Found Safe NY - Flora Stevens, 36, Monticello, Aug 1975

Such a STRANGE story! What have you been doing for 42 years, Flora?

What the actual heck?? There's got to be more to this story.

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Something is weird about this whole thing... Glad she is ok.. sad she has dementia in a nursing home and has no family... I came looking to see if she ever had a thread on here but did not.

http://nypost.com/2017/10/26/woman-turns-up-four-decades-after-going-missing/

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/loca...-Found-Alive-in-Unlikely-Place-453372243.html



A woman who disappeared from upstate New York after being dropped off for a doctor's appointment 42 years ago has been found suffering from dementia and living in an assisted-living facility in Massachusetts, authorities said.*
The sheriff's office in Sullivan County, New York, said Flora Stevens, 78, was using the last name Harris when detectives tracked her down this week in Lowell. Officials said they've been unable to figure out details of what happened to her between the time she disappeared in August 1975 and when she was finally found.*
"It's not too often we get to solve a 42-year-old missing-person case," Sullivan County Sheriff Mike Schiff said in a press release. "The main thing is we know Flora is safe."*
Police said Stevens was a 36-year-old employee of a Catskills resort when her husband dropped her off for a doctor's appointment at a hospital in Monticello, 75 miles northwest of New York City. When he returned to pick her up, she wasn't there.*

Police periodically reviewed her missing person case but kept hitting dead ends. They got a break in September, thanks to a query from a New York State Police investigator working on a different cold case. The unidentified remains of a woman had been found in neighboring Orange County, and the investigator said they roughly matched Stevens' general characteristics.*
The state police investigators asked Sullivan County for help tracking down any relatives who could provide a DNA sample for possible identification. During a records search, Detective Rich Morgan discovered someone was using Stevens' Social Security number in Massachusetts.*
Deputies tracked the number to the Lowell assisted-living residence, where staff confirmed the number belonged to a resident named Flora Harris, who has lived there since 2001. Morgan and another detective went there Tuesday and confirmed Harris was actually the Flora Stevens who had disappeared in 1975

Because of her condition, Stevens couldn't provide details of her life since then, police said. But the detectives brought along her employee photo identification card from the now-defunct Concord Resort and she recognized herself, officials said.*
Her medical records under her new name show she lived in nursing homes in New Hampshire and New York City before arriving in Lowell, police said.
Stevens apparently has no living relatives, officials said.*


http://www.riverreporter.com/police-blotter/sullivan-cold-case-1975-solved

Police have "solved" a decades-old missing person case — but the woman who vanished so long ago now has dementia and can't explain her own disappearance.

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Harris recognized an old employee photograph of Stevens from the Concord Hotel, and the two police officers soon realized Stevens and Harris were the same woman — but much had changed.

"She doesn’t speak in more than one or two words at a time," Sullivan County Undersheriff Eric Chaboty explained, noting that Stevens suffers from dementia. "But she looked at the ID and said, 'Me!'"
The struggle to communicate indicates a late middle stage or end stage form of dementia, according to the Alzheimer's Association.
But Chaboty said when investigators showed her old pictures of the Concord Hotel, Stevens lit up immediately.

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"One of the things we talk about for late stage care is to find alternative ways to connect with them," said Beth Kallmyer, vice president of constituent services at the Alzheimer's Association. "They’re still alive, they’re still living here, so that helps make their quality of life better when you can find ways to connect with them. One way to do that is to look through old photos or to tell them about old memories or past events."

Stevens had spent time at nursing homes in New Hampshire and New York City, but the mental health records are relatively vague and no one is quite sure what caused her to leave the small New York town of Monticello 42 years ago, officials said. She has no living relatives who could fill police in, either, they said.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/police-find-woman-missing-42-years-mystery-remains-n814761

This is quite a story. It's a shame that Flora's secret of her life after 1975 will likely die with her. What if she had children after 1975 who were separated from her and never knew her? I hope they ran her DNA against all databases they have access to. I hope she was uploaded to Ancestry and other family DNA databases.

I don't understand how she's been able to be in these facilities all these years, without anyone knowing who she is. Someone had to have known her identity at some point due to the ssn usage.

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Even in The Netherlands this was news. Wowww why they didn't find her before...Glad, this is one more missing cold case resolved.

this is incredible. Hats off to investigators re-checking old MP cases. I read in the CBS article on this case and it talked about an unidentified body found in Orange County was considered as possibly her and caused the aquiring of a relative’s DNA sample. I wonder if there’s a thread for that UID.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cb...vens-missing-woman-found-alive-massachusetts/

Edit: The UID mentioned in the article as the possible match that lead to collecting Ms. Stevens’ relative’s DNA is probably this Jane Doe found in Harriman State Park which is in Orange County, NY in 1984.
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/254ufny.html

The discovery of a woman missing for 42 years drew widespread attention and news coverage, accompanied by a police photo of the smiling woman in a wheelchair with a teddy bear in her lap and flanked by the beaming detectives.

But the elation was mixed with mystery. Where did she go and what did she do all those years? Was she running? From what? Investigators were able to put together some of the timeline, including stints at other care facilities. But with the woman’s condition and the passage of time, many other details may never be known.
“To be honest, I don’t think she ever really wanted to be found,” said Festus Mbuva, a former worker at the Boston-area facility who helped care for her for a decade. “You can tell something happened in her past that she didn’t want any part of.”

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Florence “Flora” Stevens was among the hundreds of hotel workers who once flooded into this lake-laden area north of New York City each summer. She worked for several summers at The Concord, a sprawling resort with more than 1,200 rooms that was considered a jewel of the Catskills’ Borscht Belt.

A Concord job application from 1975, signed “Mrs. Flora Stevens” in neat cursive, says she went to high school less than two hours away in Yonkers.

The man she listed as her husband, Robert Stevens, worked there, too, though it’s not clear what he did there. Police have not confirmed they were actually married. Her application includes no phone number or local address. She listed an address in Seattle.

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On the evening of Sunday, Aug. 3, 1975, 36-year-old Flora Stevens was dropped off by Stevens at a small hospital a couple of miles from the hotel in Monticello, at the time a bustling tourist hub.

Two hours later, he came to pick her up. She was gone.

Authorities say they cannot divulge why she went to the hospital that evening because of privacy laws, and they don’t know what she did once she was dropped off. But there was a bus station nearby, and she might have had some money that Sunday evening.
“She had just been paid, probably had a weekend full of tips in her pocket,” said Sullivan County sheriff’s Detective Rich Morgan.

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Flora Harris had been at the CareOne facility in Lowell since 2001. She had a court-appointed guardian from New York state, which paid her bills. The record is spotty before then, though authorities said she had a previous guardian from about 1987 and spent time at least part of that time in care facilities in New York City and New Hampshire.

Mbuva, who left CareOne last December, said the woman rarely talked about her family other than to say she came from a bad marriage and her husband had been abusive. Police in New York would not comment on that claim.
Over the years, Mbuva gleaned a few other tidbits: Stevens had grown up in Yonkers, had been a hairstylist and went to the 1969 Woodstock concert, held down the road from The Concord.

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http://bangordailynews.com/2017/11/...s-woman-found-in-mass-after-42-years-missing/

This is so crazy. She had been in care facilities dating at least back to 1987 and no one ever found her before? I almost wonder if someone at the hospital in 1975 saw that she was in an abusive relationship and had her committed in another facility somewhere just to help get her out of the situation? On the other hand, if she had a guardian in 1987 then she might not have been medically well of mentally aware back then either. That is a very long time to spend in in-care facilities without anyone knowing who she was or realizing she was "missing". JMO.