It’s been 20 years since 21-year-old Jennifer Wix and her 2-year-old daughter, Adrianna, disappeared in Robertson County, Tennessee, just north of Nashville.
Casey Robinson, Jennifer’s sister, told Dateline that the thought of her sister and niece still takes her back to the moment she found out they were missing. “Panic is, like, the only way I can describe it,” she said. “I just remember it all happening, and being so young at the time and not really understanding what was happening.”
Casey said the grief has stayed with her for the two decades since. “It just kind of, like, consumes you and attacks you,” she explained. “Most of the time, it’s around their birthdays or holidays and things like that, whenever we should be doing something with them, you know — but we’re not.”
Their mother, Kathy Nale, told Dateline that Jennifer was like a “mother hen” to her younger sisters, Casey and Heather. She said that Jennifer was incredibly sweet, albeit “headstrong,” which, Kathy admits, Jennifer may have gotten from her.
“We were very close,” Kathy said. “She would always write me these sweet letters to tell me how sorry she was after we had an argument.”
Kathy remembers what she told her daughter when she found out that, at 19, Jennifer was pregnant with Adrianna. “‘Things happen in life, and we’re just gonna — we’re just gonna deal with it,’” she recalled. “‘We’re gonna make the best of it. And this is going to be a loved baby.’”
And she was. “Lord have mercy, I mean, she was just so precious,” Kathy told Dateline. “And funny. And beautiful.”
Dateline spoke with Lisa Fierro, Kathy’s sister, who said she and her niece Jennifer were also very close. “She was beautiful, vivacious, strong-willed, hard headed. Wonderful mother,” she said. “Loved her baby more than anything on the face of the earth.”
Kathy told Dateline about a conversation she had during a heart-to-heart with Jennifer. “She just felt like Adrianna was her angel and had just saved her life,” Kathy said. “She said, ‘She’s probably just been an angel for me and saved me in a lot of ways, you know? Prevented me from going the wrong path.’”
A few months after that conversation, Jennifer and her little angel disappeared.
The disappearance of Jennifer and Adrianna Wix
According to Kathy Nale, Jennifer and Adrianna had been living with her in Cross Plains, Tennessee prior to December of 2003.
She said Jennifer and her boyfriend, Joey Benton, started dating in the summer of that year. Kathy told Dateline she didn’t like the way Joey sometimes treated her daughter and granddaughter and would not allow him in her house. Lisa Fierro said she didn’t observe that. “There was no indication to me that there was anything going on between the two of them other than two young people that was loving each other,” she said. “They were crazy about each other.”
Jennifer and Joey broke up briefly in the fall. Unbeknownst to Kathy, the couple started seeing each other again shortly after that.
In December of 2003, Jennifer and Adrianna moved in with Joey and his parents, Joseph and Cindy Benton.
Jennifer had limited physical contact with her mother and sisters after that, though they would still communicate over the phone. “Her boyfriend did drop her by my birthday party so they could come in and see me for my 16th birthday [in February 2004],” Casey told Dateline. “And that might be the last time that I saw them.”
Just weeks later, Jennifer and Adrianna would vanish.
Lisa Fierro told Dateline that she drove Jennifer and Adrianna to the hospital on Monday, March 22, 2004. The baby had been feeling sick and had been having trouble going to the bathroom. She also had a rash.
Kathy said she met Jennifer, Joey, and Adrianna on Tuesday, March 23, outside a Dollar General so she could give her daughter a homemade cream for Adrianna’s rash. “The baby was crying to go home with me,” Kathy remembered. “I had to work the next day, I said, ‘But you can come to Mimi’s next weekend.’” According to Kathy, Jennifer agreed to let Adrianna stay with her the following weekend.
That meet-up outside the Dollar General was the last time Kathy saw Jennifer and Adrianna.
Kathy did get a call from her daughter the next day — Wednesday, March 24 — from the Benton residence. According to Kathy, Jennifer was distraught over a fight she’d had that night with a member of Joey’s family. Kathy said she tried to calm her daughter down over the phone. “I just said, ‘Everybody will be — everybody will be calmed down tomorrow. Things will be better in the light of day, you know? And if not, you just call me tomorrow,’” Kathy remembered telling her daughter. According to Kathy, Jennifer said she would call her the next day. “I never heard from her again.”
