This here’s Miss Cheyenne Phillips. This is Dalton Hayes. They rob cars, are madly in love and are currently living on the lam. Sounds like a plot loosely based on Bonnie and Clyde, but it’s true: A teenage couple from Grayson County, Kentucky have run away and are flying south, where they are wreaking havoc on cattle farms, swiping cars containing firearms, cashing stolen checks and worrying their parents.
There is currently a manhunt out for Cheyenne Phillips, 13, and Dalton Hayes, 18, who have been missing now for 12 days. “It is imperative that these two be located and apprehended as their behavior is becoming brazen and increasingly dangerous,” said the Grayson County Sheriff’s Office in a statement.
The pair have been going steady for three months, but fled when Hayes’s mom, Tammy Martin, found out that Phillips was not in fact 19 years old, but 13, and confronted her about it. “I texted Cheyenne and said the police are looking for you, she says why; I said, they say you’re underaged,” she told WHAS-TV Louisville. Phillips’s father had reported her missing to local police when she didn’t return home the night of January 3 and spent it at her boyfriend’s instead. Authorities alerted Martin, but her son and his girlfriend had vanished by the time she got home. Police believe that the two were staying with family and friends for about a week, until they began committing crimes.
On January 11, one week after they went missing, the couple jacked a truck from Kathy and Jim McGrew, a couple living in Grayson County. The McGrews told WHAS-TV Louisville that they heard a loud sound, “like a bomb went off,” and it was the pair stealing a truck from their garage. The pair thundered down the road in the stolen car with the police and Jim McGrew, who attempted to chase them in his personal airplane, in hot pursuit.
The teens damaged $7,500 worth of property after barreling through a cattle farm, then disappeared into the woods, where they made their escape. Later, local police found the truck and a pile of clothes the pair had left behind. Not an hour and a half later, they had stolen another car, a 2006 Toyota Tacoma, and skipped town.
On Monday, the Grayson County Sheriff’s Office released surveillance images placing the pair at a Walmart in Manning, South Carolina, where they were driving the Tacoma, which happened to have a gun inside, and cashed two stolen checks for $20 each, reports TheWashington Post. This car has since been recovered in Henry County, Georgia, but no mention of the gun.
Authorities confirmed on Thursday that the couple has stolen and is believed to be driving a silver 2001 Toyota Tundra, which was parked walking distance from the Tacoma they abandoned. Said car has a certified firefighter license plate and contains two handguns, a .38 special and a .45 caliber, reports the Lexington Herald-Ledger.
Hayes is currently wanted by the police on charges of felony car theft and custodial interference.
The criminal couple hasn’t made an attempt to contact their parents, save for a single text that Hayes sent his mom on January 6, two days after they disappeared. “Mommy, don’t worry. I’m fine, okay—plenty of money and food. Love you, good night, sweet dreams.”
Speaking to the Lexington Herald-Ledger, Grayson County Sheriff Norman Chaffins said authorities’ primary concern is getting the teens home safely. They don’t believe the couple has malicious intentions, but they worry about what could happen. "We think it's important for them to get back home, because they're starting to bite off a little more than they can chew,” he told the paper. “Our concern is that they could get themselves hemmed up in something that they.… We just don't want them to get hurt."
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