archived article from 2016
https://archive.ph/JJvdN
Marilyn Alexander: Children said there can't be closure until mystery solved
- NICHOLAS BERGIN Lincoln Journal Star
- Sep 5, 2016 Updated Sep 12, 2017
David Flesner (left), 24, of Clay Center, Tim Flesner, 34, of Lincoln, Elizabeth Morris, 36, of Grand Island, and Emilea Sell, 26, of Arcadia hold a picture of their mother, Marilyn Alexander, who disappeared on Sept. 20, 2001.
HASTINGS -- Marilyn Alexander disappeared on Sept. 20, 2001.
Her family believes she was the victim of domestic violence, her homicide unpunished.
Yet without proof, they wonder: Is she out there nearly 15 years later?
Is she being held against her will? Did she leave to start a new life without her husband and four children?
“There have been a lot of times when I’ve been driving somewhere, and I stopped and turned around, because I thought I saw someone that looked like her,” said Marilyn Alexander's oldest child, Elizabeth Morris, now 36.
Her younger sister, 26-year-old Emilea Sells, recently drove to the Rosebud Casino near Valentine with her husband, but spent the trip hoping she wouldn’t find her mom feeding coins into a slot machine.
“If she is still alive, that means she left everybody. I can’t see her doing that,” Sells said.
Marilyn Alexander was 39 when she disappeared. It was several years before the 2004 launch of Facebook, which families often turn to now to help find missing loved ones.
In the initial days and weeks, her disappearance got little attention. She had suffered from occasional depression, and she drank and gambled. She had gone off on her own before but had always made sure her children had a place to stay, either with her parents or sister.
Then workers at the gas station she managed found checks she wrote to the business but didn’t cash. Police got a warrant for her arrest on suspicion of theft.
“We’re not going to lie. She was an alcoholic, and she had a gambling problem,” said Cheryl Thiel, Alexander’s sister.
“Police treated her as a runaway, as a criminal that ran away from her crime,” Ed Thiel, her brother-in-law, added.
About a month after she disappeared, her car was found north of Red Cloud. In the car there were beer cans and a money bag with uncashed checks but no cash.
Her brother and ex-husband were members of the Red Cloud Fire Department and got fellow volunteers to help scour nearby fields.
Things didn’t add up to those who knew her. They say she wouldn’t have left without arranging for a place for her children to stay.
None of her belongings were missing, not even the pillow she had refused to sleep without for years. She once forced her ex-husband to drive hours to get that pillow after she forgot it at a hotel.
Her dad, Laurence “Abie” Johnson, a former Hastings police detective, would have bailed her out of legal trouble, paid her debts and hired her an attorney; and Marilyn Alexander knew that, Cheryl Thiel said.
At the time, family wondered whether she had fled from her husband, Robert Alexander, and sought help at a women’s shelter. Morris, her oldest daughter, called them all.
“All they would say is, 'If she’s here, she is going to have to contact you herself,'" she said. “At that point, it kind of gave us a little bit of hope.”
Amy Evans, executive director of Friendship Home, a Lincoln shelter, sympathized with the heartache Marilyn Alexander's family felt, but said the danger domestic violence victims face makes secrecy essential.
"I just can't imagine what that must have been like for her to so desperately be looking for her mother and not be able to get the answers that she needed," Evans said. "However, we as a domestic violence shelter can't know who the person calling actually is and whether the victim would want information disclosed to that person."
Evans said if the Friendship Home knows how to contact a person whose family is looking for them, staff will pass on a message and ask whether it's OK to give a message back to the person who called.
The month before Alexander disappeared, she had suffered a cut going through a glass door of a gun cabinet during a fight with Robert. He wouldn’t let her get it treated at a hospital.
“I told her at that point she needed to leave him and get away,” Morris said. “But she said she didn’t want to have another failed marriage.”
The most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she's leaving, said Patsy Martin, communications coordinator for Voices of Hope, a Lincoln-based nonprofit that works with victims of abuse and sexual assault.
The Nebraska State Patrol recorded 22 domestic violence-related deaths involving 17 perpetrators from 2012 to 2013, the most recent dates for which figures are publicly available. All the deaths happened in a heterosexual relationship with a male abuser. In some cases, the person killed was a child or someone else close to the abuse victim.
Marilyn Alexander’s dad suspected his son-in-law of murder.
Adams County Sheriff Gregg Magee said area law enforcement respected Johnson, who died in 2007 without getting closure in the most personal case of his life.
Johnson brought his suspicions to investigators, Magee said, but officers were never able to prove Alexander died.
Robert Alexander took a lie detector test, which indicated he answered questions truthfully, according to documentation provided by Marilyn's family.
It wasn’t enough to convince Johnson, who hired a private detective and paid to have a cadaver dog search the septic tank of the Alexander home near Hastings.
The rest of the family looked to Johnson for guidance, and he told them to put their faith in law enforcement. Years later, they wonder whether evidence was lost during those first weeks, when police considered it a case of a woman running from the law.
The night before Alexander disappeared, she tucked her two youngest children into bed, like she did every night. Everything seemed normal, said Sells, 11 at the time. Her brother, David, was 9.
“She told us she loved us,” Sells said.
Their older siblings were grown and out of the house. Morris had her own family, and Tim Flesner was attending college in Lincoln, where he still lives.
Marilyn Alexander woke early Sept. 20, 2001, and left the house before her kids got up for school. She managed the Time Saver gas station and had to open.
Ed Thiel was the last member of the family to see her when he stopped at the station.
“She was not her normal giddy self,” he said. “She was kind of depressed, said she had to go back home and do something, then had to pay a bill.”
What happened after that is a mystery.
A man claimed to have seen her at a Lincoln bar that day drinking beer and watching the Huskers play football, which police considered the last time she was seen alive. But her family thinks he was mistaken about the date she was there. She had been at the bar a week prior, before she went missing, watching a football game.
When the younger children got home from school that day, they found their stepdad shampooing the carpet. It was odd for him to be home that time of day, Sells said, and even more unusual for him to be doing housework.
That weekend, Robert Alexander moved the kids to their father’s house in Red Cloud. He filed for divorce about a month later.
Robert Alexander died in March 2003 when his truck crashed about 5 miles north of Harvard.
Marilyn Alexander remains on the Nebraska State Patrol’s Missing Persons Clearinghouse.
The Adams County Sheriff’s Office still has an active missing person case and criminal case, to make it easier to search national databases for mention of her. They also have samples of her hair and DNA.
She doesn’t have a headstone or memorial and never got an obituary.
Her children believe she’s dead, but they’ve been unable to properly mourn, Morris said.
“Even if we had a stone somewhere, there’s never going to be closure."
nebraska.tv
