SPECIAL TO THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR / March 4, 2005
Audrey May Herron, with her husband Jeff, in happier times.; Photo: The whereabouts of Audrey May Herron remain a mystery to New York State investigators. Audrey May Herron's picture has appeared on billboards, shopping carts and national television shows including Montel Williams and Court television. Her friends organized searches and rallies, consulted psychics and private investigators, raised a $20,000 US reward and posted her picture widely in an effort to find out what became of the 32-year-old nurse and young mother of three. New York State police have chased down more than 1,000 leads and covered every foot of the highway from the nursing home where she was last seen in Catskill, N.Y., on Aug. 29, 2002, to her home in Freehold about 18 kilometres away. They used divers, tracking dogs and helicopters as they scoured the rugged terrain between the nursing home and her residence. Despite the massive exposure, there hasn't been a single confirmed sighting of the missing woman or the 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee she was driving when she left the facility at about 11:30 p.m. that evening. Her friends and family have now pretty much exhausted all their investigative avenues and hope of ever finding her alive. Herron had just finished the evening shift at the Columbia-Green Long Term Care facility and had phoned her husband, Jeff, earlier in the evening to say she'd just gotten a raise. She seemed anxious to be back home with him and their two young children. (Her oldest child was in Florida). According to Jeff, who underwent a lie detector test, she never returned home and he has no idea what became of his wife. Her friends and family, who've had their hopes dashed hundreds of times before, aren't putting a lot of hope in the rash of recent reports that she may be in the Halton/Hamilton area. Since her picture appeared in The Spectator on Wednesday, more than a dozen people have phoned Halton Detective Andy Forde to say they've seen somebody who looked like her. He hasn't been able to confirm any of the leads, however. New York State investigators started turning their attention north of the border last October when somebody posted a message on the Internet claiming to be Audrey May Herron and living in Miami. The writer assured her family she was well and would return home. But she warned not to look for her because she'd simply move again. But when investigators traced the missive, they discovered it had been routed through Cogeco's Burlington-based e-mail system. If the sender was indeed Audrey Herron, it appeared she had jettisoned her husband and children and started a new life in Canada. But how good was the lead? Was it just another hoax or red herring by some Internet mischief maker? There had been bogus leads before. The missing woman's best friend, Marie Parker, said she would have been excited if the Canadian angle had come up a year ago. But after two and a half years, she's given up hope of ever finding her friend alive. She believes Herron was smart and resourceful enough to engineer her own disappearance. But she never would have left without her children who were "her whole world." At the time she disappeared, her youngest children were two and four years old and her other daughter -- from another relationship -- was 11. Her credit cards were never used, her Jeep was never seen and her last cheque remained uncashed after Aug. 29, 2002. To survive on the lam, she would have had to create a new identity and find another source of income. This would have been hard to do in a foreign country. "I don't believe Audrey made it past Friday evening (the night she disappeared)," Parker remarked. Since Herron's disappearance, Parker has dreamed up all kinds of innovative ways to keep the story alive in the media. She contacted prominent television personalities like Montel Williams and psychic sidekick Sylvia Brown and posted her picture on billboards and shopping carts. She also organized a 145-kilometre motorcycle run in her friend's honour. Ray Turk, 62, of Ravena, N.Y., is also skeptical about the latest lead and has little hope of ever seeing his daughter again. He also believes his daughter died shortly after she left the nursing home on Aug. 29, 2002, and has strong suspicions about what happened to her. "I gave up a lot of hope. It's not good what I'm thinking," he said. He said he first heard his daughter was missing when he received a telephone call from his son-in-law Jeff Herron at about 9:30 a.m., Aug. 30. Turk's wife then called police and alerted them for the first time about Audrey's disappearance. Turk is angry that he wasted valuable time by not notifying them right away on that Friday evening. Turk adds that he was among hundreds of foot searchers who meticulously scoured the road from the nursing home to the new house that his daughter and Jeff had just built on Jeff's father's golf course and resort in Freehold. But they didn't find a single shard of glass, skid mark or flake of paint to indicate she'd been in an accident. Shortly after he got the call from Jeff, Turk said he was shocked to find his daughter's purse, credit cards and cigarettes in the new house. New York State police in Catskill have never described Jeff as a suspect. But in early media reports, they suggested he wasn't entirely co-operative with investigators. He had agreed to undergo a polygraph examination which left some questions unanswered. When they asked to do a second test, however, he refused and retained a lawyer. In initial reports, Catskill detectives also said they were treating the case as a "homicide." Investigator Bill Fitzmaurice told The Spectator yesterday that the term "homicide" was used to show they were pulling out all stops to find out what happened to Audrey and haven't entirely ruled out an accident or that she left on her own. Asked about suspects, he replied: "No one in the case has been ruled out 100 per cent." But he played down earlier reports that Jeff had been reluctant to speak to police and was referring police inquiries to his attorney. "He's retained an attorney (on the advice of his family). It's not that he's not talking. It's not like he's shut the door," he pointed out. Fitzmaurice said investigators appealed to Halton police for help this week after Cogeco refused to tell them who had posted the message on the Internet. He said they considered getting a search warrant to obtain the information but the procedure was mired in international "red tape." The New York State police would have had to apply through diplomatic channels to appear before a judge in Canada to obtain a search warrant for the Cogeco records, which are protected under privacy legislation.
