That was the platform on which her campaign really caught fire, she said in an interview. Sarah Turney subverted popular memes like "put a finger down" and "interior crocodile alligator" to push for charges against her father, eventually gaining more than 1 million followers.
"That dark humour of TikTok really just lent itself to me," she said. "I feel like there was not another platform where I could be as expressive."
Now, nearly two decades after Alissa disappeared, Michael Turney, 72, has been charged with second-degree homicide. At a news conference last week announcing the grand jury indictment, Allister Adel, prosecutor for Maricopa County, Arizona, addressed Sarah Turney directly.
"Your perseverance and commitment to finding justice for your sister, Alissa, is a testament to the love of a sister," she said. "Because of that love, Alissa's light has never gone out."
Turney did not only campaign for justice; she also became an amateur sleuth. She recorded conversations with her father and shared the clips on YouTube. She pored over old home videos and posted footage on TikTok. At one point, she described efforts to locate her sister's body.
Alissa was "extremely sweet — strong and sweet," she said. The sisters lost their mother to cancer when they were young and were mostly raised by Michael Turney, Sarah Turney's biological father and Alissa's stepfather and legal guardian.
"Of course we fought like normal sisters over toys, over hair, over clothes," she said. But when she was on the cusp of becoming a teenager, she said, she and her sister grew closer. "I didn't really feel the need to tattle as much," she said. "I was finally accepted into the cool kids' club."
That was just before Alissa disappeared.
Michael Turney has been accused of abusing, surveiling and controlling Alissa, and her sister has publicly shared some of the video footage he recorded. In one clip from 2000, it appears that he sat in a parking lot to film Alissa while she worked at a fast-food restaurant.
At the news conference Thursday, Detective William Anderson of the Phoenix Police Department said that after an initial investigation into Alissa's disappearance in 2001, police "became aware of additional information" in 2008, leading to a "reinvestigation" that involved more than 200 interviews with people who knew her.
Then, he said, police "bumbled into" another discovery. At Michael Turney's residence in Phoenix, they found "26 pipe bombs and three incendiary devices," according to an FBI statement.
In an interview with ABC News in 2009, Michael Turney suggested that the explosives were not meant to hurt innocent people. He also said that he had not killed his stepdaughter.
In response to questions about whether he had been a controlling parent, he said that he had been trying to keep Alissa safe. "I look back at it, because she ran away as a result of that," he added. "Yeah, of course I feel bad about it."
In 2010, he pleaded guilty to the unlawful possession of unregistered destructive devices, a felony, and was sentenced to a decade in prison. He served seven years. Sarah Turney's social media campaign kicked off around the time of his release.
A lawyer for Michael Turney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It was unclear how Sarah Turney's online efforts affected the case, and Anderson did not say what evidence prompted the homicide charge this month. On Tuesday, a police spokeswoman also declined to answer that question.
Anderson referred to the case as a "no-body homicide investigation" but stopped short of confirming that Alissa was dead. "This office would not seed charges in a homicide if there was a belief that the victim was alive," a spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Attorney's Office said.
"In my heart, I feel certain that Alissa is gone," her sister said. "It took me a very, very long time to come to that conclusion, and there was so much guilt there when I did."
Turney's posts have suggested that her campaign took an emotional toll on her. "What I'm going to do is scream to the whole world until Alissa has justice," she wrote in a blog post last year. "I'm going to abandon all fear of police retaliation, all fear of this destroying my career, and all fear of this consuming and destroying my life. I'm going to do it because it's the right thing to do and Alissa would have done it for me."
After the charge against her father was announced, she posted celebratory updates to her social media accounts. But she knows the story is far from over. She plans to attend every court hearing, she said — just as she did a decade ago, when her father was on trial for the explosives possession charge.
"All I can hope for is a fair trial for Alissa and my father," she said. "That's all I ever wanted, is for them both to have their day in court."
Written by: Jacey Fortin
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES
