators didn't consider her missing report. The state buried Frost as a Jane Doe, but years later, her grandson, Cory Curl started praying for answers.
He also researched 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 learned someone shot Francine in the head multiple times.
Not wanting other families to suffer, Curl took her mother’s story to Oklahoma lawmakers and 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 since local agencies are now 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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