Brady Flanigan
Editor
It’s the work of the Great Witch. She’s unfastened her shift and now she dances wild beneath the moonlight. It’s the work of entropy—that slow, measured erasure of order from all existence. The clock ticks forward. Gears shave away, and the precision of all experience scatters into the ether.
It’s the work of the mud. Everything gets lost in it eventually. Tales get muddled. Homes in Texas Hill Country are swept into the shrubs. The mountain passes of Appalachia are broken in twain by the Gulf breeze. And women are lost to it for reasons that’ll never be known. Stories and lives are lost to the mud.
And the prophecy rang true again on August 27, 2025. It piqued the public’s interest, the media’s interest, since April 10, when 84-year-old Ms. Sara Padgett disappeared from her apartment in Shelbyville, Tennessee. Now, four months later, her body’s been recovered from the muddy bottom of Normandy Lake—any story drowned with her.
Sara was thought to be Argentine, but born in Rome. She immigrated to New York with her parents and brother, possibly some time during the 1970s or ‘80s. She was from the land of the gaucho. The Criollo horse is a symbol of national pride in Argentina, and evidently the streets of Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx didn’t stable enough. So Sara wandered west, where she found refuge in one of America’s many horse capitals: Shelbyville, Tennessee.
But Sara was not a simple character, or a well understood one. All of her family has passed, and much of her history is left to speculation. But what is known about this woman, whose remains now lay unclaimed in a Nashville medical examiner’s office, was that she was a former president of the Shelbyville-Bedford County Humane Society. She was a devout attendee of St. Williams of Montevergine Catholic Church. A well-known polyglot, Sara was thought to have spoken between three and seven different languages. And in 1991, she was charged with solicitation of murder against her husband.
This carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison in Tennessee, but Sara was let off with two-years probation after being rescued by a witness who came to her defense—her husband.
Sara was initially contacted by an undercover TBI agent posing as a hitman. After discovering her husband was having an affair, she paid the undercover agent to take a hit out on him. When her husband testified, he explained his wife wasn’t completely fluent in English and didn’t understand what it meant to “take out a hit,” thinking it meant to assault him. The courts took sympathy, and she left with a misdemeanor. This would prove important later, as Sara went on to work for the Bedford County court and school systems as a translator.
Later in her life she worked at Kroger until she retired and started spending her time dog and house sitting for people in Shelbyville. Less than a few years before her death, she had sold her long-time property and mysteriously moved into an apartment.
When her landlord reported her missing in April, the Shelbyville Police Department reached out to TBI to issue a Silver Alert—a form of public notification used across the United States used to broadcast information about missing persons, specifically senior citizens with dementia or other mental disabilities, in effort to help locate them. SPD also employed what’s known as an exigent circumstance clause to allow them to ping the present location of her phone without a warrant, but the data returned that the phone wasn’t on, yielding no location.
It was at this point SPD Detective Samuel Campbell, who was assigned to her case, requested a search warrant for Sara’s phone. With a warrant, Campbell was able to access historical data of where her phone had been prior to her disappearance.
“We were able to plug those historical records into a program I have called CellHawk, and we were able to start pinpointing an area of where her last ping was. That was on the 13th [of April],” he said.
Shelbyville Police Department initially added Sara to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System and contacted the FBI to put out a request for an LPR, a license plate reader hit, where if the plate was read anywhere in the United States, SPD would be notified.
On April 14, a Coffee County Sheriff’s Office sonar team and a Tennessee Highway Patrol helicopter were dispatched to Normandy Lake, where Sara’s phone last showed her to be located. Several days later, Coffee County EMA did a drone scan of the area.
The Coffee County rescue squad initially received a ping from something in the water, but when divers were sent to the lake bottom, they discovered it to be an artificial reef placed by TWRA as a fish habitat. The SPD spent the rest of the evening searching the area, but after no leads were found, the search was suspended until April 22.
When the search resumed, TBI and TWRA sent sonar boats out to scan the Normandy Dam side of the lake, where the vehicle was eventually recovered, but despite being in the right area, they found nothing.
“They used side-scanners, but they must’ve just missed her, because they scanned that area,” Campbell said.
On July 8, Campbell submitted Sara’s call records to A.B.M. Intel, a Kentucky-based firm that specializes in analyzing cell data to narrow search areas for law enforcement.
“They came back and gave me a smaller search area that they would look at. We then used CellHawk again and contacted their analysts for a third opinion, and a CellHawk analyst was able to actually look at the records and give us a better spot at the dam. They said we should definitely look there,” he said.
Campbell took the aggregate data and reached out to a nonprofit sonar group called United Search Corps, based out of Oregon. The organization’s founder, Doug Bishop, was in Nashville searching the Cumberland River for the Metro Nashville Police Department when Campbell reached out. Normally Doug works with a team of divers and sonar experts, but they were in Missouri at the time, and he felt the cell data SPD had was sufficient for him to find the missing vehicle by himself.
Within an hour of being in the vicinity of Normandy Dam, Doug was able to find Sara Padgett’s vehicle, located 13 feet underwater, in the mud.
“We asked how come we weren’t able to find her during our other scans,” Detective Campbell said, “and he said that newer vehicles are made from denser metals, and they’re harder to pop on sonar until they’ve developed a lot of silt or algae on them that reflects more.”
He mentioned Doug and United Search Corps are sponsored by Garmin, and his boats are equipped with side-scan and live-scan.
“It’s all about fine-tuning your equipment…it’s more of an art than a science. So he was able to dive down once he found a vehicle and confirm it was her. Then he called us, and we were able to pull the vehicle and confirm there was an actual body inside,” he said.
The vehicle was found only 20 to 30 yards from the boat ramp, where it had drifted due to the current from the dam.
Once the body was recovered, further search warrants were conducted, looking for possible motivations. SPD spoke with several of her friends from the community, as well as her last known contacts and her ex-husband, who lives in Warren County and had not spoken to her in over ten years. But after everything, nothing nefarious came to light. Sara was known to have UTIs, which in older individuals is sometimes known to cause symptoms similar to dementia, but in the end it’s left to speculation if that caused her to drive into Normandy lake. The coroner’s office ruled out all signs of foul play.
Right now, it’s unclear how she’ll be returned to Shelbyville, or if she will at all. With no next of kin, somebody must step up to have her remains repatriated to her home. Otherwise, she’ll be placed in a Nashville potter’s field, and mixed with the ashes of so many lost to the rain.
Services will be announced by Father Thomas Kalam of St. Williams of Montevergine Catholic Church. Donations can be made to Doak Howell Funeral Home.