A mother seeks answers in Brockton
By Maureen Boyle, Enterprise staff writer
Dorothy MacLean will spend Mother's Day surrounded by a son, a daughter and two grandchildren. But it will be the child who is absent who still haunts her.
Fourteen years after her eldest child, Jennifer Lynn Fay, disappeared near the family's Emerson Avenue apartment in Brockton, MacLean battles to keep the investigation active and braces for how it might end.
"In my heart, I always felt something happened to her," said MacLean, who now lives in Rockland. "I don't like to think that. I would rather have thought she ran away."
Police initially thought Jennifer, then 16, had run away when she did not return home Nov. 14, 1989, after partying with friends.
It is not what investigators believe today.
Brockton and state police detectives reopened the investigation 2 1/2 years ago, traveled to two states tracking leads and talked with acquaintances and friends who knew the teenager or may have been with her the night she disappeared.
Based on information gathered so far, investigators have some suspicions as to what happened to Jennifer 14 years ago.
Those suspicions, if true, will not lead to a happy ending.
Authorities are eyeing two different spots in the Brockton area where Fay's body may be. But the harsh winter, coupled by budget concerns and imprecise descriptions of the locations, have hindered an extensive search.
"It is frustrating for the family," said Brockton Detective Michael Damiano, one of the investigators. "They want to know what happened."
Dorothy MacLean said she tried to convince herself 14 years ago the police were right, that her daughter was a runaway who would return.
In her heart, she knew her daughter did not take off. She said she suspected the worst.
"It was out of character for her," MacLean said. "She would not leave and not call all these years."
Statistics show MacLean is right.
According to the National Runaway Switchboard, nearly 40 percent of all runaways return home within three days. Another 21.8 percent return home between four and seven days later. Only 5.4 percent wait six months before going home.
"Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother's Day she wouldn't have stayed away," MacLean said.
MacLean has spent the past 14 years getting her daughter's photograph on fliers, advertising supplements featuring missing children and Web sites.
The posters feature a photograph of Jennifer at age 16 and an age-progressed photo of what she could look like today.
Jennifer Lynn Fay would have turned 30 this past Christmas.
Yvette Churchill was 12 the day her sister disappeared. Jennifer was watching Yvette and brother, Jim, then 4, at the family's Brockton apartment and called a 17-year-old cousin to come over to take over baby-sitting duties.
"I remember her calling up my cousin to come over and baby-sit so she could go to a party down the street," Yvette said.
Jennifer was in a good mood that night as she left the apartment recalled Yvette, now 26 and the mother of two.
Yvette did not know it would be the last time she would see her sister.
For the first few years after Jennifer disappeared, her mother would buy birthday and Christmas presents for her, a sign of hope that she would return.
Then MacLean stopped.
"It didn't make any sense to anymore," she said.
On the bookcase shelf in MacLean's home sits a portrait of Jennifer, a yellow ribbon draped atop the frame and a tiny plastic statute of the Virgin Mary from the teen's First Communion to the side.
It is a reminder of Jennifer's absence and fuels the family's determination to learn what happened to her.
"Someone knows," Yvette said.
MacLean said she hopes someone will be able to provide police with the key piece of information so her daughter can be found.
"Even if I couldn't find who did it, just having some kind of closure finding her would help," MacLean said.
An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing each year, a 2002 study by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found. Of that number, 58,200 are abducted by non-family members. There are 115 cases of long-term abductions, known as stereotypical kidnappings, with 56 percent of victims found alive and 40 percent found dead.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited children reports that finding missing children quickly is key in saving lives.
Seventy-four percent of abducted children who are murdered are dead within three hours of abduction, the center reports.
"It doesn't take very long to find a victim who has been taken away. The longer you wait, the harder it is to find the victim," Damiano said.
He said when Jennifer disappeared, police did not search as aggressively for missing teens considered runaways as they do today. That thinking has changed today, but it does not make the search for Jennifer easier.
"There has to be somebody who knows where she is and what happened," Damiano said.
MacLean said she hopes that person will come forward soon.
"I was hoping this Mother's Day, it would be over," she said.
Maureen Boyle can be reached at
mboyle@enterprisenews.com
http://www.whereisjennifer.org/jennifer/about.html