Lisa Fierro said that on Thursday, March 25, she got a call from her niece. According to Lisa, Jennifer said that she did not want to live at the Benton house anymore and told her she was planning on moving out as soon as she spoke to Joey that day. “She said, ‘If he does not agree for us to leave when he gets home, I’m leaving and I’m coming [to your house].’”
Lisa said she left a spare key out for Jennifer in case she decided to come to her house later that day. “She never came, needless to say.” Lisa believes something happened to Jennifer that day. “I also know for a fact that if something had not happened to her, she would’ve called me,” Lisa said. “And she didn’t.”
Dateline spoke to Jennifer’s cousin Jeff Grayson, who is Lisa Fierro’s son. Jeff said that on March 25, 2004, he was working with Joey Benton at a construction site. The two were also friends. “Being a normal day, we’re just working, you know? And Joey got a phone call and had to leave,” Jeff recalled. “It was really fast. It was really — something happened, you know? ‘We gotta go, I gotta go,’ you know? It was really, really, really, really urgent.”
Casey and Kathy said that Joey later told them he found Jennifer locked inside their room when he got home that day. That evening, he and Jennifer took a drive to talk about their relationship. According to Casey and Kathy, Joey said that Adrianna was with them during this conversation. “They decided to break up while they were driving around,” Casey said.
Dateline reached out to Joey Benton over text in March of 2024 requesting an interview. He agreed and replied, “I’ve never declined to answer any questions on the matter.” Despite multiple attempts, Dateline has subsequently been unable to conduct the interview.
Dateline also reached out to Joey’s mother, Cindy Benton, who “respectfully declined” to discuss the case. Dateline was unable to contact Joey Benton’s father, Joseph Benton.
The Robertson County Sheriff’s Office was the initial investigative agency in Jennifer and Adrianna’s disappearance.
In December of 2013, ahead of the 10th anniversary of Jennifer and Adrianna’s disappearance, they posted the details about the investigation on their website.
“The investigation led deputies to the Robertson County home of Jennifer’s boyfriend, Joey Benton, where Jennifer and Adrianna had been living with Benton in an out building on the property,” the department stated. “Joey Benton claimed that on the evening of March 25, 2004, Jennifer asked him to take her to a grocery store in Cross Plains to use the phone.”
According to the post, Joey told officials that he dropped Jennifer and Adrianna at the grocery store briefly before driving to a local Exxon, where he dropped them off again. “Benton said he pulled across the street and watched as a white four-door car pulled up and Jennifer and Adrianna got inside,” the department stated. “Benton also claimed that on March 26, 2004, Jennifer showed up back at his property, collected her belongings and said that she needed some time away.”
The Robertson County Sheriff’s Office noted that Joey’s claim that he drove Jennifer and Adrianna to the grocery store and the Exxon — as well as the claim that Jennifer stopped by his house the next day — were never independently corroborated “despite countless hours of investigation and numerous interviews [as of 2013].”
“The last person known to have spoken to Jennifer was her father, Michael, who, phone records confirm, talked with her at approximately 11 a.m. on March 25, 2004,” the post confirmed. Michael Wix, who lived in Manchester, “told detectives that his daughter spoke of arguing with Joey Benton’s family and that she looked forward to seeing him in Manchester on the following Sunday,” the department stated. “Michael Wix has not heard from Jennifer since.”
Kathy Nale reported her daughter and granddaughter missing on Saturday, March 27, 2004.
According to the Robertson County Sheriff’s Office, as of December 2013, the Benton household had been searched on four separate occasions. “No one, including Joey Benton, has been eliminated as having potential involvement in the disappearance of Jennifer and Adrianna Wix,” the department’s website states.
The sheriff’s office noted that there had always been “strong implications of foul play” in the case and it was investigated as a homicide from the beginning. In their 2013 release ahead of the 10th anniversary of Jennifer and Adrianna’s disappearance, they announced the had case had formally been reclassified as a homicide.
Also in 2013, following a formal request by then District Attorney General, John Carney, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation took over the case. Prior to that, they had already been assisting in the investigation. TBI Public Information Officer Susan Niland told Dateline that the agent in charge of Jennifer and Adrianna’s case, James Scarbro, was called last-minute to attend to an AMBER alert in another county — the disappearance of 15-year-old Sebastian Rogers — and could therefore not attend a previously scheduled interview with Dateline. He later provided written responses to some of the questions sent by Dateline.
