Marialice Clark vanished from Omaha at 14 after federal documents named her in a Black Panther weapons probe, and her family still has no answers.
Ed Clark last saw his little sister on the front porch of their Omaha home in 1972. She was 14, the youngest of six, and told him she was heading around the corner to visit a friend. He told her to let their mother know she was leaving. She never came back.
The friend said Marialice never arrived. Relatives later heard she got into a car with Chicago plates near the Bali-Hi Lounge, a spot she knew well. Their mother spent hours knocking on doors and searching around the lounge. When she tried to report her daughter missing the next morning, police turned her away and treated the girl as a runaway.
More than five decades later, Marialice would be 68. Her mother died at 95 without ever learning what happened. Ed is now pressing the public for information so he can learn his sister’s fate before he dies too. Omaha police reopened the case in 2019. The family wants hard answers, not more dead ends.
Two years before she disappeared, Marialice’s name surfaced in a federal search warrant. A 2021 letter from the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office detailed older police reports and the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division account of what happened in July 1970.
Special Investigator Thomas Sledge of the U.S. Treasury’s ATF division interviewed Marialice on July 15, 1970, when she was 12, according to the warrant description. Five days later, on July 20, agents secured authority to search a house around the corner from the Clark family home. Members of the National Committee to Combat Fascism, tied to the Black Panther Party, lived there.
The warrant account said Marialice told Sledge her older sister Linda, then 22, belonged to the Black Panther Party. It also described her account of machine guns, dynamite, and bomb-making inside the group’s home. Great-niece Jennifer Jackson later noted the warrant misspelled the girl’s name. Ed has doubted she ever spoke to Sledge at all.
About a month after that claimed interview, Omaha police were lured to an abandoned home. A suitcase of dynamite exploded. Officer Larry Minard, 29, was killed. Black Panther figures David Rice and Edward Poindexter were later jailed in the case. Both maintained their innocence and said they were framed. Ed has said Linda once dated Poindexter, one of the group’s leaders.
Long cold cases like this one still surface in American life, much like the Orlando missing-person case that finally brought charges after 15 years. Families wait. Files sit. Time keeps moving.
Relatives were told at some point that Marialice had been placed in witness protection. Ed and Jackson are not convinced. Omaha Police Sergeant Brett Schrage, who oversees the missing persons unit, has said federal agencies reported they held no records pertaining to her.
That gap matters. A girl named in a federal weapons warrant vanishes two years later, and the federal side now says it has nothing on file. Schrage has not hidden his frustration with the stalled file.
Schrage put it bluntly while discussing the case.
"drives me nuts, it really does."
Jackson has helped the search for roughly three years after the 2019 reopen. She wants her great-aunt to know the family never walked away. Public pressure on federal record-keeping is not new; senators have also pressed the Justice Department and intelligence officials over FBI document releases in other fights over what the bureau keeps buried.
Jackson stated the family’s simple ask.
"We just want her to know that we did not give up."
Ed still carries his mother’s words. She spent the night looking for her youngest child and woke up to a police station that would not take a missing-person report seriously.
He recalls what she used to say as the years piled up with no word.
"I hope I get to see my baby before I die."
She never did. She died at 95. The runaway label stuck long enough to waste the first critical hours. In a city already dealing with radical violence and a murdered officer, a 14-year-old Black girl walking out the front door did not get the urgency her mother demanded.
Ed could not reach ATF investigator Sledge before Sledge died. That conversation is gone. So is whatever clarity it might have brought about the July 1970 interview, the misspelled name on the warrant, and whether a child was ever used as a source in a volatile domestic probe.
Informant handling has drawn hard scrutiny in other modern cases, including a federal case built around money moved to a white-supremacist informant. When agencies lean on sources and then lose the paper trail, families pay the price.
The Omaha Police Missing Persons Unit still lists tip lines for anyone with information: 402-444-4123 for the unit and 402-444-5818 for the front desk. The case file is open again. The Chicago-plates lead from near the Bali-Hi Lounge has never produced a public resolution in the material the family has seen.
Schrage’s unit is left working a disappearance that began with a porch goodbye and a short walk that never finished. The same neighborhood that hosted a Black Panther-linked house search in 1970 later buried a police officer killed by dynamite. Marialice’s name sits in the middle of that history on paper, then drops out of sight in 1972.
Federal agencies told local police they have no records on her. That claim lands poorly next to a 1970 warrant that used her statements, or at least claimed to. Declassified fights over how the FBI handled informant reporting in other sensitive probes only sharpen the public’s demand for clean files and plain answers.
Ed is not asking for a theory. He is asking for his sister. Jackson is not asking for a press conference. She is asking for proof someone is still looking. The family has already buried a mother who waited her whole life. They are done waiting quietly.
Cold cases do not solve themselves. Agencies that put a child’s name in a weapons warrant owe a full accounting when that child later vanishes, and local police should never have sent a frantic mother home with a runaway brush-off while a 14-year-old was already gone.