http://www.nptelegraph.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19500695&BRD=377&PAG=461&dept_id=601696&rfi=6
Anguish of not knowing lasts decades for families
04/19/2008
The worst part is not knowing.
In the nearly 43 years since Jacqueline Rains Kracman and Melvin Uphoff disappeared from their Nebraska homes, their families have been seeking answers.
Where are they? Did they leave willingly? Did they leave together? Are they still alive?
The missing Nebraskans, their families and their ordeal are the subject of a new documentary film, Closure: Can It Really Be Possible?
Family members recently attended a private screening to see the results of months of interviews, research and editing by filmmaker Stacy Heatherly of Papillion.
Heatherlys film takes viewers through the questions the families have been facing for years.
Michele Sells, Uphoffs daughter, was just 2 years old when her father disappeared in the fall of 1965. In the film, her mother, Myrna Dey, details the last day they spent with him.
The Rising City, Neb., man treated his children to a family day filled with pheasant hunting, roller skating and lunch in nearby Shelby, Neb. Dinner that evening was at the home of Uphoffs parents.
That night, when Dey was getting the children ready for bed, Uphoff told her he was going to Shelby for beer.
He was 31. His family never saw him again.
Kracman, 18, disappeared around the same time as Uphoff after telling her family that she was going to Glenwood, Iowa, for a weekend with her roommate.
Kracman, who was separated from her husband, left her children with her family. As far as the family can tell, she never went to Glenwood.
They never saw her again. Kracmans car was found outside her home in Columbus, Neb.
In the film, Leo Meister, who was Butler County sheriff in
1965, is the first one to mention rumors that Kracman and Uphoff had been having an affair.
At the time, people thought they had left together. Uphoff took only his coin collection and his car; Kracman took most of her clothes. Uphoffs 1954 Oldsmobile was never recovered. He was declared legally dead in the 1970s.
For years, the disappearances werent discussed within the Rains and Uphoff families.
But Sells has spent much of her adult life compiling information on the disappearances and trying to find Uphoff and Kracman.
There is no consensus among family members about what happened. Some think the couple ran off together; others think they were harmed. They all say answers would have been easier to come by if the disappearances had been thoroughly investigated in 1965.
I really dont think there was an investigation, said Sharon Henggeler, Kracmans sister. If there was, it didnt amount to much.
The film has two goals, Heatherly said: to tell the story of Uphoff and Kracman, and to bring awareness to the (Project Jason's) Campaign for the Missing, an effort to establish protocols for dealing with adult missing persons cases.
The campaign has been spearheaded by Kelly Jolkowski, an Omaha woman whose 19-year-old son, Jason, disappeared almost seven years ago.
The protocols being promoted were drafted by the U.S. Department of Justice.
States need step-by-step instructions on handling missing persons cases involving adults, Jolkowski said, because they arent always taken as seriously as missing children cases.
Such laws have been adopted in at least 11 states. Jolkowski hopes to see one passed in Nebraska.
Also, law enforcement agencies sometimes overlook available resources, such as the Center for Human Identification, a federally funded lab in Texas that processes DNA of family members of the missing and enters the results in a national database for free.
The Nebraska State Patrols cold case unit investigated the Uphoff and Kracman cases a few years ago at the urging of Sells and others. The patrol has now turned the matter back to the Butler County Sheriffs Office, Sells said.
State Patrol Sgt. Robert Frank, who investigated the disappearances and who appears in the documentary, did not return calls requesting comment.
Theres nothing anywhere to show that a homicide occurred, Frank says in the film.
According to the documentary, law enforcement officials did not interview Kracmans husband, Dennis Kracman, or her roommate, Sally Fisher, in 1965. Melvin Uphoff was Dennis Kracmans boss at a service station in Rising City.
It wasnt until years later, when the State Patrol did its cold case investigation, that Dennis Kracman and Fisher were questioned. Those interviews werent fruitful.
Frank urged the families to accept the idea that Uphoff and Jacqueline Kracman left.
They need to come to terms with it and accept it, he said.