In less than two months, it will be 19 years since Brandee Hope Canipe was last known to be alive.
It was May of 2006, and the 29-year-old was believed to be living in Mocksville, North Carolina.
Her family has been desperately searching for her — and answers — all these years.
Brandee’s youngest sister, Leigh Scoggin, spoke with Dateline in 2022. We featured Brandee’s disappearance in our Cold Case Spotlight series. “She was a free spirit,” Leigh said. “It would be sometimes a month or so without contact with her when we were younger.”
But this time, something was different. A month or so turned into years with no word from Brandee.
“She had never gone that long,” Leigh, who was around 10 or 11 years old at the time, said. The family knew Brandee would bounce around from place to place and go without communicating sometimes, but when she didn’t show up to a funeral they believe she would never have missed — they decided they needed to report her missing. That was in April 2010.
The Davie County Sheriff’s Office is handling the investigation. Captain DJ Smith told Dateline in 2022 that through their investigation, officials were able to determine “that the date of the incident was May the 6th, 2006.”
“That’s when -- the last time someone had seen her,” he said.
One of Brandee’s two daughters, Autumn Sky McCluney Underwood, told Dateline in 2022 that she struggles to remember the last time she saw her mother. “I don’t remember exactly the day, because I was so young,” Sky said. She was only 6 years old at the time.
She does remember always keeping an eye out for her mother’s car after she vanished. “I remember just, like, looking for her car in the parking lot. Like when we would go to Walmart or something, like, I would look for her car to see if I could find her.”
Sky never spotted her mother’s car.
It’s also been missing for the last nearly 19 years.
However, the family recently learned that parts of Brandee’s car have been located. “That’s something that they’ve been looking for, for a while,” Sky said.
Captain Smith confirmed parts of the car have been found. “It was determined that her car was taken to a U-Pull It,” he said. The 109 U-Pull It where the parts were located is in Winston-Salem, about a half hour northeast of Mocksville. “There wasn’t anything remarkable about the car at all,” Smith said. “So it’s not like we had a car with a crime scene.”
It’s unclear exactly when the parts of the car were found, but Brandee’s sister Leigh told Dateline she learned about the development in late February when she and a few other family members went to the Davie County Sheriff’s Office to provide familial DNA to be on record. Captain Smith confirmed DNA samples were taken for their records. “We just wanted to make sure that we had a copy of their DNA,” he said. “I wanted an additional copy for our use here to be held in evidence in case, down the road, there was something to directly compare it to.”
Another recent development is that Leigh believes they’ve finally located the property where she last saw her older sister. “It was one of the last places that I knew where she was,” she said.
Leigh told Dateline she had gone with police to search around the lake in the Belews Creek area on the northeast side of Winston-Salem in 2022, but they couldn’t find the house. “The lake and the creek have the same name,” Leigh said. “So we were searching the lake this entire time, when we needed to be searching the creek.”
Once they searched the creek area, they came across a property Leigh says is the house she remembers. “It was just absolutely spot on from memory,” she said.
“We were searching up by the lake, but it was on a small creek, you know, miles and miles and miles away from where we were initially looking at,” Captain Smith told Dateline.
“This was the correct house, but it’s not where she disappeared from,” the captain said. It is just one of the last locations where Leigh saw Brandee. “We’ve been to the house, we found the current owner, the past owner, all of that has been followed up on.” Smith says everyone they’ve interviewed connected to the property was cooperative and there was no evidence of a crime occurring there.
Smith said those interviews did provide the department with other people to follow up with, and they are currently working to find those people. One person in particular is a man called Eric. “We’re trying to focus on finding Eric,” he said. Officials believe Brandee may have met this man at a bar in Winston-Salem. They also know the man was driving a red pickup truck. “I know she was with him at one point,” Smith said. He stressed that Eric is not a person of interest and that there is “nothing to say that he had anything to do with her disappearance.” They are just trying to trace Brandee’s movements in the days before she vanished. “We’re trying to find the last person she was seen with,” Smith said.
And while these recent developments haven’t brought the family answers yet, they remain hopeful. “This is the only lead we’ve had in—ever,” Leigh said. Over the past few years, Leigh has used her TikTok account to advocate for Brandee. “We’re just trying to establish her timeline and that’s why the house was so important because it was one of the last places I saw her.”
Ashley McCluney is Brandee’s oldest daughter. She was around 10 or 11 years old when her mom disappeared. “She moved to this lake house and then after that she moved back,” to Mocksville, Ashley said. Mocksville is about 40 miles southwest of the Belews Creek area. Ashley and her sister, Sky, lived with Brandee for a brief time after she returned to Mocksville. “We had moved in for a bit and I don’t know exactly what happened,” Sky said. “I was so young that I don’t really remember everything.”
And while Ashley’s recollection of that time isn’t fully in focus, either, she does have two vivid memories of her mother. “I seemed to have, like, wiped everything from, you know, 12 and before,” she said. “But I remember that my favorite thing that she would do was wash my hair.”
“I can still hear her singing in the car,” Ashley said. She says ‘I Hope You Dance’ by Lee Ann Womack was one of Brandee’s favorites. The lyrics are of a mother’s hope that her daughter lives life to the fullest. “So that song is, like, super important for me and Sky.”
Captain Smith says his department is dedicated to finding out what happened to Brandee after May 2006. “We’ve always followed up on stuff all these years,” he told Dateline. “We’ve never shut the case down and put it aside.”
No persons of interest or suspects have ever been named in the case. The captain emphasized they are still working to find anyone who was with Brandee in May 2006. “We’re still busy looking for anybody that may have had contact with her around that time to interview them to see if there’s any information out there that we don’t have or, you know, is there somebody out there that may have had contact with her shortly before she went missing that might point us in the right direction,” Smith said.
Brandee has brown eyes and, at the time of her disappearance, had long, light brown hair and a slim build. She has a couple of tattoos, including a heart with wings on her right wrist and a rose with a dagger on her shoulder blade. She would be 48 years old today.
Captain Smith encourages anyone with information to call the Davie County Sheriff’s Office at 336-751-6238.
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