Over two decades after a Tennessee mom and her two-year-old daughter vanished without a trace, her family believe they are finally on the cusp of cracking the case.
Jennifer Wix, 21, was living with her boyfriend Joey Benton and his parents in Robertson County at the time of her disappearance in March 2004.
Joey is believed to have been the last person to see Jennifer or Adrianna alive, claiming he dropped them off at a gas station.
But after sticking to this story for 20 years, he shocking agreed to sit down with Jennifer’s sister Casey Wix Robinson and her mother Kathy Nale earlier this month to share more about what happened.
In an interview with DailyMail.com, Casey revealed that during this conversation he chillingly referred to their ‘remains’ for the first time – and reportedly claimed he had been lying for 20 years.
Young mother Jennifer Wix is pictured with her baby daughter Adrianna before they disappeared in late March 2004. The Wix family remains steadfast in their commitment to find out the truth behind what happened to them
Pictured: Casey Wix Robinson, Jennifer’s younger sister and Adrianna’s aunt. Robinson was 16 when her 21-year-old sister vanished. She now claims there could be bodily remains of her missing family members somewhere in Robertson County
For the first year-and-a half of Adrianna’s life, Jennifer lived with her mother and two younger sisters in their family home in Springfield – about 30 miles from Nashville.
Casey, then a teenager, has fond memories of this time and recalls helping care for her niece while her older sister worked night shifts.
She told Fox 17 Nashville that she was ‘very close’ with Jennifer and Adrianna – and has been desperate to find out what happened to them since they vanished.
Casey said that when she had her first phone call with Joey a few months ago, he stuck by the gas station story.
But in a second meeting on July 2, she claimed he told her ‘everything I told you on that first phone call is a lie. It’s been a lie for 20 years.’
Casey added: ‘During this meeting he told us what he supposedly remembered from that day. He said that it was Jennifer and Adrianna’s last day on Thursday, March 25, and then gave a potential location for their remains’.
Casey also hinted that Joey revealed ‘extreme details’ about what happened to them, but declined to say what she heard out of a desire to protect the ongoing investigation being led by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Robertson County Sheriff’s Office.
Jennifer and Joey Benton had started dating in the summer of 2003.
Less than a year later and only a few months after Jennifer and Adrianna moved in with Joey’s parents in Springfield, the young mother and daughter vanished and were never heard from again.
Casey recalled the days leading up to the disappearance of her sister and niece in March 2004.
At the time, Casey was 16 and an audibly distressed Jennifer called their mother, Kathy, at home on Wednesday, March 24.
During this call Jennifer reportedly told her mother about an intense argument between her and Joey Benton’s parents, Joe Benton Sr. and Cindy Benton.
‘Adrianna was in the other room. [My mother] could hear her crying and screaming,’ Casey said.
Casey explained that in the days prior to the phone call, baby Adrianna had been sick and was taken to the ER
Pictured: Joey Benton in his 2008 interview with FOX 17 Nashville. He told the local station: ‘I miss them both, and I would do anything to know where she’s at’
During the call, Casey recalled Jennifer said Cindy was acting ‘weird’ and was angry that Joey was acting like a father to Adrianna under her roof.
Joey was not Adrianna’s biological father.
That night, the couple was trying to sleep train the baby, and this apparently didn’t sit well with Cindy, according to Jennifer.
Nale also spoke to Dateline NBC about this call, saying she tried to assuage her daughter’s anxiety about her fraught living situation.
‘I just said, “Everybody will be — everybody will be calmed down tomorrow. Things will be better in the light of day, you know? And if not, you just call me tomorrow,”’ Nale recalled telling Jennifer.
Nale remembered her daughter telling her she would call tomorrow.
‘I never heard from her again,’ Nale said.
DailyMail.com made multiple attempts to contact the Benton family.
Kathy Nale, mother of Jennifer and Casey, was one of the last people to speak to Jennifer. Her daughter, who was living at the Benton home in Springfield, told her she had a fight with the Bentons. Nale recalled Jennifer telling her she would call the next day. She never did
Kathy Nale, left, pictured with her daughter Jennifer at an unspecified time before her disappearance in 2004
Lisa Fierro, Nale’s sister and Jennifer’s aunt, instead got a call from Jennifer the next day, Thursday, March 25.
Casey told DailyMail.com that this was recently confirmed as the last contact Jennifer ever had with her family before going missing.
According to Fierro, Jennifer said she didn’t want to live with the Bentons anymore and told her she was planning on moving out after talking to Joey about it. She also said she wanted to come to Fierro’s house for the time being.
Fierro said she left a spare key for her.
‘She never came, needless to say,’ Fierro told NBC.
Her family began calling around for her, and the first people they turned to for help were the Bentons, as they were the last known people to see her.
But to their chagrin, Joey and his parents didn’t pick up their phones.
‘I just remember everyone in my family panicking,’ Casey said.
When they finally reached Joey, Casey said he told the family: ‘I don’t know where she is. We broke up. I dropped her off at the gas station.’
