Missing: Annette and Mylette Anderson — 52 Years Since Two Sisters Vanished in Jacksonville

On the evening of Thursday, August 1, 1974, two little girls were left alone at their Jacksonville home for a short while. When their father, Jack Anderson, returned that night, they were gone.

Lillian “Annette” Anderson was 11 years old. Her little sister, Mylette Josephine Anderson, was 6.

They have never been found. Their cases remain open with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office — fifty-two years later.

Twenty minutes

The details of that evening, as public case summaries record them, are painfully ordinary right up until they aren’t.

Around 6:00 p.m., the girls were left at their home in Jacksonville’s Oceanway area while their mother, Elizabeth, and their older sister, Donna, went out to care for a sick relative. At about 7:00 p.m., a phone call reached the house and contact was made with the girls — everything seemed normal at that moment. But when follow-up calls came later, no one answered. By approximately 7:20 p.m., the sisters were gone.

Investigators concluded the girls were likely taken within a span of about twenty minutes. When their father returned, he found the house empty — and he noticed something that made the silence worse: the baby doll that Mylette loved and carried everywhere with her was missing too.

The Charley Project classifies both disappearances as non-family abductions. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children lists the case under NCMEC number 1323574, with NCIC numbers M584468202 (Annette) and M174488883 (Mylette). Age-progressed images of both girls remain in the NCMEC system. Today, Annette would be 63 years old. Mylette would be 59.

A claim, and the doubt around it

In later years, the case became entangled with the name of serial killer Paul John Knowles, known as “the Casanova Killer.” Case summaries report that Knowles — whose first murder was committed in Jacksonville in late July 1974 — claimed he had been on the Andersons’ street, that he saw two little girls at their home, and that he abducted and killed them, with accounts differing on how he said he disposed of their remains.

This is where the record demands care, because a claim is not an established fact. Investigators have expressed skepticism about Knowles’s account — some regard it as a likely false confession — and there has never been definitive evidence linking him to the Anderson sisters. No one has ever been charged in their disappearance. The distinction between what a convicted killer said and what was proven matters, and Deadly Duval will not blur it: the sisters’ case is an open missing-persons investigation, and it has never been closed.

The summer Jacksonville stopped letting its children play outside

The Anderson sisters did not vanish in a quiet year. In the summer and fall of 1974, Jacksonville was living through a nightmare: over roughly three months, five little girls between the ages of 6 and 12 disappeared in the city. Among the other names in that season were Jean Marie Schoen, 9, who vanished in Springfield between her grandmother’s house and a convenience store; Virginia Suzanne Helm; and Rebecca Ann Greene.

As writer Tim Gilmore put it in his 2017 account of the sisters’ memorial, it’s hard to know which thought is the more terrifying: the possibility that the missing girls were the victims of a single predator, or the probability that most of the cases were unrelated to each other. Investigators initially believed the abductions were not connected. Whether that assessment held has never been publicly settled, because none of the cases were ever solved.

Parents across Jacksonville, most of them for the first time, stopped letting their children play outside or walk to school alone. That fear was the summer’s legacy. The absence of answers is its inheritance.

A headstone with two birthdays and no death date

The Anderson family’s grief has a physical address: a small cemetery in Jacksonville’s Pumpkin Hill area, where conjoined heart-shaped headstones bear the names of the two girls and the words “In Loving Memory — Missing Since Aug. 1, 1974.”

Only birthdates are carved there: Lillian Annette, born March 2, 1963; Mylette Josephine, born October 18, 1967. A plaster angel stands at either end of the dual cenotaph. Elizabeth Anderson bought the memorial only after her husband Jack died in 1994 — twenty years after their daughters disappeared. She does not believe her daughters are still alive, Gilmore reported, but without the discovery of their bodies, they will never be declared gone either.

Jack Layton Anderson’s own stone is attached to Elizabeth’s. The girls’ stones stand beside them, waiting.

Still open, still waiting

More than five decades have passed. Law enforcement, the NCMEC, and missing-children registries continue to keep the case active. The girls’ age-progressed photos still circulate. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office still carries the case — and the city’s long memory carries the absence, especially in Oceanway, where the sisters’ home once stood.

Two little girls walked out of 1974 and into silence. Somebody, somewhere, knows what happened to Annette and Mylette Anderson.

If you know anything about the disappearance of Lillian “Annette” Anderson or Mylette Josephine Anderson, contact the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office at 904-630-0500.

Every face matters.

Sources: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC #1323574); The Charley Project; The Resource Center for Cold Case Missing Children’s Cases; Tim Gilmore, “Pumpkin Hill: Anderson Cemetery (Annette’s and Mylette’s Memorial)” (2017).