Vanished
A man dropped his wife off at a regular appointment at the doctor. When he came back to get her, she was gone. It was a mystery as to where she went until 42 years had passed.
His wife felt sick with a cold, so he decided to take her to the doctor. He told her he'd come to get her in an hour. But when he arrived on time waiting for her, she never appeared. Up until now, the case hadn't been closed. But with a single word and photo, the mystery unraveled.
Monticello
Florence Stevens was last spotted on August 3, 1975, when her husband dropped her off at the doctor. She was 36 years old and was adventurous and energetic. Her job was at a resort in the Catskill Mountains.
She was not feeling well on the night she disappeared. She was dropped off at a doctor's office in Monticello, New York. When her husband drove back to the office, she was gone.
Case Re-opened
Nobody knew where Florence was or could be. A case was opened for her and the police searched in great numbers, perplexed by her strange vanishing. As time went on, the case was closed as they were never able to figure out where she was.
What they weren't expecting was evidence to jumpstart the case again... 42 years later.
Yan Salomon
An investigator named Yan Salomon was stationed at New York State Police in 2017. He found a piece of evidence from a case he wasn't even aware of. The body of a woman had been found and Salomon needed to identify her.
Salomon's next decision had him running to the phone.
Nearly Impossible
The sheriff's office in Sullivan County got a phone call from Salomon asking for a detective. He had found the remains of a woman in the Catskill Mountains and they needed to figure out who it was.
It wouldn't be easy, considering almost 70,000 women over 18 go missing in the U.S. every year. It would be nearly impossible to find out who this was, but then they hatched a plan.
One In Particular
There are 21,894 women missing in cases that have gone cold in the U.S. as of 2016. Even though these cases are cold they are reopened if new evidence is found.
Salomon had a long road ahead, he and his partners were going to sift through every case file and look for any kind of compatibility regarding the remains. They narrowed it down to a number of women. Then they noticed something in particular about one of them,
Sullivan County
As unlikely as his odds were, Salomon traveled to Sullivan County to continue his investigation.
To make things easier, Salomon started searching locally to find the identity of the woman. From experience, he knew the woman they found was from this area. So he started at the beginning, searching for one clue at a time.
Relevant
There was a case in Sullivan County from a long time ago that sounded like his woman. Was this the right case? Salomon took a look at the case file, he needed to find the woman's family if she had any.
This case dated back to 1975 and what he found in the file wasn't too helpful. Although there was something relevant.
Putting Two and Two Together
Salomon gave the case over to Sullivan County. A detective named Rich Morgan took it over and was tasked with matching the evidence with the two women. The detective then found some startling information in the case file. The woman's old ID card was found. This indicated that she worked at a resort in the Catskills.
This was near where the remains where found as well. A woman in 1975 went missing and hadn't been found, not just yet. The woman had a name - Florence Stevens. But this wasn't the detective's only amazing discovery.
Florence Missing
Morgan put two and two together. He found the woman and the case had many similarities. He looked deeper into Florence's life. At the time of her disappearance, her husband frantically tried to find her. He dropped her off, and never saw her again.
After that point, her case was active. But nothing was ever found. Unfortunately, Florence's husband died 10 years ago and so did the case.
Social Security Number
Detective Morgan had a pretty tough job on his hands. With no relatives and no one he could speak to about Flora, he did not know how he could prove that this was the woman who had been found dead.
He started shifting through local and national databases and hit on one crucial clue – someone was using Flora Steven’s social security number in Massachusetts.
250 Miles Away
He tracked the number down to an assisted living facility north of Boston. He was shocked, someone had stolen a missing woman’s social security number.
Detective Morgan called the facility, and the staff there confirmed that the number belonged to a Flora, but her last name was not Stevens, it was Harris and had been in the facility since 2001.
Identity Theft?
Detective Morgan and another investigator went to the facility. They could not believe what they had found. A case that went cold, so many years was now emerging itself into their lives. Admittedly, this meant something. “Same first name, different last name, but same birth date and social security,” detective Morgan told CBS Boston. They had to talk to Flora.
Was this an identity theft crime?
“Me”
Just in case, the detectives went with the only picture they had of Flora in the database, her old work ID she used while she was at the Catskill Mountains. They headed over to see Flora, and as the introduced themselves, she swiftly did something that left the detectives gasping.
Flora took the picture and pointed at it. “She says that’s me, or me, she responded with one word, me,” detective Morgan told CBS. How could this be possible? But then, they showed her a picture of her husband, and she uttered “Robert.” They had found the missing woman.
Mystery (un)Solved
Sadly, Flora couldn’t clear up the mystery surrounding her disappearance. She suffers from dementia and doesn’t remember anything in the last 42 years. “We really don’t know the circumstances of why or how she disappeared,” detective Morgan said. But they did have more clues, Flora’s caregiver Mbuva got bits of her background. He says Flora told him she came from a bad marriage, and that her husband had been abusive. That she had grown up in Yonkers and that the main thing that characterizes Flora is this one phrase: ‘none of your business.’
Sullivan County has officially closed the case, they confirmed Flora Harris was indeed Flora Stevens. “It is not too often that you get to solve a 42-year-old missing person case,” Sheriff Mike Schiff said in a press release. But can they go back to the way things were 42 years ago?