Employee of the Month: The Disappearance of Carla Beth Anderson

On Friday, November 13, 1987, Carla Beth Anderson found out she had been named employee of the month.

She worked at the Hardee’s in Wadena, Minnesota. Her picture was supposed to go up on the employee of the month display. It would be taken the next Monday. Her mother planned to do her hair for it.

That night her mother and stepfather took her to dinner to celebrate. They rented some movies, then dropped her off at her apartment around 8 p.m. She was 23.

No one has seen her since. No one has ever been arrested.

Sources for this section: 1, 2, 3, 6, 7

Delta Dawn

Carla was born and raised in Brainerd, the Wadena Pioneer Journal reported.

Her older brother Dan remembers a 9-year-old holding a spatula at the stove of the family camper in Alaska. He remembers her record player, and Carla singing “Delta Dawn” over and over in her room until her brothers pounded on the door.

She was small. Most accounts put her at 4 feet 10 inches and about 80 pounds. CNN gives 90. She had strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes.

The state calls her a vulnerable adult. CNN reported that she had a learning disability, and that she took part in a living skills program and met with a social worker. Her family worried that her size and her disability left her vulnerable living alone.

“After high school, she was anxious to get going on her own, and she did,” Dan told CNN. “Had a job, had her own place.”

“Fiercely independent,” he called her. “Loved living on her own, making her own money, doing her own thing.”

Sources for this section: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9

A couple of blocks from work

Her apartment at the Greenwood Apartments was a couple of blocks from work, so she could walk. She sometimes volunteered to come in on days she wasn’t scheduled.

Her manager, Wayne Wolden, called her “spud.” “She was like a little potato,” he said in an earlier interview quoted by the Pioneer Journal in 2022. It doesn’t say when or to whom.

Wolden later became mayor of Wadena. He told FOX 9 in 2026:

“Carla is just an exemplary bubbly, happy, just joyous individual who just brought so many smiles to everybody, employees and customers alike.”

Sources for this section: 6, 8

Her brothers

According to CNN, some people in town bullied her, and her mother told a newspaper she worried Carla would be taken advantage of. Her family said local people sometimes harassed her.

Her three brothers looked out for her, Dan said.

“There’s a lot of not good people out there but you can’t protect somebody all the time, as much as you’d like to think you can,” he said.

Sources for this section: 3, 6

Taco John’s

Her mother was Roberta Wells. Her stepfather was Verne Wells. The dinner was at the new Taco John’s.

She would have stayed at her parents’ place that weekend, Dan said. But they were working on a new house on a lake about an hour away, and Carla didn’t want to go.

Greenwood sits near Second Street Northwest and Hemlock Avenue.

The BCA says they dropped her off about 8 p.m. The Wadena Pioneer Journal, in 2022, put the drop-off between 7:30 and 8. Her federal missing person record says she was last seen at 7.

She was carrying a cup of soda from dinner. She was believed to be wearing blue jeans, a white sweatshirt with three Pepsi and Mountain Dew bears on it, a brown Hardee’s jacket and pink sneakers. She had a half-inch scar over her right eye.

Sources for this section: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7

Opening weekend

Deer hunters were getting ready for opening weekend. A fire was burning in a swamp on the edge of town, not far from Carla’s apartment. A few blocks away, someone stole a brown Plymouth Horizon.

Nobody has ever shown that any of it had anything to do with Carla.

The building had a security door. That night it had been propped open by other tenants who were moving in, the Pioneer Journal reported in 2022.

Sources for this section: 3, 6, 7

The shift

Carla was due at Hardee’s at noon on Saturday, November 14. The 2022 Pioneer Journal story calls it a morning shift.

She didn’t come.

Not showing up wasn’t like her, her mother and Wolden told the Wadena Pioneer Journal in 1987. People called her apartment. No one answered.

Her mother called several times that weekend, she told the Brainerd Daily Dispatch in 2007. No one picked up. Then she went to the apartment herself and found it untouched.

“I knew then that life would never be the same,” Roberta Wells said. “Immediately I got my husband and went down to the police station.”

By Sunday, her parents had gone to law enforcement, the Pioneer Journal reported.

Dan was working in Eagan, about three hours away. His mother called him at about 9 a.m. that Monday to say Carla hadn’t shown up for work, CNN reported. He packed and drove to Wadena. Then he called their father, Marvin Anderson, who flew down from Alaska. CNN’s account doesn’t mention the Saturday shift.

Sources for this section: 1, 3, 6, 7

The VCR

Investigators also searched Carla’s apartment. The public record found for this story doesn’t say exactly when, or who went in first.

According to the BCA, the door was locked. The 2022 Pioneer Journal story says it was locked from the outside.

There was no sign of a break-in. Nothing showed a struggle.

Her purse was still inside. So was her checkbook. The empty soda cup was in the garbage. One of the rented movies was still in the VCR.

The BCA says two things were gone. Her apartment keys, and her Hardee’s jacket.

Chief Naomi Plautz told CNN it was a Hardee’s “rainbow jacket” Carla had just gotten for being employee of the month. Other descriptions say brown and orange, or brown with the Hardee’s logo.

Her NamUs entry says “all of her personal belongings remained in the home.” The BCA and investigators have said her keys and jacket were gone.

Sources for this section: 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 12

Five thousand posters

Volunteers, including the Wadena Pioneer Journal’s staff, made more than 5,000 posters of Carla. They went up across northern and central Minnesota. One made it to the Metrodome, when the Verndale Pirates played in the state Prep Bowl.

The Civil Air Patrol searched from the air. A WCCO helicopter flew too. Students from Wadena Technical College walked the ground. Hunters were asked to watch for anything. A search committee went out looking for her about five days after she disappeared.

