For more than two decades the answer sat eight feet down, sealed in silt and summer algae, waiting for sonar beams to finally sweep the right patch of water. On Tuesday divers from Adventures With Purpose—a nonprofit cold-case dive team—closed their eyes, let the current settle, and touched the roof of a 1994 blue Ford Tempo that had rolled off a Pope County road one night in September 1998 and never resurfaced. Inside were the last known traces of Samantha Jean Hopper, her 6-year-old daughter Courtney Holt, and the baby boy Samantha was due to deliver any day.
The disappearance had become local lore: a young mother setting out from her Russellville apartment to drop Courtney at a friend’s, then continue to a Little Rock concert. She gassed up, buckled the kids, and vanished. Search dogs lost the scent on a rain-swept highway; detectives logged tips about strange cars and rest-stop arguments, but leads withered. Samantha’s parents kept her bedroom unchanged; her eldest daughter, Dezarea—only four when the car slipped into the lake—grew up alternating between hope and the slow ache of maybe.
