New billboard shows victim’s photo in 43-year-old cold case

A mother on her way to the bank never returned home. Now, investigators hope a billboard in Fort Myers will help crack the 43-year-old cold case of Margie Phillips.

“Although it been 43 years, I never will forget that day,” said Genethel McGee, the victim’s sister. “It’s just like it was yesterday.”

The day Genethel older sister, Margie, disappeared a friend of told detectives he went to the bank in Downtown Fort Myers so she could get money for a new car. But investigators said bank records show Margie never took the cash from her account.

“She went missing under some very suspicious circumstances,” said Trish Routte of Southwest Florida CrimeStoppers.

Circumstances that left her family waiting anxiously by the phone for years.

“Every time that phone rang,” Genethel said, “I ran to that phone just knowing it was going to be her saying, ‘I’m coming home.'”

Now, after more than four decades, Margie still has not come home and her body has not been found.

“There’s really a drive to make sure that justice is served for Margie,” Trish said.

So cold case detectives and Southwest Florida CrimeStoppers are taking her picture to new heights by putting up a billboard along Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. near neighborhoods where Margie spent most of her time.

“People talk and you know those secrets may have gone hidden for 43 years,” Trish said. “It’s time for them to come back out, back to light and provide closure for this family.”

It is a closure that Genethel hopes will come someday soon.

“If they got any kind of conscience or anything to let us know where her remains are,” Genethel said. “Where we can go head on and lay her at rest.”