Page 19 of Dead Man's Hollow
DIANA: Not really. I figured she’d had too much to drink and was sleeping it off somewhere or that she’d spent the night at a friend’s house. But we knew she was going to be in trouble with our parents for not at least calling. They were still asleep, so Amy started calling Heather’s friends, looking for her. Nobody knew where she was. Then our parents woke up.
MAISY: And you told them?
DIANA: No. Mom made a big breakfast, French toast, sausage patties, orange juice. When the food was ready, she sent Kristy upstairs to tell Heather to get out of bed already. Kristy came back down and said Heather wasn’t in her room. Before Amy could explain, the doorbell rang. I remember thinking it must be Heather, thinking maybe she’d lost her keys in the hollow. But it was Rich.
Rich Marino and Amy are now married and have been for over twenty years. At the time of Heather’s disappearance, Amy and Rich were just friends, classmates. Rich was also at the party in Dead Man’s Hollow. You’ll hear from Amy and Rich Marino later this season.
MAISY: Why did Rich come to your house?
DIANA: When Amy was looking for Heather, after the police showed up, she ran into Rich. His older brother was on the force, so I guess he knew he wouldn’t get picked up or arrested if he was still in the woods. So he told her to go home and promised to look for Heather. He came over on Saturday morning to tell Amy he hadn’t been able to find her and to see if she’d come home.
MAISY: Why not just call?
DIANA: I don’t know. You’d have to ask Rich. If I had to guess, it was an excuse to see Amy. He had a girlfriend, but everybody knew that relationship had just about run its course. I guess he saw an in with Amy. (Pause.) I don’t mean that the way it sounded. I don’t think it was calculated like that.
MAISY: Of course not. So, he wasn’t worried about Heather either?
DIANA: You have to understand, things were different then.
Diana’s right. It may be hard for younger listeners to imagine now, but in the mid-90s, children weren’t supervised the way they are today. That goes double for teenagers. A sixteen-year-old staying out all night after a party, would certainly be in trouble when she returned home, would probably get grounded. But her absence would be unlikely to cause a panic the way it would now.
MAISY: Did Rich have any information?
DIANA: No. He did say Jimmy would put the word out on the police force and ask everyone to keep an eye out for her—unofficially.
MAISY: But your parents didn’t file a police report, and there was no missing child alert sent out, right?
DIANA: Right. Not then. But that afternoon, our whole family drove over to Dead Man’s Hollow to look for Heather. I don’t know why, to be honest. It was obvious she wouldn’t still be there. I guess we just wanted todosomething.
MAISY: Did you find anything?
DIANA: What you’d expect. The fire circles, lots of empty bottles and cans, cigarette butts, junk food wrappers. It was clear there’d been a party, but none of the litter suggested anything bad had happened in the woods (voice breaking).
MAISY: Do you think something bad happened in the woods?
DIANA: Don’t you? It’s been thirty years and no one’s seen my sister. Something happened to her that night.
MAISY: At some point law enforcement was officially notified. Do you know when that happened?
DIANA: I think my dad called the police on Sunday morning when she still hadn’t turned up. I know they sent the dogs out into the woods on Memorial Day. And the FBI showed up at our house the day after that. By then, by Tuesday, she’d been missing for more than seventy-two hours.
MAISY: How did Heather’s disappearance affect your family?
DIANA: About how you’d expect. It destroyed my parents. The first weeks were sheer hell—waiting, holding our breath every time the phone rang, and plastering the telephone poles and bulletin boards all over town with her picture. Amy and Kristy couldn’t focus in school. But at least we had hope then. We still thought then she’d come back. She’d give some lame explanation, get grounded, and we’d all move on with our lives.
MAISY: But she didn’t. When did the reality set in that she wasn’t coming back?
DIANA: I’m not sure it ever really did, not fully. But by the end of July, when we still had no leads, no sighting, nothing, things got bad. Our dad withdrew, started working a lot of overtime and going to the bar with his friends most nights, and mom … today she’d be diagnosed as clinically depressed, but back then she just went into her bedroom and basically didn’t come back out. She quit her job and stopped taking care of Kristy. She didn’t cook. She didn’t clean. She just sat in her room, crying and smoking.
I was about to go back to school for my junior year and Amy was getting ready for her freshman year. Dad sat us down at the beginning of August and told us one of us needed to stay back to help mom. Amy offered to right away, but I said no. She had to go, and I’d stay. I was afraid if she didn’t start her freshman year she’d never go. But I could take a leave of absence for a year until things got back to normal (bitter laugh). So that’s what we did. Dad didn’t even go with me and Kristy to drop Amy off at college. He stayed home with Mom in case Heather showed up.
MAISY: And you lived at home that whole next year?
DIANA: Right. In the autumn of 1995, she’d been missing for fifteen months, and I did go back to school. By then Kristy was ten, and she was better able to take care of herself. Amy, Heather, and I, we all started staying home alone when we were ten. Besides, Mom still hadn’t gone back to work, so Kristy wasn’t going to be alone, anyway.
But I guess after I left Mom focused all her anxiety on Kristy. She was basically a prisoner in that house until she graduated and moved out of the house. They were paranoid because of what happened with Heather, and they smothered Kristy as a result. Not that I blame them. They lost their daughter. We lost our sister. It changed everything.
MAISY: Do you have a message for listeners who might know something about what happened that night in Dead Man’s Hollow?
