Woman jailed in 1991 vanishing of Sabrina Long was one of her high school classmates

The 1991 vanishing of Sabrina Leigh Long, a 19-year-old Southwest High School graduate, did not make many front-page headlines when she went missing that summer.

For whatever reason, her disappearance, which happened two months after the high-profile slaying of 6-year-old Taylor Fargason, did not attract the publicity that such cases often do.

But an arrest last week in connection with Long’s now-alleged abduction or kidnapping has renewed interest in a cold case that has at times seemed an all-but-lost cause outside of investigative circles. Behind the scenes, detectives have over the decades examined and re-examined Long’s disappearance to little avail.

Until now apparently.

Thursday’s arrest of a woman named Melinda McSwain from the tiny Coffee County town of Broxton, 90 or so miles southeast of Macon, came as a surprise to one of the lawmen who was once perhaps most versed in the particulars of Long’s vanishing.

An answer to what happened to Long “would thrill me,” retired Bibb County sheriff’s Capt. Mike Smallwood told The Telegraph on Monday.

“Just because you retire doesn’t mean you forget about these cases. You think about them all the time, about something we might have missed,” Smallwood said. “I hope they can put a close to it. It has bugged us for 27 years how she just went missing.”

Authorities have said that Long and McSwain, whose last name in high school was Pogue, knew one another from Southwest High, which at the time in the late 1980s was one of the largest high schools in the region.

Online records show that McSwain, 46, once lived in the 3700 block of Bloomfield Drive, barely a mile to the northeast across Rocky Creek Road from where Long was living with her now-deceased stepfather on Ashland Drive.

Smallwood, the retired sheriff’s investigator, said McSwain’s name never came up during his work on the case.

The GBI, which took the lead in the probe years ago and has had agents looking into it off and on, has declined to say what prompted McSwain’s arrest.

She was booked into the Bibb jail about 7:15 p.m. Thursday by police at Mercer University, where she had been on campus that day. Authorities said McSwain has no official connection to the college.

“She is not a student or employee,” Mercer spokesman Kyle Sears told The Telegraph. “She was visiting campus that day.”

GBI agents talked to McSwain following her arrest, special agent in charge of the Perry office J.T. Ricketson said Monday.

Ricketson declined to comment on whether McSwain had been interviewed by agents about Long prior to last week’s arrest.

“It’s my understanding they knew each other from high school,” Ricketson said of the pair.

In a 1988 Southwest High yearbook, the two were a year apart. Long was a sophomore and McSwain was a freshman.

Authorities have declined to say if there are other suspects.

In the years since Long disappeared, investigators have spoken to a number of people who knew her and had been in touch with her around the time she went missing.

One of the people who at one point was considered to have been one of the last to have spoken to Long was Keith Loyd, a friend from high school.

Loyd lived a few houses down, just around the corner on Greenleaf Drive.

As Long’s mother, Sue Corley, would later tell investigators, the night Long vanished — Aug. 14, 1991 — Long had called Corley in the wee hours and said she was going over to Loyd’s house to help Loyd with a birthday gift for his mom.

As it turned out, Loyd’s mother’s birthday was a month away, and he was out with his girlfriend that night.

“When I found out she said she was coming to see me,” Loyd told The Telegraph in a 1992 interview, “it was like, ‘What?’ ”

Loyd, who was questioned numerous times in connection with the case, passed polygraph examinations, Smallwood said.

When Loyd spoke to The Telegraph in early 1992 for an in-depth article about the vanishing, he wondered if maybe Long had been trying to, in a roundabout way, warn her mother about going somewhere else that maybe Long wasn’t comfortable going.

Loyd died last September when he was apparently struck by a train in downtown Macon.