Special Agent Scarbro stated that because the case is “an active and open investigation,” they are “very limited as to the information” they are able to provide. He confirmed that in 2013, the case was “reclassified from a missing persons case to a death investigation.”
The special agent was also able to confirm that the last person “reported to have seen Jennifer and Adrianna was Joey Benton.” Scarbro wrote that there are no publicly named suspects and confirmed that there have been no credible sightings of Jennifer or Adrianna since 2004.
“We continue to follow up on leads provided from the community and pursue efforts to find Jennifer and Adrianna,” Scarbro wrote.
Life without Jennifer and Adrianna
For Jennifer and Adrianna’s family, the past 20 years have been clouded by grief.
“My mom did the best she could to still be there for us,” Casey told Dateline, explaining that Kathy would frequently leave the house to follow up on small leads over the years, which often were states away. “She would be gone all the time. And so, for young girls, that’s really hard to cope with — the disappearance and loss of your sister and niece, but also the loss of your mom.”
Ultimately, however, Casey understands. “Her pain as a mother is just a lot different. And I know that now, having kids of my own,” she said. “But, like, there was a time when [Heather and I] had to be, like, ‘OK, Mom. We know that you have to fight for Jennifer and Adrianna, but we’re still here, too. Like, we need you at home.’”
Casey said that in the past few years, she has taken over the case from her mother, researching and pushing for answers on the ‘Justice for Jennifer and Adrianna Wix’ Facebook page, which her mother started in 2011.
“The past couple years were just really hard on me, just going through the case again,” Casey told Dateline. “I was kind of like my mom reincarnated — like, going out of town to places and interviewing people and just constantly, constantly working on the case.”
Kathy said that, on top of performing her own searches and interviews, she’s reached out to law enforcement countless times over the years. “In the very beginning, it was every day,” she said. “Then it went to every week, then it went to once a month, and then, you know — then it was once a month for many, many years.”
It’s a part of the grieving process, Kathy says, which never stops. It just changes.
“There’s not a lot of hope left, that’s for sure, so I just have to live on my memories,” she told Dateline. “The problem is that, as I get older, memories seem to fade away more and more. I mean, the memory of them will never be gone completely, but, you know, I can’t — I can’t sometimes remember the sound of my daughter’s voice or her laugh.”
It’s one of her greatest fears, Kathy said, that these memories — which once brought her joy, then brought her pain, and now bring her comfort — will someday be gone altogether.
“It’s difficult when I can’t — when I just can’t conjure up in my memory. I used to feel like I could feel her hand holding mine,” Kathy said. “But I don’t feel that anymore. So sometimes it’s just scary to think that I could one day just not remember them like I want to.”
Jennifer’s family told Dateline that they believe Jennifer was murdered. Kathy has some hope that Adrianna may be alive, though, since she was only 2 at the time of her disappearance. “I would hope that even if things got out of hand and [somebody] harmed Jennifer, that they couldn’t harm Adrianna. That they couldn’t harm this innocent child,” Kathy said. “And that maybe — maybe she’s still out there somewhere.”
Adrianna would be 22 years old today. “I’ve always held out hope. That’s the reason I’m on Ancestry.com,” Kathy told Dateline. “Because if Adrianna ever — if she’s out there and she ever thinks, you know, ‘I don’t belong where I’m at,’ and does her DNA or something, or just does it out of curiosity, that she would match with me.”
Holding on to hope that Jennifer and Adrianna will someday be found is important to Kathy. “I want a place to take flowers,” Kathy said. “I just want peace for my family and for my children. And I really believe that the answers are out there. And that we just have to keep looking and not give up. So, when I say I don’t give up hope, I don’t give up hope that I will know someday.”
Jennifer’s cousin Jeff Grayson told Dateline that the ever-present grief of the past 20 years has “turned our family upside down.” He echoed a statement, however, that all four family members who spoke to Dateline — Kathy, Lisa, Casey, and Jeff — separately expressed. “There’s nothing I’d love more to find out what the hell happened,” he said.
Casey agrees. She told Dateline that she wants people to keep Jennifer and Adrianna’s memory alive until they get justice. “Probably my biggest ask is like, don’t forget that Jennifer and Adrianna existed,” she said. “That they were our family.”
Anyone with information about Jennifer and Adrianna’s case is asked to contact the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-TBI-FIND or email TipsToTBI@tbi.tn.gov. You can also contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 (1-800-THE-LOST) or the Robertson County Sheriff’s Office’s tip line at (615) 382-6600.
