Woman Vanishes After Telling Sister She Was Nervous For A Date With A “Young” Man

Eryn Beth McClary was a 38-year-old woman from Eugene, Oregon. She was the second of three daughters and had a close relationship with her family. According to her younger sister Pamela, Eryn was a “daddy’s girl.”

At 21, Eryn married a man named Leroy, but the relationship lasted only a year. Pamela explained that “drugs were what they had in common. When she sobered up she realized what a mistake it was.” Eryn stayed clean until her father died of cancer. She was 23 and quickly developed a serious addiction to heroin.

Eryn earned her money from sex work and was well-known in the Whiteaker area of Eugene. She was staying with her mother, Audrey, and her 12-year-old niece, Jayme Hart. But the 38-year-old often lived on the streets, in motels, or with friends.

Nevertheless, her beloved cocker spaniel, Barney, was always by her side. According to Jayme, she’d only leave him with Audrey when “the weather was bad or McClary was going somewhere that Barney wasn’t allowed to be (jail, rehab, etc).”

Jayme had a special bond with her aunt, who she says had a radiant personality,

“Eryn was like a second mother to me … She was amazing. I don’t even know how to describe her, really. She was 5-foot-4 and maybe 100 pounds soaking wet, but she had a personality that was bigger than life. When she smiled, her entire face lit up, and you couldn’t help but smile back.”

On the evening of August 4, 1995, 23-year-old Kyle spotted his aunt hitchhiking. Eryn told him she was attending a recovery meeting at the Jesco Club, a sobriety club in Whiteaker. He gave her a ride and, at approximately 8:45 PM, dropped her off in the West 4th Avenue and Blair Boulevard area.

Kyle wasn’t convinced she was going to a meeting due to her makeup and outfit — a leopard-print body suit and black knee-high boots. His suspicions were warranted.

Earlier that day, Eryn told her sister she was going on a date that night and was nervous because he was young. According to Jayme, younger men seeking sex workers tend to “act entitled, rough them up and sometimes not even pay them.”

Eryn did not visit the Jesco Club. She also had plans to meet with friends later that night but never showed up. She has not been heard from since.

Both authorities and the McClary family suspect foul play is involved in Eryn’s disappearance. She had a warrant out for her arrest due to a parole violation. However, Eryn did not have a history of evading her legal issues, and her family does not believe she would willfully leave her life behind, especially without Barney.

The young man she had a date with remains unidentified, but he is a person of interest in the case.

Although unlikely since her remains were never found, one hypothesis is that Eryn overdosed and somebody hid her body. A few months after she vanished, a note was found on the back of one of Eryn’s missing person flyers. According to Jayme, it stated that “she ‘overdosed while partying,’ and they supposedly dumped her body in the woods around Fern Ridge Reservoir.”

Eryn’s older sister, DeLynn Tucker, says the note was written in “broken English” and thinks it may be from one of the Hispanic drug dealers her sister knew.

Several years after Eryn vanished, a family acquaintance known only as “TB” approached DeLynn and her husband Scott at a bar.

The woman told them two methamphetamine dealers affiliated with the Free Souls Motorcycle Club killed Eryn as they thought she was a snitch. She added that Eryn’s body was one of several buried on the property of what is now a winery.

TB was no longer afraid of coming forward because both men were dead. Despite her troubled past, DeLynn and Scott believed her. They went to the authorities, as TB was willing to show them the exact location she thought Eryn to be buried, but the couple didn’t hear back.

In 2015, Neal Falls was fatally shot while assaulting a sex worker in West Virginia. He had no criminal record, but he has since been investigated in relation to missing and murdered sex workers in several states, including Oregon.

After Heather Saul killed him, police found a “kill kit” in the trunk of his car — it included “handcuffs, several long knives, a box cutter, two axes, a machete, a sledgehammer, a bulletproof vest, another gun, shovels, a rubber tub large enough to hold an adult, and bleach and other cleaning supplies that could be used to help dispose of a body.” He also had a list of names and phone numbers of local sex workers.

A suspected serial killer, Neal was originally from Oregon and would have been 25 years old when Eryn went missing. He is not an official suspect, but Jayme does not rule out the possibility of his involvement,

“My mom and I wondered about that guy, too. I showed her his picture when the story originally broke, and she said he looked familiar, which seemed to kind of freak her out. From what we heard, however, EPD was on it and somehow ruled him out. I still think it’s a possibility, though I don’t know where to even start looking into that.”

Eryn Beth McClary has been missing for 27 years. She would now be 65 years old, although she is presumed deceased. Barney lived with Audrey after Eryn went missing. Jayme remarked,

“She absolutely adored that dog, and he sat by the back door of my grandmother’s house literally for years waiting for her to come home.”