Searching In Greensboro, NC

Two Lakes, Two Names:

Searching Greensboro, NC

Inside the Find Me Project's sonar and dive operation across Sector 1 and the cold cases that brought us there.

By Mark DeLuca, Founder, The Find Me Project

The raft goes in before the sun's fully up. That's how most of these mornings start. Gear staged, sonar checked a stretch of water in North Greensboro that's been sitting on a map for weeks with a red dot on it, waiting for us to come clear it.

Sector 1. North Greensboro. Two lakes, two names, one mission: find something that matters.

Location #1: Lake Townsend

We started at Lake Townsend, right at the dam, where the boat ramp and the rental kayaks make it look like any other Saturday on the water. It isn't. This site made our list as a Hydro Anomaly Zone (HAZ). One of the dozens of coordinates our platform flags automatically and our OSINT team confirms by hand before we ever load a boat.

The plan was simple on paper: scan the inner bay, work around the pier, hug the barrier along the dam, then punch west in case anything had drifted. In about 9.5 feet of water, we ran the full route, every foot of it green on the map when we were done, which means every foot of it is now crossed off the list.

"We essentially went through the bay, out of the inner bay, scanned around the pier, around the sand ramp, and also along the barrier for the dam."

No vehicle. No person. But a body of water that no longer has to be a question mark on somebody's case file and that's a real answer, even when it isn't the one a family is praying for.

Case File: John Prange Massey, Gibsonville, NC, 1984

While we packed up for location #2, we put a name in front of you. This is one of the reasons Sector 1 matters to us at all.

John Prange Massey was 26 years old, a Purdue-trained engineer working as a cost analyst for Burlington Industries. On the night of March 16, 1984, he attended a dinner party in Greensboro, roughly 20 miles from the home he'd lived in for two years on Rosemont Street. He left the party alone, driving a yellow 1979 Toyota Corolla hatchback. He never made it home. Coworkers reported him missing to the Alamance County Sheriff's Department eight days later, on March 24. At the time, investigators suspected foul play. Neither John nor his car has ever been found.

"He was the kind of person people trusted without thinking twice. A 1975 salutatorian. A reliable employee. A man with no known enemies and no reason to disappear."

Years later, a tip sent investigators into the woods off University Drive near Burlington for an all-night dig. They found nothing. Forty years on, the questions haven't moved: Where is the car? Who was the last person to see him, and why has a case with this much detail, a name, a date, a vehicle, never been closed?

If you have any information on John Prange Massey or his 1979 Toyota Corolla hatchback, CONTACT US. Every lead matters. Every case deserves an answer.

Location #2: Higgins Lake

Higgins Lake pulled us in for a specific reason: the entrance road runs downhill straight toward the water, the kind of geometry that turns a routine drive into an accident if a vehicle doesn't stop in time. It fought us the whole way. We got the raft out and ran sonar in about 14 feet of water further out, but the closer we pushed toward shore and the launch ramps, the worse it got. Lake weed thick enough in spots that a clean scan was nearly impossible in 4 to 5 feet of water.

"I was genuinely shocked at how bad the weed growth was. It really limited our search capability more than expected, but we were still able to get the raft out and run sonar."

We didn't pull a clean result out of Higgins Lake. We pulled a harder truth: some search areas don't clear easy, and we log that too. It still counts as ground covered.

Case File: Sonya Nicole Kingston, Greensboro, NC, 2002

The second case we carried into the field with us is harder to sit with.

Sonya Nicole Kingston was 26 years old when she was last seen on July 2, 2002, leaving her residence in Greensboro driving a dark green 1995 Mazda Protege, North Carolina plate PTL-7712. She has never been heard from since.

Sonya worked as a dancer at the Sugar Bears and Twiggies clubs. She was romantically involved with Elton Turnbull, described by investigators as a major drug and gun smuggler; according to investigators, she worked at times as a drug courier for him and recruited other women into that same role. In November 2001, she was arrested for drug possession, and Turnbull bailed her out. After that, he reportedly stopped using her as a courier, but the relationship continued. He gave her money. They traveled together. At the same time, she was allegedly seeing another, unidentified drug dealer.

Turnbull has also been linked by investigators to the 1997 disappearance of Sterling Porter, another man who vanished from Greensboro. In 2002, Turnbull was arrested on drug charges and cooperated with authorities in exchange for a lighter sentence. To date, he has never been charged in connection with either Porter's disappearance or Sonya's. Given the world she was moving in, investigators suspect foul play. But one detail is the one that stops everyone who knew her:

"Friends say Sonya always dressed up, dressy clothes, put together. The day she vanished, she left home in a shirt and sweatpants. That alone told the people close to her that something was wrong."

Rumors have followed this case for over two decades, buried in Virginia, buried in New York, alive somewhere in the Virgin Islands. None of it has ever been confirmed. Sonya's case remains open with the Greensboro Police Department.

If you know anything about Sonya Nicole Kingston, her whereabouts, or the car she was driving the day she disappeared, contact the Greensboro Police Department or The Find Me Project. Somebody knows what happened to her. It's time that answer came out.

What Two Lakes Actually Buy Us

We didn't find a vehicle. We didn't find a missing person. What we did do is cross two primary bodies of water off the list for good, real, documented answers, delivered to the families and investigators who need them, instead of another decade of "maybe."

That's the sliver you see on camera. Behind it is the Guardian Angel Task Force. Professionals and practitioners from their own fields who take on cases like these and build a strategic approach from the ground up. It starts with awareness: taking a case from a couple hundred views to hundreds of thousands. From there, it's intelligence gathering, real open-source work, military- and intelligence-grade scouring of connected devices and public data to build a pattern of life that gets layered onto a map. That map feeds directly into search and recovery in the field. Along the way, every case gets cross-checked against human trafficking databases, because that work matters just as much. There are still missing people. There are still families hoping and praying for answers. Somewhere out there, someone missing is praying that a hero like you steps up to help in whatever way you can.

Help us keep going. This Greensboro search only needed about $100 in pledge support to cover what we couldn't already fund ourselves — you can pledge any amount, one-time or recurring, click here to PLEDGE. Have a tip on either case above? Use the Submit a Tip feature on our site, you can stay 100% anonymous. And if this work matters to you, leave a review, share it, and tell us how we're doing in the comments. Let's bring them home.