Kimberly Sue Doss

• Missing Since 03/20/1980
• Missing From Davenport, Iowa
• Classification Endangered Missing
• Sex Female
• Race White
• Date of Birth 02/12/1966 (58)
• Age 14 years old
• Height and Weight 5'2, 125 pounds
• Distinguishing Characteristics Caucasian female. Brown hair, brown eyes. Kimberly has a gap between her upper front teeth.

Details of Disappearance

Kimberly was living in Davenport, Iowa at the time of her March 1980 disappearance. She had moved to Houston, Texas with her mother several months earlier, but returned to Davenport because she missed her friends and boyfriend. She initially planned to live with her father, but instead stayed with her boyfriend and his family. She kept in regular touch with her mother in Texas.

On March 20, Kimberly called her mother and said she was going back to Houston and had gotten a bus ticket to go. She mentioned meeting a girl on the bus in the Quad City area, named Kathy, who was from Chicago, Illinois, and Kimberly planned to spend the night in Chicago before going to Houston.

She never arrived in Houston and has never been heard from again. Her mother attempted to report her missing, but the Houston police refused to accept the report because Kimberly had disappeared in Iowa. She then contacted the Davenport police and tried to file a report, but they wouldn't take a report either because Kimberly's mother was in Texas.

It was not until September 1982, after Kimberly's mother moved to Davenport, that she was finally able to file a report for her daughter as a runaway with the Davenport Police Department. Many agencies give the date of Kimberly's disappearance as September 1, 1982 or September 27, 1982, but she'd actually gone missing two and a half years earlier.

Thursday's Child, a charitable organization that assists homeless or at-risk teenagers, claimed they made contact with Kimberly in 1983 when she was arrested for prostitution in California, and that she was using the name Kimberly Kathleen Gardner and didn't want anything to do with her family.

This woman was not, in fact, Kimberly Doss or Kimberly Gardner; she was located in Minnesota in 1991 and admitted her real name was Shannon Jones. All of the supposed sightings of Kimberly that had been reported after 1980 were actually of Jones. In 2018, a DNA sample taken from Jones definitively proved she was not Kimberly Doss.

Due to this misidentification, Kimberly’s name was mistakenly removed from the National Crime Information Center several times. The Davenport police closed her case in February 1984, because she had turned eighteen and it was policy at the tmie to remove missing children who reached the age of 18 from the registry. Kimberly was re-listed as a missing child in 1999.

Kimberly's family does not believe she ran away from home, as they don't think she would have suddenly stopped contacting everyone she knew. They believe she may have met with foul play. Her disappearance remains unsolved.