Peggy McGuire

Title

Into Thin Air: The Disappearance of Peggy McGuire

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

October 23, 2025

The morning of November 16, 2015, started like any other Monday for Peggy Anne McGuire. The twenty-eight-year-old mother finished her overnight shift as a licensed practical nurse at Wellington Hills Nursing Center in Eufaula, Oklahoma, drove home to pick up her eight-year-old son Ethan, and dropped him off at school in the nearby town of Canadian. On her drive back home, she called her stepfather to discuss measurements for a new deck they were planning to build. She promised to call him back with the numbers once she got home.

That call never came. Peggy McGuire vanished without a trace, leaving behind her beloved son, her mother, her friends, and a trail of disturbing clues that would point investigators toward one suspect. But nearly a decade later, no arrests have been made, no body has been found, and Peggy's family continues to search for answers in a case that has left a small Oklahoma community haunted by questions.

A Country Girl with Big Dreams

Born on November 27, 1986, Peggy Anne McGuire grew up in Oklahoma with a love for the outdoors that defined her personality. Standing 5'10" with wavy blonde hair and blue eyes, Peggy was the kind of person everyone seemed to love. She was kindhearted, sociable, bubbly, and outgoing. Friends and family describe her as someone who lit up every room she entered, whose smile became even brighter whenever her son was around.

Peggy was a true country girl who loved fishing, camping, and hunting. She cared for a small herd of goats and helped manage more than 150 head of cattle on family land. She had pet dogs that she adored and spent her free time outdoors, often with young Ethan by her side. Whether she was baling hay or riding a tractor, her son was usually right there with her. Her family would later emphasize this point repeatedly to investigators: Peggy would never abandon Ethan. He was her entire world.

In the months before her disappearance, Peggy had accomplished something she was immensely proud of. She had passed her nursing board exams in June 2015, becoming a licensed practical nurse. It was a career that suited her perfectly because she genuinely loved helping people and taking care of them. She was building a future for herself and her son, working toward independence and stability. For the first time in years, Peggy could see a path forward, one that didn't include fear and violence.

The High School Sweethearts Who Weren't Sweet

Peggy met Thomas Ryan McIntosh when they were both in high school. By all accounts, they were an unlikely match. Where Peggy was warm and friendly, Thomas was described as awkward, rude, antisocial, and known as a bully. But Peggy fell in love with him anyway, and what began as a teenage romance would become a relationship marked by jealousy, control, and escalating violence.

Thomas had severe jealousy issues from the start. Peggy was naturally sociable with many friends, both male and female, but Thomas would become enraged whenever he saw her talking to other men. His anger manifested in terrifying ways. He would smash her car windows, break down doors, and punch holes in walls. The violence wasn't just directed at property. Thomas turned his rage on Peggy herself.

The couple's relationship followed the classic pattern of abuse: periods of violence followed by reconciliation, promises to change, and then more violence. Peggy left Thomas multiple times, but she always returned. In 2006, she filed a protective order against him. When that expired, she filed another in 2013. She also pressed criminal charges against him for battery. But like so many victims of domestic violence, Peggy wanted to believe he could change. She wanted to give her son a stable, secure family life with both parents. She reconciled with Thomas, and they continued living together even as the abuse continued.

One incident stands out for its sheer brutality. After a lunch date with Thomas, he became angry about something. He pulled out a pistol and struck Peggy in the face with it, breaking her nose. Her best friend, Elizabeth, took her to the emergency room. It took significant convincing, but Peggy finally confided in Elizabeth about what Thomas had done. The incident should have been a wake-up call, a point of no return. But the cycle of abuse is rarely that simple, and Peggy stayed.

By the time of her disappearance in November 2015, Peggy and Thomas were still living together in a home in Stidham, Oklahoma, along with their son. However, their relationship had changed. According to family and friends, they were only living together platonically at that point. Peggy had moved on emotionally and was seeing another man. She was making plans to leave Thomas for good, slowly moving her belongings to her mother's house over weekends. She finally had the career stability and confidence to break free.

But Thomas McIntosh, by all accounts, was not the kind of man who would let Peggy go easily.

The Day Everything Changed

Monday, November 16, 2015, was ten days before Thanksgiving and eleven days before Peggy's twenty-ninth birthday. She had worked a double shift through the night, and after finishing her shift that morning, she drove to the house she shared with Thomas to pick up Ethan for school. The school was in Canadian, Oklahoma, about thirteen miles from their home in Stidham.

