The picture they used was a former mugshot. She looked so grotesque, so hardened by her life. The article got some of the details wrong — details that to this day bother me... The article was the only media coverage her case received. I didn't know that then, nor could I have understood, how different the police treat a missing persons case when the person missing is an ex-convict. Her case didn't go cold; it was on ice the moment she disappeared.
It wasn't until 1999, seven months before the birth of my second child, that I took a renewed interest in her disappearance... I spent hours on the phone tracking down the new detective assigned to her case, and once I found him, I managed to ignite his interest in the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, too...
Up until then, nothing more than preliminary investigative work had been done. Witness statements were collected, reports were filed. The room she went missing from was never tested for traces of blood. No luminol or black lights were ever used to see if she'd been murdered in her motel room. By the time I was in touch with the detective about her case, the motel had long been torn down.
Most interesting of all, my mother's ex-husband, the man she had only recently left before she disappeared, had never been questioned.
