I have just spent over three hours reading all of these threads and Missie, what a wonderful thing you’re doing keeping Deanna’s story in the public eye like this! It must be so frustrating that while you’ve managed to find out so much in the past two years, you still don’t have an answer. I really hope you get it one day soon because you really deserve it. Everyone should have someone like you in their lives, and Deanna is so lucky to have you as a sister.
The thing that makes me angry about this is the lack of action from the police until you started pushing them in 2007, Missie. It shouldn’t take a relative demanding answers to finally prompt them to look for some who was 13 when they went missing in the middle of the night with two men. By not doing anything at the time, they’ve lost so much possible evidence, like witnesses who would no longer remember that night after 18 years but who might have seen Deanna or the brown car, the two men at the time. And I can’t believe they haven’t finished the age progression photo for you either, because that could be vital in someone today recognizing her!
Over the two years or so these threads having been here, a lot of people have mentioned looking at high school records for graduates that could be Deanna. In regards to her finishing high school someplace else…who would she be living with for starters? In my experience you need to be able to prove you have an address in the area with something like a electricity bill to enroll in a high school. How could she have done this? Who would be supporting her with food, clothes, books etc.?
I find it very strange that she should use her real name in the 1995 LE encounter, especially in Texas, the state where she went missing. If I had runaway I would automatically assume that by giving some sort of LE agent my real name they could and would do a simple search and it would pull up a missing persons report that I’d assume would have been made about me. Of course maybe this is what happened and that’s the real reason why Deanna was no longer listed as a missing person in 1995, but shouldn’t that have been recorded somewhere?
Although we already know the tattoos are very dubious, would Deanna really get Merryfield tattooed on her neck? If she’d tried so hard to disappear from everyone she knew, why would she have gotten something so…well, so obvious tattooed in such a visible place.
I’m honestly not actually this pessimistic, but I just want to offer some counter-arguments to some of these things. Obviously it is better to be safe and check everything rather than just making assumptions that Deanna would change her name, not go to high school etc. I really wish that Bekki and Deanna had had the chance to talk that night before your uncle came out and Deanna took off. It would have told us whether she had been planning to leave that night or if it was a sudden thing, because she could have wanted to say goodbye to Bekki as they were so close. And Missie, I just want to ask one question. If Deanna ran away, would she think that someone would report it at the time and actively look for her or would she assume, perhaps because of your mom not being particular active in her life at that time, that nobody would look especially hard? I know your grandma reported her as missing, I only ask because if she wasn’t worried about someone finding her or recognizing her name, she might not have bothered to change her name completely.
