July 6, 2026 | By: Zoe Hatfield, PCC Business Development Coordinator

On February 26, 2003, 16-year-old Hayley Jean Marshall disappeared from her father’s home in Marion County, Florida. Just ten days later, on March 10, 2003, her body was found nude, in a decomposing state in a wooded area in Dunnellon, Florida, and now, over twenty-three years later, the family is still looking for answers on what happened to their goofy, free-spirited daughter and sister.

“She was always one that wanted to be kind of, you know, the class clown,” Hayley’s older sister, Jennifer Marshall, recalls. “She always did really funny pranks on people. That was her thing, always wanting to get people to laugh.”

Jennifer remembers the day her sister disappeared. Just after her 16^th birthday on February 11, Hayley had left her mother’s home in Starke, Florida to stay at her father’s house. Jennifer had gone to school that morning with a promise to take her younger sister to the mall afterwards.

“She wanted to kind of clean her look up a little bit,” Jennifer said, “She wanted to start dressing nicer.”

Hayley had been complaining about feeling ill, so Jennifer expected to come home to see her sister waiting for her in the living room on the couch watching something on the TV, but when she got home the backdoor was unlocked and Hayley was nowhere to be found.

“I anticipated her coming back, and she didn’t,” Jennifer said.

While Jennifer says she remembers thinking it was a little out of character for Hayley not to be home because she had been complaining about not feeling well, the family didn’t report her missing right away because this wasn’t out of the ordinary for Hayley to disappear for a little while.

“It got into a pattern where she would take off for days, not come back. Multiple, multiple, multiple times,” the sister recalls. “Calling the cops, go find her, all they did was bring her home and then the process would just repeat itself.”

At the time, it was said Hayley had been running around with an older crowd, most in their 20s, and most known for doing drugs.

Jennifer recalls what finally led them to report her sister missing, with her dad coming to her with concern after a Jane Doe had been found.

“My dad looked at me, he goes, ‘You know, I kind of have a funny feeling about this. This Jane Doe found with these tattoos, you know, it kind of sounds like Hayley.’ But that was the initial, you know, hair sticking up, something funny’s going on.”

It was then over a week later, on March 10, 2003, that Hayley’s decomposing, nude body was discovered by a man looking for his dogs in the woods of Dunnellon.

Jennifer says, even with all the time that’s passed, it still eats away at her and her family every day that there are still so many unanswered questions in her sister’s case.

“It still effects my mother deeply, of course, as a parent,” Jennifer said.

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If you have any information about the unsolved murder of Hayley Marshall, please contact the Marion County Sheriff’s Office at (352) 368-3559. To remain anonymous, you can contact Crime Stoppers of Marion County at (352) 368- 7867.

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