New hope but few answers in case of Raleigh woman missing since 2008

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) -- It's a cold case that's been haunting Raleigh police for a decade and was featured on ABC11 a year ago.

And now, there is new information in the missing-person case of Taveta Hobbs, a woman believed to be missing since 2008 and now dead.

"Something terrible happened to Taveta Hobbs here in Raleigh, and she took her last breath on November 24th, 2008," Raleigh police detective Eric Gibney told ABC11 in May of 2018.

This week, a search warrant affidavit last month by Gibney was unsealed.

In it, he said that in 2009, Hobbs' husband, Phillip Hobbs, told police "that Taveta abruptly left him in November of 2008 after she found out that he had been cheating on her" and hadn't been seen since.

Then, in late January of this year, Gibney wrote that he interviewed a "biological family member of Philip Hobbs."

The affidavit goes on to say that the family member said "that sometime after Taveta disappeared, Philip Hobbs buried a firearm in the woods behind (a house) on Golden Heights Drive" in South Raleigh near Yates Mill occupied by another member of Hobbs' family.

"I'm really glad to hear that they had a search warrant on the property to look to see if they could obtain any new information or new clues," Taveta Hobbs' brother, Clinton Crier, told ABC11 by phone from San Francisco where he lives.

Crier said he's also glad people are finally coming forward.

"I just feel like people are cracking. It has to weigh on them," he said. "It's been 10 years of keeping this type of secret. They just can't keep holding this secret and holding these lies."

Raleigh police didn't immediately look for the weapon according to the search warrant.

Instead, they placed a surveillance camera in the woods for a month, apparently to see whether anyone came to try to retrieve the weapon.

But investigators now tell ABC11 that the camera and a subsequent search turned up nothing.

While that's disappointing to Crier, he still considers it progress.

"It gives me some comfort that I know we're keeping the case active, that we're looking into the case, and that we're continuing to focus on any and all leads that come in," Crier said.

He added that he believes it's just a matter of time before police find his sister's body and -- if she was murdered -- her killer.