THE SECOND TEENAGER
Last year, long before police had publicly revealed anything at all about Paul Rowles or his red Bronco, Pat Sessions got an email from a woman. She started by asking forgiveness for what she was about to tell him.
In 1989, when she was just 16, the woman was living with her mother in Gainesville. Her parents had divorced, and her father lived in a small town several miles north. Her father had just gone home to recover from minor surgery, and early that evening she decided to drive up to see him.
She had only been driving for a few months, and was a little nervous about driving at dusk. So when she rounded a curve in a rural wooded area about 10 miles north of Gainesville, she panicked at the sight of a blonde girl running into the middle of the road, waving her arms in obvious distress. She ran her car off the road into a ditch.
As she tried frantically to back her car out of the ditch, the young woman could see in her rearview mirror that the blond girl looked terrified. And from the woods, a man was running toward her. He seemed to be coming from a red truck that had been backed into the treeline.
Terrified, she managed to get her car up onto the road and roared away. By the time she got to her fathers house, she was ashamed of leaving. Should she call the police? Her father pooh-poohed the idea. Probably just a boyfriend-girlfriend dispute, he said. Nothing to worry about. She decided to do as her father suggested, and let it go.
The womans trip north took place on Feb. 10, 1989. Over the next few days, she saw, over and over, reports about the disappearance of Tiffany Sessions the night before. She wasnt stupid; the possibility that she had seen the kidnapped girl that everybody was looking for was plain to her. But how would she ever explain why she had just driven away and done nothing? The longer she waited, the more impossible it seemed to report what she had seen.
Yet over the years, her decision gnawed at her. Now in her mid-30s, with a daughter of her own, she understood more clearly than ever what Tiffanys parents were going through. And she was reaching out. I am beside you in your search for Tiffany, she said.
Pat Sessions gratefully put her in touch with police. She easily directed them to the sharp and distinctive curve on Racetrack Road where she went into the ditch. She passed a lie-detector test and even agreed to be hypnotized in hopes that more details would surface in her memory. But they didnt.
Did I believe her? Enough to take a team of cadaver dogs out there to search those woods, says Allen. But the dogs didnt get any hits. So theres not much more that we can do right now. Its a story we might be able to verify further if we find the Bronco.
But verification would also dash the belief with which Pat and Hillary Sessions have comforted themselves the past two decades or so that whatever happened to their daughter, it happened quickly. If Melissas story is true, it means that Tiffany was still alive at least 24 hours after her abduction.
