Her search ended in a softly lit funeral home chapel. At the end of the aisle, on a long rectangular table, waited the bones of her sister.
The remains lay on a cloth, vaguely arranged in order. A tangle of hair, partially decomposed, rested near the end.
Here was Christine, the sister Kathy Thornton had been looking for most of her life, reported the Casper Star-Tribune.
Mixed with Christines bones were those of her unborn child tiny, unidentifiable pieces of a life that would never be. It was a small miracle among a large horror that so many bones had been recovered after a serial killer left her body on the wind-swept plains of southwest Wyoming, not to be identified for decades.
The funeral home brought in extra people to catch Kathy in case she fainted at the sight of her sisters remains.
But Kathy is not the fainting kind.
For 39 years, she looked for her sister. She scoured death records and stitched together YouTube videos asking for information. She visited old addresses. She wrote to the director of the FBI.
For 39 years, police departments and government agencies responded: Sorry, but we cant help you.
In October, in that chapel of a Rock Springs funeral home, she found an answer.
She reached out and touched Christines bones. The abstract of a person, of a death, that had always flitted at the edges of Kathys life became tangible.
These are her bones, Kathy, 57, thought to herself. She was here.
After the remains were cremated, Kathy and her sister Mary Ann took the ashes in a small, plain white box to their R.V.
It was time finally to bring their sister home.
