In June 2017, Jodie Brooke Anderson was 18 years old, living in Nashville, Tennessee, and navigating circumstances that would have been difficult for anyone, let alone someone barely into adulthood. Most people called her by her middle name, Brooke. She was a young mother. Her son was only about a year old. Brooke was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed approximately 160 pounds. She had brown hair and brown eyes. Both of her ears were pierced, as was her upper lip, and high on her chest near her collarbone was a distinctive tattoo reading: Daughter of a King
At the time, Brooke’s life was unstable. According to later reporting and missing-person resources, she and her mother, Shannon Anderson, were houseless and struggling with substance use disorder. Brooke was allegedly known to frequent the areas around Brick Church Pike and Trinity Lane in Nashville. But Brooke was also connected to the world around her in a very modern and very visible way. She was reportedly an active Facebook user. Then, suddenly, she wasn’t.
The precise timeline of Brooke’s disappearance is surprisingly confusing for a case that occurred as recently as 2017. Nashville’s official cold-case website gives her date of last contact as June 6, 2017, and her last known location as Dickerson Pike and Doverside Drive. Yet on the very same page, the summary states that Brooke was last heard from on the morning of June 10.
The Charley Project provides another account. According to its updated case file, Brooke was last seen on June 5, 2017, at a Jack in the Box on West Trinity Lane. She had been there with her mother. According to Shannon’s account, she went into the restroom and when she came back out, Brooke was gone. If that account is accurate, it was an extraordinarily ordinary moment immediately before a disappearance.
Her 18-year-old daughter is there when she leaves. Minutes later, she returns. And her daughter has vanished. There is no publicly available indication that anyone saw Brooke being forced into a vehicle. There is no publicly identified person who picked her up. There is no known message explaining where she intended to go. And there has been no confirmed contact with Brooke since.
Her Facebook activity stopped. Messages went unanswered. And Brooke left behind her baby boy. Those details would eventually become particularly troubling to the people who loved her. But there was another problem. Brooke wasn’t immediately reported missing. She disappeared in June.
According to Metro Nashville Police, her missing-person report wasn’t made until August 9, 2017 which is roughly two months later. Those weeks represented valuable lost time.
Brooke’s aunt, De’Anna Anderson, has openly questioned the delay. Metro Nashville Police told WSMV that Shannon was incarcerated when Brooke was eventually reported missing, which may partly explain what happened. De’Anna, however, said Shannon had been briefly out of jail during June and already knew that Brooke was missing.
Whatever the explanation, by the time authorities had an official missing-person investigation underway, Brooke’s trail was already cold. Weeks had passed since anyone could reliably account for her whereabouts. People’s memories fade. Surveillance footage can be erased. Witnesses who might not realize they’ve seen something important move on with their lives. And Brooke seemingly left very little behind that could tell investigators where she went. Her disappearance was especially difficult for her family to understand because Brooke had a child. She didn’t return for him. She didn’t resume posting on Facebook. She didn’t contact friends or relatives to say she was safe.
She simply disappeared.
In 2021, Brooke’s aunt described the mystery in painfully simple terms: an 18-year-old doesn’t simply disappear without money, a phone, or leaving some kind of trail. The family began raising money for a reward, hoping someone who knew something would finally come forward.
Years passed. Brooke remained missing. Her family continued trying to keep her name in the public eye, eventually pushing for her case to receive greater attention and resources.
And increasingly, the possibility nobody wanted to consider became harder to ignore. What if Brooke wasn’t alive anymore?
Today, the Charley Project classifies Brooke as endangered missing and states that foul play is suspected. Her aunt has also publicly acknowledged that, although she wants desperately to find Brooke alive, the circumstances increasingly lead her to fear Brooke was murdered. There has never been a publicly identified killer. There has never been an arrest for Brooke’s disappearance. And no publicly identified suspect has been charged with harming her.
Then, in 2026, Brooke’s name unexpectedly returned to the headlines. Not because she had been found. Because of her mother. Police arrested Shannon Anderson in May 2026 and charged her with felony food-stamp fraud. Authorities alleged that Shannon had continued collecting benefits in Brooke’s name after her daughter disappeared. She was also facing unrelated charges involving sex-offender registry violations. The revelation understandably disturbed Brooke’s family and prompted renewed questions online.
But one distinction is extremely important: Shannon Anderson has never been publicly named as a suspect in Brooke’s disappearance.
Whatever people may think about the alleged benefits fraud or the delayed missing-person report, neither establishes that Shannon caused Brooke’s disappearance. That distinction becomes especially important when looking at internet discussion surrounding the case. And surprisingly, there isn’t nearly as much of it as you might expect.
A Reddit thread devoted to Brooke’s disappearance appeared in 2018. Rather than presenting a developed theory about a particular suspect, much of the discussion focused on how strange it was that so little information existed and how concerning it was that Brooke apparently stopped using Facebook and missed important milestones involving her son.
That second Reddit comment contains an inaccurate or at least misleading timeline—the official report was made roughly two months after Brooke disappeared, not four—but it illustrates one of the main suspicions expressed by people discussing the case online: why did so much time pass before Brooke was officially reported missing?
Websleuths users have asked many of the same questions, but the discussion is notable for what it *doesn’t* contain. There isn’t a well-supported online theory identifying a particular killer. For years, posters repeatedly remarked on the lack of information and bumped Brooke’s thread simply to prevent her case from being forgotten.
That may actually be the most responsible way to look at Brooke’s disappearance. There are obvious questions. Why are there conflicting dates for her last confirmed contact? What exactly happened at the Jack in the Box? How does that reported sighting fit with Nashville’s official listing of **Dickerson Pike and Doverside Drive** as her last known location? Who saw Brooke after she separated from her mother? And why did approximately two months pass before she was reported missing?
Those questions are legitimate.
Turning them into accusations against a specific person without evidence is not.
There was another brief moment of uncertainty in August 2025 when human remains were discovered near Dickerson Pike. Because of Brooke’s connection to that area, her family was reportedly notified. For a family waiting years for answers, discoveries like that can bring a terrible mixture of hope and dread. But those remains weren’t Brooke. They were subsequently identified as 68-year-old Michael Allen.
So the waiting continued. And it continues today. Nearly a decade has passed since an 18-year-old mother disappeared from Nashville. Brooke would no longer be a teenager. Her little boy, who was approximately one year old when his mother disappeared, has grown up without her.
The Facebook account that once showed signs of an active young woman went silent. No confirmed phone call came. No verified sighting brought her home. No arrest explained what happened. Somewhere within the conflicting dates and sparse information surrounding those first days of June 2017 lies the beginning of the answer.
Perhaps someone saw Brooke leave the restaurant. Perhaps someone picked her up. Perhaps another person knew where she planned to go. And if foul play did occur, as investigators now suspect, someone may have been carrying the truth for almost nine years.
Brooke’s circumstances at the time of her disappearance – homelessness and addiction – made her vulnerable. They did not make her disappearance inevitable. They did not make her less worthy of being searched for. And they certainly did not make her less important. She was an 18-year-old daughter, niece and mother whose family is still looking for an answer.
Her name is Jodie Brooke Anderson.
She is approximately 5’4″ and 160 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. Her ears and upper lip were pierced, and the words “Daughter of a King” were tattooed high on her chest.
As of August 2026, Brooke has not been found and her case remains open. Her family is still waiting.
And somewhere, somebody may know exactly what happened after Brooke Anderson disappeared from Nashville in June 2017.
Sources: Nashville Cold Case, Charley Project, WSMV 4, Websleuths, Reddit
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