His eyes filled with tears and his lip trembling with emotion, the boyfriend of a missing Georgia woman said he believes she is still alive and begged anyone who knows anything about her disappearance to call authorities.
“I believe this tragedy can come to a happy ending,” Douglas Davis told TODAY’s Ann Curry Thursday in New York. “I believe she’s still alive, just in my heart. She’s a fighter. She has a faith in the Lord that’s real. She lives that faith. I believe that faith will sustain her and has sustained her up to this point.”
‘Don’t take me’
Davis is the last person 38-year-old Kristi Cornwell spoke to on Aug. 11, when she was apparently abducted around 9 p.m. while walking on the remote Georgia road on which she lived. Cornwell was talking to Davis on her cell phone when she said a car was approaching. Among her last words was the plea, “Don’t take me.”
Until Thursday, Davis had not spoken to the media, and he continued to comply with the request of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to not discuss specific details of the phone conversation.
“When you meet someone this precious, it may only come once in a lifetime. And to see this tragedy occur, it’s like somebody took my heart and ripped it out,” Davis told Curry.
Despite a massive manhunt conducted by law enforcement officers and hundreds of volunteers, Cornwell has not been found, and the GBI and FBI have called off the local search effort and moved to a broader search.
Davis praised the efforts of the searchers, but asked that the expanded search for Cornwell, who has a 15-year-old son, be intensified. “I believe that if we could just step up the search, that there are those out there right now who know the real truth of this story, who know where she is. Just pick up the phone, make the call and let us bring Kristi home,” Davis said.
A meaningful gift
As he spoke, Davis held tightly to a book of daily devotional prayers by Oswald Chambers. The book was a gift from Cornwell, sent before she disappeared.