News reports on Heuermann’s arrest brought back memories for former Erie County Undersheriff Richard T. Donovan and his former administrative assistant, Marilynn Calhoun-Allen.
In interviews with The Buffalo News, they both recalled the anguished calls they received in 2009 from Lynn Barthelemy, the missing woman’s mother, after her daughter vanished.
Lynn Barthelemy was “extremely upset, very frustrated” and convinced that something terrible had happened to her daughter, but she said police agencies were skeptical because her daughter had worked as a prostitute, Donovan recalled.
“She told me she had called the New York City police and other police agencies and nobody would take her seriously. Nobody would even take a missing person’s report,” Calhoun-Allen said. “I told her, my boss was out to lunch, and that he’d call her when he got back. She said, ‘No, he won’t. Nobody calls me back.’ I told her, ‘He will.’ ”
Barthelemy’s mother was “crying and sobbing, and it really hurt me to hear that,” Calhoun-Allen said. “I’m a mom, too, and I could only try to imagine what she was going through.”
Attorney Steven M. Cohen, who represented the Barthelemy family, told The News in 2011 that New York City police had a policy at the time of not investigating missing persons for 10 days and that because Barthelemy worked as a “hooker,” detectives would not be assigned to the case.
Donovan remembers talking to Barthelemy’s mother and quickly realizing that her fears were genuine. “I was our liaison with NYPD and I had some friends in their Intelligence Unit,” the retired undersheriff said. “I called them, and to their credit, they took it very seriously, and immediately contacted the mother.”
In the summer of 2009, a 15-year-old Buffalo girl received disturbing phone calls from a man who taunted her about her missing older sister.
buffalonews.com