Joey added that someone in a white car picked Jennifer and Adrianna up, but declined to give a more specific description of the vehicle or driver.
Adrianna Wix was born on January 14, 2002, and unlike her mother had brilliant blue eyes. Jennifer had brown eyes. This difference was something the Wix family constantly marveled at
This is one of the last pictures ever taken of Jennifer. Casey claims it was probably taken at the home of Joey Benton’s grandparents or aunt
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children rendered these aged up photos of what Jennifer, left, and her daughter Adrianna, right, might look like today if they were found
On Saturday, March 27, 2004, Jennifer’s family reported her and her daughter missing, and soon after, the Robertson County Sherriff’s Office searched the Benton home.
The police have never identified any suspects, nor have they corroborated Joey’s story about dropping Jennifer and Adrianna off at the gas station.
Today, Jennifer would be 41 years old and Adrianna 22.
In December 2013, the eve of the 10th anniversary of their disappearance, the Sherriff’s Office upgraded the case from a missing person’s case to a homicide investigation.
At that time, investigators were under the impression that Jennifer’s father, Michael Wix, was the last known person to speak to her on Thursday, March 25, not her aunt.
Michael told investigators Jennifer said a lot of same things she told her mother a day earlier. She was fighting with the Bentons, though she added she was excited to see him the following Sunday.
Like everyone else in the family, Michael said he has not heard from Jennifer since this phone call.
‘No one, including Joey Benton, has been eliminated as having potential involvement in the disappearance of Jennifer and Adrianna Wix,’ the Sheriff’s Office wrote in its case update.
It also made clear that county investigators approached this case as a homicide from the very beginning because there were ‘strong implications of foul play.’
DailyMail.com has reached out to the Sheriff’s Office for comment.
The last time Joey Benton spoke publicly on the case was in 2008.
‘I miss them both, and I would do anything to know where she’s at,’ he told FOX 17.
Joey Benton, pictured, claimed he dropped Jennifer and Adrianna off at a gas station on March 25, 2004. After that, he said he saw them get picked up in a white car. Police have never independently verified his story
Jennifer, pictured, began dating Joey Benton in the summer of 2003. She moved into his family home in December 2003. About three months later, she and her daughter disappeared without a trace
Jennifer’s family have spent two decades searching for answers.
They’ve assisted authorities in countless searches, held vigils, put on fundraisers to hire private investigators and even had some confrontations with the Bentons.
But none of these tireless efforts dredged up any new information.
All of that would change on March 27, 2024, when the sheriff raided the Benton home where Jennifer and Adrianna were living.
The raid came ’20 years to the day that we reported Jennifer and Adrianna missing,’ Casey pointed out.
However, the sheriff was there to bust Joe Benton Sr., Joey’s father, on 40 unrelated charges for illegally possessing weapons, explosives and the sexual exploitation of a underage family member.
While the raid didn’t uncover anything new in the unsolved murder of her sister and niece, Casey is hopeful it will lead to more answers.
She also told DailyMail.com that after the raid, pressure from the district attorney was what forced Joey to set up that meeting with her and her mother to finally talk about what happened to Jennifer and Adrianna.
‘My hope of them actually being alive, that all kind of died a couple months ago, before we started getting all of this new information after [Joey’s] father went to jail,’ Casey told DailyMail.com.
‘I already knew that they were deceased prior to that meeting, but just hearing it from him solidified it, and it’s very difficult because they’ve lied to us for 20 years.’
Now that Casey has this grim confirmation, her family and investigators have been digging out multiple wooded areas in Robertson County based on what they’ve been told by Joey.
Nothing has been found yet.
‘I feel like we’re getting closer,’ she said.
Pictured: The booking photo of Joe Benton Sr. after he was arrested on charges unrelated to the disappearance of Jennifer and Adrianna
Casey is also launching her own podcast about the case next month, called ‘Missing in Hush Town.’
She has teamed up with true crime podcast producer Jules Thorp, and the pair are in the process of re-interviewing as many people connected to the case as they can.
Some are coming forward with new information, though many others who have knowledge are choosing to stay quiet.
‘We’ve had a lot of people come forward and say, “I wish I could tell you what I know, but I’m too scared,” Thorp told FOX 17.
But judging from the podcast’s tagline – ‘Small towns talk, and we’re listening’ – Casey and Thorp appear confident they will get the answers they’re looking for.
The podcast will premiere on all major platforms on August 16, Jennifer’s birthday.
Casey has also started a GoFundMe to raise money for legal counsel as the homicide investigation appears to be reaching a fever pitch.
Close to 80 donors have given a total of $6,110, as the family closes in on its $10,000 goal.
Although Casey said it was often frustrating at how slow progress was on the investigation into her sister’s disappearance, she thanked county police for staying on top of it for all these years.
‘We have way more information now, in the last few months, than we have had in the 20 years that this has been a missing persons case,’ she said. ‘I definitely attribute it to [the police] and to us for staying on top of it and working so hard to do our own investigation.’
