Uncle Pete: The Disappearance and Murder of Cayce McDaniel

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

September 12, 2023

Cayce Lynn McDaniel was fourteen years old in the summer of 1996, living with her family on U.S. 45 just outside Milan, Tennessee, a small city in Gibson County about a hundred miles northeast of Memphis. On the night of August 15, she attended a back-to-school party at Double Springs Cumberland Presbyterian Church, the kind of low-key end-of-summer gathering that churches across rural West Tennessee host every August before classes start. A chaperone drove her home afterward and watched her walk inside the house at around 12:30 in the morning on August 16. That small detail, a responsible adult confirming with her own eyes that Cayce made it safely through her front door, would end up anchoring the entire case for the next twenty-six years, because it is the last confirmed sighting anyone has ever had of her.

A House Left Open

Cayce's mother arrived home sometime between 1:30 and 2:00 that morning and found the house not as she left it. The television in Cayce's bedroom was still on. The clothes she had worn to the party were laid out, as though she had changed out of them. And the back door of the house was standing open. There was no sign of Cayce anywhere inside.

Investigators would later conclude from the scene that Cayce had likely come home, changed clothes, and then left the house again, whether on her own or with someone else was never established. Complicating the case from the very beginning, Cayce's mother did not report her missing right away. Cayce sometimes stayed over at friends' houses without much advance notice, and her mother initially assumed that was what had happened again. By the time it became clear that this absence was different from the others, precious hours, and eventually days, had already passed with no one actively searching for her.

What followed was a missing persons case with almost nothing to work from. No confirmed witnesses after the chaperone dropped her off. No physical evidence beyond an open door and a television left running. No ransom demand, no communication, nothing. Cayce, a white female standing five foot four and weighing about a hundred twenty pounds, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a distinctive strawberry birthmark on the underside of her lower left arm, had simply stopped existing anywhere investigators could find her.

A Name That Kept Surfacing

For years, the case sat cold in the way so many rural disappearances do, worked occasionally, discussed among family, but without the kind of breakthrough that reopens active investigation. Yet one name kept surfacing quietly in the background of the case almost from the start: Finis Ewin Hill, known to nearly everyone, including Cayce herself, as Uncle Pete.

Hill was not a blood relative. He was simply a longtime acquaintance of the McDaniel family, close enough to the household that Cayce used the familiar, affectionate title kids often give to trusted adult friends of their parents. According to investigators who spoke publicly about the case decades later, Hill's name kept coming up in connection with places Cayce and her family had been around the time of her disappearance. As one Milan investigator put it, he had been on the radar of law enforcement for a long time. But being on the radar and having enough evidence to charge someone with murder are very different things, and for more than two decades, nothing closed that gap.

Part of what makes Hill's proximity to the case so unsettling in hindsight is who he turned out to be. Long before anyone connected him publicly to Cayce's disappearance, Hill had already accumulated a serious criminal record. In 2003, he was arrested on charges of attempted aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was sentenced in 2005 to fifteen years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and was not let out again until early 2018.

Freedom, and a Fast Return to Prison

Hill's freedom in 2018 did not last long. That summer, law enforcement built a sting operation around him, creating a fake social media profile to draw him into contact online. According to investigators, Hill was lured to a hotel in Mississippi under the belief he was meeting an underage girl for sex. In messages captured during the operation, Hill allegedly admitted to having had sex with a fourteen-year-old in the past, the same age Cayce had been when she vanished, and described in disturbing detail having raped, chased, and beaten women. He was indicted on child exploitation charges and taken back into custody, this time on the federal side, where he would remain held without bond for years to come.

It was in the wake of that arrest, in July 2018, that Milan police and the FBI publicly named Hill as a suspect in Cayce's disappearance for the first time, twenty-two years after she vanished. Investigators explained that they had spent years working through other people connected to the case, ruling suspects out one by one whenever their alibis held up under scrutiny. Milan Police Chief Bobby Sellers would later say plainly that when investigators checked into Hill's account of that August night in 1996, his alibi simply didn't check out, unlike everyone else they had cleared before him.

The Podcast, and a Phone Call

Naming Hill as a suspect publicly was a turning point, but it still wasn't an arrest. What ultimately moved the case from suspicion to prosecution appears to have involved an unusual outside contributor: a true crime podcast. Around the twentieth anniversary of Cayce's disappearance, a podcaster named Brandon Barnett began researching her story for a series called Searching for Ghosts. As Barnett dug into the case and reached out to people connected to it, Cayce's own mother contacted him, and in that conversation she reportedly said something that amounted to an acknowledgment that Hill was responsible for what happened to her daughter. That development, arriving through an independent podcast investigation rather than a police interrogation room, appears to have helped push the long-stalled case back into motion with prosecutors.

By October 2019, more than twenty-three years after Cayce disappeared, a Gibson County grand jury indicted Finis Hill on four separate counts: premeditated first-degree murder, first-degree murder committed during the perpetration of rape, aggravated rape resulting in bodily injury, and aggravated rape involving a deadly weapon. Gibson County District Attorney Garry Brown announced the indictment publicly, and Hill, still held on his unrelated federal sex crime charges involving a minor, was transferred into Gibson County custody to be formally arraigned. Cayce's cousin, Lindsey McDaniel, spoke to reporters at the time with a kind of weary, guarded hope common to families who have waited decades for any forward motion at all. We just want justice to be served, she said. Whatever that means. Whatever that looks like.

A Best Interest Plea, and an Answer Without a Body

Justice, in the end, arrived in a form that left some of the biggest questions still only partially answered. In August 2022, nearly twenty-six years to the month after Cayce vanished from her family's home, seventy-year-old Finis Hill entered what is known as a best interest plea, admitting to criminal responsibility for second degree murder and abuse of a corpse, without a full formal admission of guilt to the original first-degree murder and rape charges he had been indicted on. In exchange, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, to be served at one hundred percent with no possibility of early release, followed by six years of supervised probation once that sentence is complete. Because he entered the plea at seventy years old, Hill will not be eligible to walk free again until he is eighty-five.

The abuse of a corpse charge included in Hill's plea confirms what investigators and the McDaniel family had long feared, that Cayce did not simply disappear but was killed, and that Hill did something with her remains afterward severe enough to warrant that specific charge. And yet, despite the plea, despite the conviction, and despite twenty-six years of searching, Cayce McDaniel's body has never been recovered. Her family finally has a name, a conviction, and a measure of the answer they spent more than two decades waiting for, but they still do not have her.

Milan Police Chief Bobby Sellers and Gibson County prosecutors closed the criminal case with Hill's plea, but the physical mystery of where Cayce actually is remains unresolved. Anyone with information about the location of her remains is still asked to contact the Milan Police Department. What began as a fourteen-year-old girl walking through her own back door after a church party ended, a generation later, with the man she called Uncle Pete admitting responsibility for her death from behind the walls of a prison cell he will likely never leave alive, while the one piece of the story that might bring her family true closure, the chance to finally lay her to rest, is still, as of this writing, missing right along with her.

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