A 27-year-old mother planned to play a game of pool before she picked up her 14-month-old son.
A 36-year-old woman told her husband she felt like taking a drive alone with her Rottweiler.
A 22-year-old woman in the last stages of a tough pregnancy left for Portland to shop for baby clothes with her estranged husband and three-year-old daughter.
A 17-year-old girl with an infant daughter and dreams of a modeling career set out to party with friends.
None of them ever made it home.
In Washington state, more than 400 people are considered to be missing persons. About 12 of those men, women, and children live in the Lower Columbia region. Months, years, and even decades after their disappearances, their loved ones still struggle daily to find a balance between hope and despair, reason and optimism.
When three long-missing women were discovered imprisoned in an Ohio home earlier this month, many families of missing persons felt a jolt of hope that their loved ones might still be living, too. But that kind of thinking can feel a little dangerous, said Brenda Rismoen, whose close friend Kelly Sims vanished in 1990.
“You never give up hope. But you don’t want to get your hopes up too much,” explained Rismoen, 50, of Longview.
Despite a case that has gone totally cold in the intervening years, Rismoen says she has never stopped thinking about her friend, or hoping for a break. Sims, a Kelso woman who never arrived to pick up her son from the babysitter’s, was not the type to abandon her child or leave without a trace, Rismoen said. She was last seen when she was dropped at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Allen Street to play pool at the Rendezvous Tavern.
“It has been so many years that you wonder, and you wonder. Did she suffer? I know she would not walk away. ... She’s got grandchildren she never got to meet. She missed weddings. She missed graduations. Her son took his first steps with me. His first word, ‘momma,’ was with me. It was unfair and selfish of whoever denied her those firsts,” Rismoen said.
There is reason for families to continue hoping — for closure at least. When 15-year-old Misty Dawn Thompson ran away from a Woodland foster home in 1993, there were few leads for most of a decade.
But about a year ago, Cowlitz County sheriff’s deputy Robert Stumph re-ignited the investigation when he located a man who had long been suspected of playing a role in her disappearance, CCSO spokesman Charlie Rosenzweig said Thursday. Since then, police have worked with the man, as well as INTERPOL agents, and believe that they may be able to determine what became of Misty.
“Here’s a case that’s 15 years old. Fifteen or 20 years later, they’re still getting leads,” Rosenzweig said, attributing these recent breaks to his colleagues’ continuing “Good old-fashioned elbow grease, hard pursuit.”
Karen Hinton knows too well how agonizing it can be to wait for a break like the one in Misty’s case. Her teenage niece Kayla Croft-Payne was last seen in a Toutle trailer park in April 2010. Hinton, a Portland resident, has been doing whatever she can to keep the search for Kayla alive ever since.
Before her disappearance, Kayla had fallen into a community of drug-users that spanned roughly from Tacoma to Longview. Because many of the people who could know what happened to Kayla have chaotic, drug-addled lives, the case has often been hindered by rumors, false leads, and a lack of information, Hinton said. Some people who associated with Kayla have speculated that she was killed. Others say she overdosed. But occasionally, people have hinted that she is being held against her will.
“Everything boils down to the Lewis County area, and things going wrong. We are just hopeful that soon we’ll find out one way or another,” Hinton said Thursday.
Hinton keeps going over the rumors again and again and tries to keep Kayla’s face in the minds of anyone who might be able to help. She said the investigation was re-energized recently, when the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office assigned Detective Danny Riordan to the case.
“I don’t think Kayla disappeared because she wanted to. I think something happened to Kayla,” said Riordan, who speaks with clear conviction about his desire to find Kayla.
Recently, Riordan has made a careful effort to systematically eliminate what he describes as “red herrings” — false leads.
His efforts have included using a warrant to search records on a website that connects aspiring models with photographers, and searching a Winlock property where a tipper said they might find her body. Investigators did not find any evidence that Kayla had been there, but it helped the case by narrowing down the list of recurring rumors, Riordan said.
Hinton and Riordan both find the lack of witnesses deeply frustrating.
“I’m 24-7. When it comes to this, my phone is on all the time. But people just aren’t coming forward on this for whatever reason,” Riordan said, adding that it’s especially pointless for a witness to stay quiet if it’s simply a matter of revealing where her body was left in the wake of an overdose.
“If that’s all it is, there’s not a crime. We need closure for the family,” Riordan said.
Hinton too, pleads with the witnesses to finally to tell the truth, even if it’s bad news.
“We just need people to stop being scared and come forward. It’s been three years. It’s been long enough,” Hinton said.
Antique Di
