Woman who was missing for more than 60 years is found 'alive and well' decades after vanishing without a trace

Daily Mail​

04-05-2025

A missing mum-of-two has been found 'alive and well' nearly 63 years after she first disappeared.
Audrey Backeberg left behind a husband and two children in what was is said to have been an abusive home when she disappeared in July 1962.
Now 82, she has been rediscovered outside of Wisconsin where she had lived, Sauk County Sheriff's Office said.
Six decades earlier, Ms Backeberg went to pick up her salary and hitchhiked to Wisconsin's capital city Madison with her 14-year-old babysitter.
This was only days after a criminal complaint had been filed against her husband, the Wisconsin Missing Persons Advocacy organisation said.
They caught a bus to Indianapolis, Indiana, before the teenager became nervous and decided to go home.
She was the last person to see Ms Backeburg, then 20, as she walked towards another bus stop.
Relatives insisted that the young mum would never abandon her children while her husband passed a polygraph test, presuming his innocence.
Despite years of investigators desperately trying to track her down, it was a review of the cold case earlier this year by a detective that led him to discovering Ms Backeberg's whereabouts.
Detective Isaac Hanson re-interviewed several witnesses and poured over all the evidence - but in the end it was her sister's Ancestry.com account that was the missing piece in tracking Ms Backeberg down.
Using their available death records and census reports, he was able to find out her address.
He called the local sheriff's department and asked them to 'pop in' on her.
'I had high hopes; there wasn't a certainty that we would know it was her,' he said.
Ten minutes later, she phoned Detective Hanson and they spoke for 45 minutes.
The detective has promised to keep their conversation private but did not rule out her leaving because of marital issues.
Though he added why it was unclear she had stayed away for so long.
After going over the cold case, Detective Isaac Hanson said he 'had high hopes; there wasn't a certainty that we would know it was her' when he found her address
'I think she just was removed and, you know, moved on from things and kind of did her own thing and led her life,' he said.
'She sounded happy. Confident in her decision. No regrets.'
The police have decided to leave the woman be and have concluded that the disappearance 'was not the result of any criminal activity or foul play'.
The startling discovery comes only months after a British woman was similarly rediscovered decades after she first disappeared - only 80 miles from her house.
Sheila Fox - a 16-year-old from Coventry - vanished in March 1972, leaving her family desperately worried.
She was apparently intending, as was normal in the 1970s, to leave school at 16 which would have happened in July 1972.
The precise circumstances of what prompted her to run away from home remain unclear though the accepted version of events among members of her wider family is that she had embarked upon a relationship with an older man and her parents disapproved - or she feared that they would if they found out.
According to her cousin Kevin Fox, the family story was that she had 'run off with the insurance man, the man from The Pru.' ('The man from the Pru', short for Prudential, was a popular insurance advertising slogan at the time Sheila vanished.)
Her movements immediately after leaving Coventry are not clear. But what is clear is that if Sheila hadn't run away because she 'got in trouble' - as the expression for unplanned pregnancies at the time had it - she soon would be.
Just 16 months after disappearing, Sheila gave birth to a son Robert, who turned out to be her only son, in July 1973.
Rob's birth certificate shows he was fathered by a man called John Foster, who is described as barman from Enfield, north London.
By that time Sheila had changed her surname to Foster, suggesting that Sheila and John had married.
Teenage mum Sheila remained estranged from her parents and siblings at this point and would remain so for another decade or so - before herself making contact again. Or at least trying to.
'She got back in touch with her family in the 1980s,' recalled Kevin, 75, who still lives in Coventry. 'But by then the whole family had moved to Canada.'
The precise details of what happened when she tried to get back in touch are unclear but it's believed that word reached the Fox family in Canada and the whole notion that Sheila was missing was laid to rest at this point - but apparently no one got around to informing West Midlands Police that they were back in contact.
It is also unclear what happened to her relationship with John Foster, but by 1983 Sheila had married divorced father-of-two Jack Thorpe, who is seven years her senior, taking his surname, as did her son, Rob.
Jack, a chauffeur, had grown up in north-west London and it's thought the couple were living in the area at this time and subsequently.
Certainly from 2003, they were in a flat just off London's North Circular Road in Cricklewood.
Then in 2015, Sheila and Jack Thorpe bought a flat in Watford, where they still live. Rob, now 51 and himself also married, lives around the corner from his mother and her husband in the Hertfordshire commuter town. He works as a lorry driver.
When approached by MailOnline, Sheila said: 'It all happened a long time ago, I've moved on, it's all in the past. It's been a misunderstanding and I don't want to say any more.'