This Woman Was Found 42 Years After She Went Missing But She Has No Idea What Happened To Her

When he took her to her medical appointment that day, nothing seemed out of place. She was just a bit under the weather. He dropped her off at the doctor’s office and assured her that he would be back in an hour, knowing she’d be done by then. The hours flew by as he awaited his wife, but she never arrived.

Up until now, the 42-year-old case, with nothing to go on but a simple word and a photograph, remains closed, but it’s not near being solved.

Florence Stevens was a 36-year-old woman who was full of life and adventure. She worked at the Catskill Mountains Resort, but the flu got the better of her one night, the night of August 3rd, 1975. Her husband saw her for the last time. He drove her to her doctor’s appointment in Monticello, New York, but she was gone when he got there to pick her up.

Flora’s whereabouts were unknown, and a case was opened. The hunt to find her was in full force, with detectives searching the entire area for her and clues behind her strange disappearance. However, nobody could figure out what had happened to her that night, and the case eventually went cold.

The detectives would never have suspected that the case would be reopened nearly half a decade later in 2017. A senior investigator with the New York State Police named Yan Solomon stumbled upon something. Was it possible that his discovery could give him answers to a case he never knew existed? They had found the skeletal remains of a woman, and Yan desperately needed to identify the body.

It was his next thought that had him rushing to his phone. Solomon called the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office and asked to speak to a detective. The woman whose remains they found was buried near the Catskill Mountains Resort, and he was determined to find out who she was. However, his progress looked grim. Since nearly 70,000 women over the age of 18 go missing in the United States each year, it would have been an impossible quest to discover who she was.

But then they came up with a brilliant idea. In January of 2016, there were a total of 21,894 active cases of women who had gone missing in the U.S. Some of those cases had turned cold and had been put into storage, but those cases still remained alive. Solomon was well aware of the fact that he had a challenging task ahead of him. When he tasked his team and himself to go through the thousands of open cases that were there, he needed them to find similarities between the missing women and the body they found.

In the end, there were multiple possible identities for the woman, but it was one who stood out among the rest. It was yet another long shot, but Solomon decided to head to Sullivan County so he could begin his research. To simplify the investigation a bit, he decided to go on local searches that could possibly point him in the right direction and help him uncover the identity of the woman.

With his talents, he discovered that the body they found must have belonged to a woman from the area. One by one, he started searching for answers while in Sullivan County. Solomon discovered that they had an open case that roughly matched the description of his victim. It was an old case, but it had questions arising in his mind. Could it be her?

The file dated back to 1975. It was older than expected and didn’t provide much information. There was something about it that just seemed to click. The case was handed over to the detectives in Sullivan County, and Detective Rich Morgan was assigned to it. His main goal was to take the cases of the two women and connect the dots between them.

During his investigations, he discovered the missing woman’s work ID, which showed that she was employed at the Catskill Mountains Resort, where the body of the woman they found was discovered. But that wasn’t the only thing he found. Detective Morgan had successfully connected the dots between the two women. He found that the body discovered in the cold case were linked in multiple ways.

He then started digging deeper into Flora Stevens and her life. After Flora went missing, her husband was actively trying to find her. He dropped her off at the doctor’s office and came to pick her up again, but she wasn’t there. From then on, her case was opened, but nobody could find any trace of her or any evidence left behind.

Ten years later, the case had died, along with her husband, or that’s what they thought. 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 Stevens’ social security number in Massachusetts. 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. 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 ago was now emerging itself into their lives.

Admittedly, this meant something was amiss. Was this an identity theft crime? 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 they introduced themselves, she swiftly did something that left the detectives gasping.

Flora took the picture and pointed at it. She said, “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.

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. She was able to recognize her own picture, but she could barely form intelligible sentences or communicate with people.

However, there was something else the police showed her that she did immediately recognize. According to reports, when investigators showed her old pictures of the Concord Hotel, Stevens lit up immediately. That was her former workplace.

There’s a reason for that. As a matter of fact, it’s a pretty common type of occurrence among Alzheimer’s disease patients. There seems to be no way of knowing what really happened to her during all those years due to Flora’s inability to communicate. We really don’t know the circumstances of why or how she disappeared, Detective Morgan said.

But they did have more clues about what could have happened. Flora’s caregiver, Ambuva, got bits of her background. She says Flora told him she came from a bad marriage and that her husband had been abusive. Let’s not forget that Ambuva has extensive experience working with people with Alzheimer’s disease. She knows how this type of patient behaves and how to read them.

But what was Flora hiding? What exactly was she escaping from? We may never know for sure. 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.