Search for Phoenix Coldon, Stacey English: Police in Atlanta and St. Louis Search for Missing Black Women

Similarities in both cases lead to speculation about disappearances.

ByABC News
January 9, 2012, 7:46 PM

Jan. 9, 2012 — -- Similarities in the disappearances of two women in St. Louis and Atlanta have police in the two cities comparing notes to see whether the cases might be related.

Stacey Nicole English, 36, of the affluent Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, and Phoenix Coldon, 23, of St. Louis, both went missing in December and the cars were later found with the engines running.

The apparent similarities in the case have some people questioning whether the same person could be responsible for both disappearances.

English was reported missing by her parents on Dec. 27, after they called her for several days and failed to get a response. They went to her home and inside found her phone, iPad and the key fob to gain entry to her apartment complex. She never left home without her phone or iPad, they said.

English was apparently last seen by Robert Kirk, a St. Louis resident who was a guest in her home from Christmas Eve until Dec. 26.

Coldon was last seen outside her St. Louis home on Dec. 18. The woman's mother told police she saw Coldon in her car outside the family home, but when she checked later, the young woman's car was gone. The young woman failed to return home that night, and Coldon's mother called police the next morning.

Neither Coldon nor English have been seen since.

English's car, a white 2006 Volvo S60, and Coldon's vehicle, a 1998 black Chevy Blazer, were both impounded by police on the day the women apparently went missing. According to several reports, police initially didn't realize the cars that had been impounded belonged to the missing women for whom they were searching.

The women's parents have been critical of both departments' handling of the investigations, particularly the initial failure to connect the impounded cars to the cases.

Carlos Campos, a spokesman for the Atlanta Police Department, told ABCNews.com this evening that his department had communicated with investigators in St. Louis.

"We have spoken with them, and we have the facts of their case and our investigators are reviewing them," Campos said.

No one at the St. Louis Police Department's media office could be reached this evening, but the apparent similarities of the case reportedly have caught their investigators' attention as well.

Coldon's mother, Goldia, told the Huffington Post that St. Louis police Capt. Troy Doyle, who is working on her daughter's case, said he has seen similarities in both cases.

Of Coldon's disappearance, St. James McWilliams of the St. Louis County Police Department said there were "no signs of foul play," adding, "at the same token there is nothing to alleviate that possibility," according to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Campos said Atlanta police have been in communication with Kirk's attorney and Kirk was cooperative.

According to a police report, Kirk told one of English's family members that the woman had begun to act "peculiar and out of character" at about 10 p.m. on Dec. 26.

Kirk told the family member that English began screaming in her apartment, shouting Biblical scriptures and saying the world was coming to an end, the police report said. He said she asked him whether he was Satan, then asked him to leave.

He said he left at about 10:30 that night.

Campos told ABC News that Kirk was not considered a suspect or a person of interest, denying previous media reports that claimed the police had named Kirk a person of interest in English's disappearance.