Michael Carr Jr., who later became Wadena County sheriff, was a high school sophomore that fall. He told the Pioneer Journal in 2022 that authorities moved fast because the ground was bare and snow would soon cover any disturbed ground. Within days, he said, it snowed.

The FBI was called in. Authorities believed it was possibly a kidnapping, CNN reported. In those first weeks, the family offered a $10,000 reward.

Nothing turned up. Her father told the Brainerd Dispatch in 1987:

“The waiting has been the worst because you don’t know anything. Hopefully, we will find something. Possibly we will find a clue, but at this point, I don’t think she is going to walk out of the woodwork.”

Sources for this section: 3, 6, 7, 12

The swamp fire

Investigator Lane Waldahl had been named to the job about two months before.

With no sign of a struggle, he first believed Carla had left her apartment willingly, according to a 1987 Brainerd Daily Dispatch report cited by CNN.

The swamp fire might have been visible from her window. Waldahl wondered whether she had walked out to look at it. Authorities theorized she may have gone to see it up close and been attacked, the Pioneer Journal reported. There was no evidence for that.

Plautz, the current chief, says the same. The fire could have been seen from the apartment, she told CNN, but there’s no evidence Carla went to see it.

“We don’t know if she went out for a walk, we don’t know if somebody was at the front door and she went with them. We don’t know any of that,” Dan said.

Sources for this section: 3, 6

Dental records to Boston

“My mom was convinced very early on that she was not alive anymore,” Dan told CNN.

“I have very slim hope that she’s alive,” Roberta Wells told the Pioneer Journal in 1989.

In 1995, eight years on, she told the Pioneer Journal she doubted her daughter was alive and “hoped that hunters would help find her body,” as the paper recounted in 2025. The 1995 story said that “as awful as it may be to imagine that someone murdered her only daughter,” she still preferred that possibility to “someone possibly taking advantage of Carla’s vulnerability.” “That’s just more than I can bear,” she said.

By 1995, Waldahl had Carla’s photo age-enhanced. He read the descriptions of bodies found and sent her dental records as far as Boston.

“Carla is probably dead,” he said. “The main thing now is that her body be found.”

Waldahl retired in 2002.

Sources for this section: 3, 6, 7

Cleared

Investigators have conducted hundreds of interviews. A few have been named or described in news reports. Each of those was cleared, the reports say.

Carla’s boyfriend and members of her family were ruled out after they passed polygraph tests.

In the 1990s, police interviewed a man Carla’s mother had reported for harassing her. He and a friend both passed polygraph tests, CNN reported, citing a 1995 Pioneer Journal story.

Floyd Tapson was looked at for a time because he targeted women with mental disabilities, according to a 1999 Star Tribune report cited by CNN. That year, a Montana court sentenced him to life in prison for the attempted murder of a developmentally disabled woman, MPR News reported.

He had an alibi that cleared him.

Plautz told CNN that police aren’t ruling out anyone who was cleared in the past. Investigators are using new tools, like DNA analysis, on old and new leads, she said.

Sources for this section: 1, 3, 6, 7, 13

The playing cards

In 2008, the BCA put Carla on its cold case playing cards. The decks went to every police department and sheriff’s office in Minnesota, and more than 10,000 went to state prison inmates. No solid tips came from them in her case.

Verne Wells died that February. Roberta Wells died that June. A year before, she had told the Brainerd Dispatch what it was like.

“As vulnerable as I knew she was, I never dreamed of her not being with us forever. I always knew she would be my child. I always knew I would always be a mother for as long as I lived because I had Carla.”

She had arranged a shared headstone for Carla and Carla’s brother Scott, who died in 2007.

“It’s never gone away. It’s always there,” Waldahl said in 2022. “I hope someone finds her before I go.”

Sources for this section: 3, 6, 7, 11

The Horizon

The stolen car was never recovered. In 2022, Waldahl told the Pioneer Journal he still thought there was a connection, and that the car might be in a lake or a gravel pit. “If you were to find that vehicle, you would probably find her,” Carr said.

“They’ve got to be related, but we just can’t prove or disprove it, yet,” Plautz said that year.

In 2026 she told CNN that police have never found any evidence that it was. “It could have been just a coincidence, although it also could have been part of Carla’s disappearance,” she said.

Sources for this section: 3, 6

Spotlight on Crime

In November 2025, the Pioneer Journal reported that police had some new leads and suspects. None has been named.

On June 15, 2026, Spotlight on Crime announced a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to Carla’s whereabouts and to whoever is responsible for her disappearance. The family is also offering $10,000, the Wadena Pioneer Journal reported. The sources don’t say whether that is the same reward the family put up in 1987.

Dan stood at the microphone in Wadena. His father, Marvin, and his brother Doug stood with him.

“We’re ready for closure,” Dan said. “Somebody’s got to know something.”

Police said the reward wasn’t timed to any new development in the case. Investigators do not believe she would have chosen to disappear. At the news conference, Plautz wouldn’t discuss suspects or leads. She told CNN that some leads are getting more attention than others.

“We’ve got evidence all over the place and we’re looking at it pretty hard,” she said. “I’m confident it will be solved.”

Sources for this section: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10

Monday

No one has said where Carla went after she got home, what became of her keys and jacket, or where she is now.

Five of her seven nieces and nephews were born after she disappeared, CNN reported. Her mother, her stepfather and her brother Scott all died without knowing what happened to her.

“She very possibly would have had kids of her own by now,” Dan said. “What would her life look like? It’s hard not to think about that.”

The employee of the month photo was supposed to be taken that Monday.

Sources for this section: 1, 3, 6

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