She went back later; Ricky Simonds Sr., her incarcerated fiancé's father, who lived in the same apartment complex and did maintenance work there, drove her there and another neighbor drove her back. Fraley decided around 12 a.m. that she had something more serious and needed to go back to the hospital, and called her mother to let her know. At 1:30 a.m. April 8, she called a friend in Albemarle; during the call she mentioned that she was going back to the hospital. The call was cut short when Fraley apparently saw her ride, whom she referred to as "he", arrive. Fraley never checked into the hospital the third time. Since that phone call, there has been no evidence of her presence anywhere. After Fraley missed an important appointment the next day, her family went to her apartment on Lowell-Bethesda Road to see if she was all right. They did not find her there. The door was locked; inside they found her wallet, purse, keys, and identification, but not her cell phone. Nothing else was missing. There were no signs of a struggle, so they concluded she had left willingly, wherever she had gone. Unable to locate her, they called police and reported her missing. Gaston County police launched a major investigation, putting all its investigators on the case, with three of them devoted to it full-time, and requesting assistance from both the state's Bureau of Investigation and the FBI. "I have never seen a missing person case worked this thoroughly", said Christie Rhoney, the chief detective. Two days after Fraley's disappearance, utility workers discovered her phone at an intersection roughly a mile (1.6 km) from her apartment. By the time the phone was turned over to the police, too many people had handled it for any usable evidence, such as fingerprints, to be gained from the exterior. Searching through its call records, police found that several calls had been made at 4:30 a.m. However, they turned out to be from the list of calls Fraley had dialed earlier and were not connected to the disappearance. A call had been made to the phone at 5 a.m., but it could not be determined who it was from. Ricky Simonds Jr., Fraley's fiancé, was still imprisoned at the time of her disappearance, so investigators ruled him out as a suspect. They quickly refocused on his father, Ricky Simonds Sr. He, too, had a criminal record, including six years in prison for manslaughter in the 1980s after strangling a girlfriend to death.