After dropping Ethan off at school, Peggy called her stepfather, Donnie Davis, during her drive home. They discussed plans for building a new deck at her house. He needed measurements, and Peggy said she would call him back with the numbers once she arrived home. Cell phone records later obtained by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) would show that Peggy's last known location was at the home she shared with Thomas.

The call to her stepfather never came.

That evening, Peggy was supposed to attend her niece's ballgame. She never showed up. Peggy's mother, Betty Davis, tried calling and texting her repeatedly. Every call went straight to voicemail. Every text went unanswered. For a woman who was in constant contact with her family, especially her mother, this silence was alarming.

One detail struck family members as particularly odd. That afternoon, Thomas had picked Ethan up from school. This was unusual. Peggy always picked up her son. She took him everywhere with her unless she was working. The fact that Thomas had picked him up without any word from Peggy set off alarm bells.

By Wednesday, November 18, after two full days without any contact from her daughter, Betty Davis filed a missing person report with the McIntosh County Sheriff's Office. The search for Peggy McGuire had officially begun, but investigators were already forty-eight hours behind.

The Truck at T&J's Ice House

The same day Peggy's mother filed the missing person report, her 2012 Toyota Tundra was found abandoned in the parking lot of T&J's Ice House, a rural bar located along Highway 9, about ten miles from her home. The discovery of the truck would provide one of the most tantalizing and frustrating clues in the entire investigation.

When investigators obtained the surveillance footage from the bar, they saw something that chilled everyone who watched it. At approximately 5:20 a.m. on November 17, during a violent storm, Peggy's truck pulled into the parking lot. The footage showed the truck parking, and then a figure emerged from the driver's seat and walked away into the pre-dawn darkness. The person appeared to be wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled up. The darkness, the storm, and the poor quality of the footage made it impossible to identify who the person was.

The timing was significant. This was roughly twelve hours after Peggy was last seen dropping her son off at school and promising to call her stepfather back. Whoever drove that truck to T&J's Ice House did so in the early morning hours while most people were asleep, during a storm that provided cover.

Peggy's family immediately knew something was wrong. Peggy didn't drink alcohol. She had no reason to go to that bar. She wasn't known to frequent the place. The idea that she would drive herself there in the middle of a storm and then just walk away made no sense. One witness, a local resident named Pamela Bradford who lived near the ice house, reported seeing a man walking along the road around that time. She described seeing him duck into the woods, as if trying to avoid being seen.

When police informed Thomas McIntosh that Peggy's truck had been found, he drove to the bar to speak with them. He offered a theory: Peggy had simply run away from everything. She had abandoned her life, her son, and disappeared of her own free will. But Thomas's son would later make a statement that raised serious questions. Ethan told investigators that before the truck was even found, his father had already told him that his mother had run away and that her truck had been found at T&J's Ice House. How did Thomas know where the truck would be found before anyone else did?

The Investigation Begins

The investigation into Peggy's disappearance got off to a frustratingly slow start. The McIntosh County Sheriff's Office initially handled the case, but it wasn't until approximately two weeks after Peggy vanished that the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation was brought in to assist. Some have speculated that the delay was related to the prominence of the McIntosh family in the area. The county itself is named McIntosh County, and the family were well-established landowners. Whether or not this played a role in the initial response, the delay meant that precious time was lost.

Once OSBI became involved, the investigation intensified. Three weeks after Peggy's disappearance, investigators executed search warrants at the home she shared with Thomas and searched the surrounding property. The search was extensive, covering approximately eighty acres of land. They brought in cadaver dogs from the Muscogee Creek Nation Lighthorse police. They deployed drones to capture aerial footage of the area, searching for any clue that might have been missed from the ground.

What they found inside the house was deeply troubling. Investigators discovered blood-like stains on the couch cushion located on the back porch. They found red stains on a yellow leather glove in Thomas's truck. They also discovered reddish-colored stains, possibly blood, in the bucket of a front-loading tractor on the property.

The samples were collected and sent for forensic testing. However, because three weeks had passed since Peggy's disappearance, the samples had degraded. Some sources report that the DNA testing was inconclusive, though investigators did confirm that at least some of the blood on the porch couch belonged to Peggy. The results of all the forensic testing have never been fully released to the public, leaving many questions unanswered.

