four-wheelers and play volleyball and shoot paint ball guns. and then she d turn around and put on a dress and go you know look beautiful for photos. her parents debbie and terry alvis say heather was driven by a passion to create. she drew all the time, decorating the family house with her doodles. everywhere you went in the house, there was some kind of writing or some kind of drawing or some kind of doodle. her brain is working overtime? constantly. just as a reminder a small desk in the house it has a computer on it. and it has sticky notes all over the top part of the desk. the one that sits right in front of my face in her handwriting, heather is amazing with a little heart. and heather was amazing when it came to cosmetology, the art of makeup. in a way that only siblings can. she sparked morgan s interest in it, too. she said cosmetology was hers.
eventually, the officer told terry to take heather s car and head home. but terry s relief was short-lived. when he told his wife the story about heather checking into a hospital, debbi didn t believe it. because she knows it s expensive to go to the emergency room. and she wouldn t want that kind of expense, so she would have called me and said, hey, this is what s wrong, what do i do? reporter: so the couple did what they could, calling family and friends. no one had heard from heather. eventually, though, one relative cleared up that hospital mystery. we find out that the heather that was in the hospital is my cousin s daughter, named the same thing. we didn t have the middle name on it, it was just the first and the last. what are the odds that it s another at the same time. heather elvis at the same time going to the hospital? it was yeah. it was it was puzzling. reporter: so where was their heather? confusion was turning to fear. i felt like somethin
one of my best friends came to the house. he looked at me and he said, he said, i hope she didn t suffer. i can t get that thought from my head. heather was born in 1993. the middle kid, sandwiched between elder brother chris and younger sister morgan. as morgan vividly remembered, heather would never let a label define her. she wasn t really a girly girl or a tomboy, she was somewhere in between. she loved heels. she would never let you swap shoes with her, though. i mean, god forbid i borrowed a pair of shoes and i did not tell her. she was coming for me. she just loved them. but she also would drive
it was the beginning of 3:00 in the morning. i believe it was 3:10. reporter: for the defense it was a timestamp, proving tammy was home well before heather went missing. that wasn t all, he said. both sidney and tammy s phones were on and pinging from their house, not from the landing, when heather was there. it was all so hard for morgan to listen to. some days she wished she hadn t come to court, but that all changed during a crucial moment in the trial. when i found out that tammy was gonna testify, i really wanted to be there because i do look like heather, and she ran into me in the hallway, and it was the first time she had ever really made eye contact and been up close and personal with me, and i could hear her audibly gasp. reporter: but when tammy took the stand, she seemed confident, ready to tell her story. she told the jury she wasn t a ruthless kidnapper. she was a mom. my youngest is on the far left over there.
heather s desperate parents called on everyone to scour the area. they printed out fliers. there wasn t a storefront in myrtle beach that didn t have one or two flyers in it. then they were in georgia, and tennessee, florida. they posted pleas online for information. they turned to the news media. local. is heather alive? my heart tells me my daughter s alive. and national including dateline s missing in america digital series. the elvises let our cameras into those agonizing early days. it s a hole that we all in the family just feel. and bearing silent witness to their anguish was another daughter, morgan. i can probably count on one hand how many times i ve seen my dad cry.