Lengthy article, many details..
Many mysteries remain about the woman who was found dead in a Fairfax County Cemetery in 1996, but one thing has just been resolved: her identity.
24ssports.com
''In an interview, Clough shared what the family knew about her sister, who essentially disappeared in the 1980s. She said Joyce Marilyn Meyer was born in July 1927, the eldest of three girls and two boys, and raised on a farm outside of Davenport, Iowa. Sommers attended Iowa State University and then moved to Los Angeles, where she got a job at Seventeen magazine and lived with an aunt, Clough said. “She was very creative and very smart. She was artistic,” Clough said.''
''Sommers then left Seventeen to teach second grade at a Catholic school in Los Angeles.
“It was difficult,” Clough said of her sister’s life as a teacher in the 1950s. “She had 60 second graders and had no educational background. She was very meticulous and stayed up into the early hours planning classes.”
It was around this time, Clough said, that Sommers began seeing a psychiatrist. “Psychoanalysis back then was all about blaming the family, blaming the mother. It kind of alienated her from the family.” Clough said her sister was first married around 1959 and later divorced.
Sometime in the 1960s, Clough said, her mother traveled to California for a 24-hour confrontation session with Sommers, during which Sommers accused the mother of being a terrible parent. “It was just awful,” Clough said. “It broke my mother’s heart.”
Clough continued to write letters to her older sister, but Sommers rarely revealed much when she replied. Sommers moved to Seattle and married James E. Sommers, but did not tell her family about the event. Police found a divorce certificate showing that Joyce and James Sommers divorced in 1977 and had no children.
Sommers then moved to Tucson. “She had a trailer at a trailer park,” Clough said. “She wasn’t very happy in that situation.” In the 1980s, her siblings visited Sommers in Tucson, where she asked the family to build her a home, Clough said. The family couldn’t do that and Sommers was unhappy, Clough said.
“After that visit, she vanished from the face of the earth,” Clough said. Her family never heard from her again.
The siblings tried to track her down in the early 1990s, Clough said. Her late brother, Larry Meyer, traveled to the trailer in Tucson, but it had been abandoned, Clough said. In a refrigerator in the trailer, the brother found four copies of a book called The Target Child, which Sommers appears to have written and self-published, about an allegedly traumatic childhood. Clough said she doesn’t believe her parents were abusive or that any of her siblings suffered growing up.''