Investigators also examined Peggy's phone records, bank statements, and social media accounts. What they found was telling. From the moment of her disappearance, there had been absolutely no activity. No phone calls. No text messages. No credit card or bank transactions. No social media posts. Her Social Security number had not been used. It was as if Peggy McGuire had simply ceased to exist.

In November 2016, one year after Peggy's disappearance, OSBI Special Agent Jenny Virden spoke about the case. She confirmed that there had been no communication from Peggy through any form of technology, no contact with family, and no use of bank accounts or her Social Security number. "There is absolutely no trace of her being alive," Virden said. She also noted that while Thomas McIntosh had been cooperating with law enforcement, he had not been eliminated as a person of interest.

The Battle for Ethan

As the investigation continued with no resolution, a painful legal battle emerged. In early 2016, just a few months after Peggy vanished, her mother Betty Davis sued for visitation rights to see her grandson Ethan. In the court documents, Betty made her position heartbreakingly clear: she had not seen her grandson since her daughter disappeared, she believed Peggy was deceased, and she feared for Ethan's safety while in Thomas's care.

Thomas filed for paternity rights and opposed Betty's visitation request. The court battle highlighted the agonizing position Peggy's family found themselves in. Not only had they lost Peggy, but they had also lost access to her son, the child she had loved more than anything in the world.

The situation for young Ethan was eventually resolved when he was removed from Thomas's custody and placed into foster care. The reasons for this removal have not been made fully public, but it speaks to concerns that authorities had about his wellbeing in his father's home.

A Son's Disappearance Echoes His Mother's

In February 2021, more than five years after Peggy vanished, her story made headlines again under tragic circumstances. On Monday, February 22, thirteen-year-old Ethan McIntosh was reported missing from the same area where his mother had disappeared. He had last been seen feeding cattle from a tractor at 5:45 p.m., but the tractor was later found abandoned with no sign of the teenager.

The news sent shockwaves through the community and brought renewed attention to Peggy's unsolved case. For approximately nineteen hours, multiple agencies searched for Ethan, including the Muscogee Creek Nation and other law enforcement organizations. Thankfully, Ethan was found safe the following day, Tuesday, February 23, at approximately 12:45 p.m., more than twenty miles from where he had disappeared. He appeared to be unharmed. The details of how he was found and what happened during those missing hours were not publicly released.

The incident was just sixteen miles from where Peggy had vanished nearly six years earlier. The parallels were impossible to ignore, and for Peggy's family and friends, it must have reopened wounds that had never really healed.

The Unanswered Questions

Nearly ten years after Peggy McGuire dropped her son off at school and disappeared, her case remains unsolved. No arrests have been made. No charges have been filed. Peggy's body has never been found. The $150,000 reward offered by her family for information leading to her discovery has gone unclaimed.

For investigators, the case presents a frustrating mix of circumstantial evidence and dead ends. The blood evidence suggests something violent happened at the home Peggy shared with Thomas. The surveillance footage shows someone deliberately abandoning her truck at a remote location during a storm. Thomas's foreknowledge of where the truck would be found raises serious questions. The history of domestic violence establishes a pattern of escalating abuse. Peggy's complete disappearance from all electronic and financial systems suggests she is no longer alive.

And yet, without a body, without a murder weapon, and without conclusive forensic evidence linking Thomas McIntosh directly to Peggy's disappearance, prosecutors have been unable to bring charges. The case sits in that terrible limbo where everyone seems to know what happened, but proving it beyond a reasonable doubt remains elusive.

The FBI has assisted OSBI with the investigation, but publicly available information about the case has been limited in recent years. The lack of updates has been agonizing for Peggy's family and the community that has rallied around them. More than 11,000 people have joined the Facebook group "Bring Peggy Home," sharing information, theories, and memories of the vibrant young woman who vanished.

The Shadow of Domestic Violence

Peggy McGuire's disappearance is almost certainly another tragic statistic in the epidemic of intimate partner violence. According to research on domestic violence fatalities, prior history of abuse is the number one predictor of intimate partner homicide. Peggy had obtained protective orders against Thomas twice. She had pressed battery charges. She had documented his violence. She had tried to leave multiple times.

