Alissa Marie Turney

Title

26 Pipe Bombs and a Note About California: The Disappearance of Alissa Turney

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

July 1, 2026

Alissa Marie Turney was 17 years old, finishing the last day of her junior year at Paradise Valley High School in Phoenix, Arizona, when she disappeared on May 17, 2001. Her stepfather, Michael Turney, said the two of them had lunch together, argued over her privileges, and that when he returned from running errands later that afternoon, she was simply gone, along with a note explaining that she had decided to run away to California. Her family never believed that story. It would take nineteen years, an enormous cache of homemade weapons, and a document Michael himself titled Diary of a Madman Martyr before prosecutors finally charged him with her murder, and even then, the case would collapse in a courtroom before it ever reached a jury's verdict.

An Ordinary Teenager

By every account from the people who actually knew her, Alissa was an unremarkable, spirited teenager navigating an unremarkable adolescence. She had ADHD, occasionally experimented with marijuana, and sometimes skipped class, but she remained a good student overall. She was close with her siblings, kept a steady group of friends, and had a boyfriend she was seriously involved with. Nothing in her history suggested someone likely to run away, and nothing in the accounts of the people closest to her suggested she had any reason to want to disappear from her own life.

A Controlling Stepfather

The home Alissa lived in, however, was shaped heavily by her stepfather's need for control. Michael Turney routinely searched through her belongings and monitored her phone calls. He was known to sit outside her workplace, watching her while she worked. He created written contracts that he required Alissa to sign, formalizing rules and expectations in a way that went well beyond ordinary parental oversight. He installed surveillance cameras throughout the interior of the home and set up a system that automatically recorded every telephone call that came through the house.

Multiple people who knew Alissa reported that she had told them Michael sexually abused her, describing specific incidents involving gagging and handcuffing. In a detail that would later strike investigators as deeply telling, Michael himself had proactively contacted Child Protective Services the year before Alissa disappeared, telling them that if Alissa ever filed a child molestation complaint against him, she would be lying, a preemptive denial issued before any such complaint had actually been made.

The Last Day of School

On May 17, 2001, according to Michael's own account, he and Alissa had lunch together and got into an argument over her privileges. He said he then left the house to run errands, and when he returned around 5:00 p.m., Alissa was gone, having apparently left behind a note explaining that she had decided to run away to California. Investigators initially classified the case as a runaway situation based largely on that note and Michael's account of the day.

What She Left Behind

The physical facts of Alissa's disappearance strained against the runaway explanation almost immediately. She left behind roughly $1,800 sitting untouched in her bank account, along with her makeup, her hairbrush, her keys, and her cell phone, an unusual collection of belongings for a teenager supposedly planning a deliberate departure. She never contacted a single friend, family member, or her boyfriend in the years that followed, a silence that felt entirely out of character for a girl described as close to the people in her life. Investigators would later note plainly that it is uncharacteristic of an actual runaway to leave behind all of her money and personal belongings while making no future contact with anyone who loved her.

A Father Who Wouldn't Cooperate

Michael's own behavior in the aftermath of Alissa's disappearance did little to dispel suspicion. He refused to submit to a polygraph examination and avoided formal police interviews, choosing instead to communicate with investigators through fax, email, and phone calls on his own terms. He claimed that the home's surveillance system, the very cameras he had installed throughout the house, showed nothing useful from the day Alissa vanished, and separately claimed that the automatic phone recording system had happened to malfunction at the exact moment Alissa supposedly called him, conveniently erasing any record of that conversation ever existing.

The Weapons Cache

The case sat largely dormant for years until December 2008, when a search warrant executed at Michael's residence turned up an extraordinary stockpile of weapons. Investigators found nineteen high-caliber assault rifles, two homemade silencers, containers of gasoline, and twenty-six pipe bombs filled with gunpowder and roofing nails, a cache described at the time as the largest stockpile of explosives ever discovered in the history of the Phoenix Police Department. More than a hundred neighbors had to be evacuated from the surrounding area while investigators secured the property.

Diary of a Madman Martyr

Among the materials recovered during that search, police found a 98-page document Michael had written and titled Diary of a Madman Martyr. In it, he accused the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers of kidnapping Alissa and claimed that he himself had killed two unnamed assassins he believed were responsible for her death. He wrote that Alissa was buried in Desert Center, California, and detailed plans to bomb a union hall before taking his own life, a document that read less like a grieving father's private grief journal and considerably more like the manifesto of someone planning an entirely different kind of violence.

Ten Years for Pipe Bombs

Whatever the truth behind that manifesto, it did not immediately lead to murder charges. In 2010, Michael pleaded guilty to possessing twenty-six unregistered pipe bombs and received a ten-year federal sentence. A forensic psychologist who evaluated him during those proceedings testified that Michael presented as genuinely dangerous, with a high likelihood of future violent behavior. He was released from federal custody in 2017, having served his sentence for the weapons charges without ever having been formally charged in connection with his stepdaughter's disappearance.

Finally Charged

That changed in August 2020, nineteen years after Alissa vanished, when Michael Turney was arrested and indicted on a charge of second-degree murder in her presumed death. The case finally moved toward the kind of formal legal reckoning that Alissa's family, and particularly her younger half-sister Sarah, had spent nearly two decades pushing for.

A Trial That Ended Early

Michael's trial began in the summer of 2023, more than two decades after Alissa disappeared. On July 17, after prosecutors had rested their case, the presiding judge terminated the proceedings before it ever reached the jury, ruling that there was no substantial evidence to support a conviction. The charges against Michael Turney were dismissed, and he was released after roughly three years in county jail awaiting trial. Because of double jeopardy protections built into the American legal system, he cannot be tried again for Alissa's murder, regardless of whatever evidence might surface in the future.

Suing the Police

Rather than fading from public view after his release, Michael Turney went on to file a civil lawsuit of his own. In January 2024, representing himself in Maricopa County Superior Court, he filed a complaint seeking more than $300,000 in damages from the City of Phoenix, Maricopa County, Phoenix police leadership, county prosecutors, and the former county sheriff. He described his 2020 arrest as a military operation and alleged that an officer had placed a fist against his throat while removing him from the ground, along with additional claims of excessive force, property damage, denial of medical care, and defamation. Unable to secure legal representation, Turney acknowledged he did not expect the lawsuit to actually succeed financially, saying plainly that he did not expect to ever get any money from it, framing the suit instead as an attempt to draw attention to the conditions of his confinement and, in his words, deter similar conduct in the future.

A Sister's Podcast

Alissa's younger half-sister, Sarah Turney, has spent years turning her own grief and frustration into sustained public advocacy, most notably through a true crime podcast called Voices for Justice, which she launched specifically to examine her sister's case and has since expanded to cover other unresolved cases as well. Sarah has said that when she has directly asked Michael about what happened to Alissa, he has told her he would only give honest answers on his deathbed, or if the state agreed to execute him first, a response that offers nothing resembling closure while still managing to suggest he knows considerably more than he has ever been willing to say in open court.

Still Missing

Alissa Marie Turney has never been found. The case that once seemed destined to finally answer what happened to her instead ended in an acquittal before a jury ever weighed in, leaving her family with a stepfather who cannot be retried, a manifesto describing a burial site in California that has never been searched to any confirmed resolution, and more than two decades of unanswered questions about a note supposedly written by a girl who left behind every single thing she owned and never spoke to anyone who loved her again.

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