I wonder why she would go through the motion of disposing of her cell phone and the I-Pass only to use credit cards at her stops in Rockford? In some instances she seems to be carefully covering her tracks and in others she's blindly leaving them.
Is anyone still investigating his disappearance?
This is very local to me and I can't believe I haven't heard of this little one before today. I saw his missing info by chance on a piece of mail this morning. How is it that a child can go missing and someone who lives <20 miles from his last known location didn't know he existed until 6 years later? It is so upsetting to me.
Timmothy would be 13 years old now. Most 13 year olds know how to navigate the internet pretty fluently. I would think that even if his name was changed and he had been moved elsewhere in the country, Timmothy would still remember enough from the first 6 years of his life to search himself online.
Thinking of you, sweet boy. I hope with all of my heart that you are safe.
I forget how I stumbled onto this one. But I have always held out hope that he was not killed by his mother, but rather handed off to some network of misguided folks who hide kids whose custody is either in dispute or granted solely to the opposite parent (usually a dad). This lines up with the note she left saying that no one (or the dad) would ever find the boy. Murder suicides don't generally hide bodies. What would be the point? Even with internet access, it is hard to assess the boy's state of mind or what he believes to be true about his father and other family members.
Agreed. While there's no trail that she 'handed him off', there is also reason to believe that he is not still alive. There was no weapon found, his blood was not found (besides the old spot in truck), his car seat is missing along with all his belongings and new toys. The two trips would cause me to lean toward a plan coordinated with someone else rather than a plan that only Mom needed to dispose of body.
Estimates can be made roughly from a the time of the last call around Sterling to her first appearance on a camera at around 8:00 I believe where she was seen buying crackers without Timmothy. Seven hours of drive time could've got her well into Iowa and back to Rockford area, as there were family ties/past in Iowa. Leaving Sterling, her phone was found on Rt 78 by Mt Carroll I believe, Stockton is only an hour from Sterling and about an hour from Rockford area...so she had a LOT of time do either drive more west to Iowa or North to Wisconsin....or just spend more time with her son.
I am so very sorry you are going through this and hope that you are safe.I just finished reading this thread and made a separate account in incognito mode to reply, for reasons that will be obvious.
Personally speaking, I am, much like many other people - 50/50 on whether she murdered Timmothy, or if she really did find one of the aforementioned underground networks to keep her safe. I wanted to give some of my thoughts regarding the latter, that might give some perspective, based on personal experience.Some of this really feels off to me - mainly regarding her relationship with her husband, and other people have also touched on the idea that it may have been an abusive relationship she felt she couldn't escape, and also wanted to keep her son safe from. I don't say that her husband did it, obviously he didn't, that's not the intent. This is more about the mentality that leads to that.
I'm actively in a near-decade long emotionally abusive relationship. It's a second marriage, and we have kids. I would never, ever harm my children, and I do what I can to distance them from the ugly things. However, I am relatively estranged from my family, I have no financial independence, nowhere to go, etc. It will take me a very, very long time to figure out how to even pay for a life for my family were we to escape. And of course the standard threats of suicide - and one other, that stood out to me about this case: the husband admits he threatened to get full custody. That's a familiar one, and the lies mine has come up with about what he'd say . . . it's ugly. No normal human being would threaten that as a control tactic, only an abuser would. Even in a fight over something else.
And let me tell you something - the fear is real it would be believed. They're good. These aren't your stereotype of a low-class abuser. An educated, intelligent one is a master manipulator. My partner posts all the time on Facebook and talks at his job about how much he loves me, compliments my looks etc. There isn't a person alive (except maybe one of our neighbors who can hear him screaming all the time, like, right now) who would step forward and say 'oh well, this is a man who abuses his wife!' The police would believe him, if I went missing, that our relationship was great. Everyone we know would back that up. Save the documentation I have hidden away of the things he's said and done to me, which would be hard to find - there's no evidence. If they interviewed the kids about our relationship, anything they'd have observed of him being a monster to me he'd be able to manipulate and explain as me being mentally ill and making them believe it. Or, another great abuser tactic - painting themselves as the abused one.
In my situation, I can't actually access any of the money we have to take a trip like she did. But if I had, I would have done so knowing I personally could not come home. I'd spend months, years being screamed at because he would assume I had been cheating, along with calling me a gold digger, accusing me of kidnapping, etc. The other difference is, even if I had access to such a network, I wouldn't dare pass my kids off for a MILLION reasons, but one major one is that I would always fear he would have them returned to him. And without me as a shield . . . I digress. If our situations are similar, Amy would have known there was no way she could come back from that trip, so it was certainly pre-planned.
I believe that Amy was probably involved in an emotionally abusive relationship. I believe she felt there was no other way out for herself than suicide - pride, nowhere to go, fear of the husband, etc. She knew that if she were to do that, there was no way for her to prevent her husband from getting custody, she couldn't leave Timmothy with a family member or so on.
But it still brings us back to that key - then what did she decide to do? Murder, or did she really find one of those networks? I really hope it was the latter, I really do. Certainly I may be projecting a bit, and I wouldn't ever abandon my children or harm them so the overall choice still baffles me. (The suicidal part doesn't. My kids keep me going, much of the time.)
I imagine if Timmothy is alive, once he comes of age and can access a DNA service and can have it done, we will have answers then.