The pattern in Peggy's relationship with Thomas is disturbingly common. Victims of domestic violence leave their abusers an average of seven times before leaving permanently, if they survive to do so. The barriers to leaving are enormous: economic dependence, emotional manipulation, fear of escalated violence, concern for children, and the hope that the abuser will change. Peggy stayed because she wanted to give her son a stable family. She stayed because she loved Thomas, or at least loved the person she hoped he could become. She stayed because leaving felt impossible until it suddenly felt necessary.

And then, just as she was finally planning her permanent escape, just as she had the career and stability to make it work, Peggy disappeared.

The most dangerous time for a victim of domestic violence is when they leave or attempt to leave the relationship. Statistics show that a woman is seventy-five times more likely to be killed when she leaves her abuser than at any other time. Peggy was seeing another man. She was moving her belongings out. She was planning her exit. If Thomas McIntosh is responsible for her disappearance, it would fit a pattern seen in intimate partner homicides across the country: the abuser cannot accept the loss of control and resorts to the ultimate act of violence.

A Mother's Grief

For Betty Davis, Peggy's mother, the past ten years have been an unending nightmare. She has been forced to live with the uncertainty of not knowing where her daughter is, whether she suffered, or where she was taken. She has had to fight for the right to see her grandson, the little boy who was the center of Peggy's world. She has had to watch as years passed with no arrests, no closure, no justice.

In statements to media over the years, Betty has been consistent in her belief that Peggy is deceased and that she knows who is responsible. She has maintained that Peggy would never abandon her son, never walk away from her family, and never disappear without contact. She has described her daughter as a loving, devoted mother whose son was her entire life.

Betty's words echo those of so many family members of missing persons who live in the terrible limbo between hope and grief, unable to mourn fully because there is no body, yet unable to hope because all evidence suggests their loved one is gone.

The Search Continues

Despite the passage of time, Peggy's case remains an active investigation. OSBI and the McIntosh County Sheriff's Office continue to accept tips and follow leads. The reward for information leading to Peggy's discovery stands at $150,000, a significant sum that reflects the family's desperation for answers.

Over the years, there have been occasional searches based on tips. In March 2016, investigators searched a pond in Muskogee County looking for Peggy's remains after receiving information about the location. The search yielded no results. In subsequent years, other tips have led to other searches, all with the same disappointing outcome.

The case has been featured on numerous true crime television shows and podcasts, including Crime Watch Daily with Chris Hansen. The media attention has kept Peggy's story in the public eye, but it has not yet produced the breakthrough that her family desperately needs.

Remembering Peggy

For those who knew and loved Peggy McGuire, she was so much more than a missing person case number or a true crime story. She was a daughter, a mother, a friend, a nurse who cared for others, and a young woman who loved the outdoors and her son above all else. She had dreams for her future and plans to build a better life. She had passed her nursing boards and was proud of her accomplishment. She was planning a deck for her house, looking forward to Thanksgiving, and preparing to celebrate her twenty-ninth birthday.

Peggy should be forty-eight years old now, watching her son grow into a man, maybe caring for more animals on her land, maybe still working as a nurse and helping others. Instead, she exists in photographs and memories, forever twenty-eight, forever frozen in time on that November morning when she dropped her son off at school and disappeared.

Her case stands as a reminder of how many women vanish at the hands of intimate partners, how patterns of abuse escalate, and how difficult it can be to break free from a violent relationship. It reminds us that domestic violence is not a private matter but a public health crisis that requires intervention, support, and resources. And it reminds us that behind every missing person statistic is a real person with a real family who loves them and refuses to give up hope.

If you have any information about the disappearance of Peggy Anne McGuire, please contact the McIntosh County Sheriff's Office at (918) 689-2526 or the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-522-8017. You can also call the OSBI tip line at 1-800-522-8017. Even the smallest piece of information could be the key that finally brings Peggy home and gives her family the closure they deserve.

For anyone reading this who may be experiencing domestic violence, please know that help is available. The National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233. You are not alone, and you deserve to be safe.

Peggy McGuire deserves justice. Her son deserves to know what happened to his mother. Her family deserves to bring her home. Until that day comes, they will continue to search, to hope, and to keep Peggy's memory alive.

Sources

Benjamin Hayes

Benjamin Hayes is a blogger with a passion for true crime and unresolved mysteries. In his free time, Benjamin is an avid hiker and photographer. He finds solace and inspiration in nature, often trekking through the scenic trails of the Appalachian Mountains.