One day, about a half-century ago, William Heiser Jr came
home from boarding school to find that his mother was gone. His father, William
Sr, a former police officer, told him and his sister that their mother had
walked out.
اضافة اعلان
“He just said she just packed up her stuff and left,” Heiser
said, even though some of her clothes and belongings were still in their house
in Philadelphia.
Heiser, 68, said he figured that his parents had grown apart
or divorced. Sometimes, he wondered if his mother had been upset at him and his
sister. As the years went on, the disappearance of his mother, Marie Petry
Heiser, became more painful, as Heiser and his sister questioned why she never
called or wrote. When they asked their father where she was, he would tell them
he didn’t know.
“‘I haven’t heard; I don’t where she’s at,’” the elder
Heiser would tell them, the son recalled. “We had no reason to question him
because we hadn’t heard neither.”
Now, the long mystery of Marie Heiser’s disappearance has
been solved — at least in part.
This past week, police announced that Marie Heiser was the
victim of a homicide and that her remains had been discovered more than 40
years ago, in June 1977, by a teenager who was biking home in a wooded area of
Townsend, Delaware, about 105km south of the Heisers’ home in Philadelphia.
Those remains had never been identified, but they were
recently connected to Heiser through DNA technology that traced her family tree
back to her children. The police said they were continuing to investigate how she
had been killed and had not identified a suspect.
Heiser, who was 50 when she died, was never reported
missing, and the elder William Heiser died in 2006. The police said his
explanation that Marie Heiser had left the family was one of many questions they
were investigating.
“We’re looking into every aspect of the case and, trust me,
that has not passed us,” said Master Cpl. Michel Eckerd of the New Castle
County Police Department in Delaware.
The younger William Heiser said he was certain that his
father had nothing to do with his mother’s disappearance.
“He would be the last person that would ever hurt anybody,”
said Heiser, who followed his father into law enforcement and is retired from
the Volusia County Sheriff’s Department in Florida. “He was a saint — took care
of his family, never raised his voice or hands or argued or anything.”
Marie Heiser was a homemaker and a part-time employee at the
former Ashbourne Country Club in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s, the
police said. Eckerd said he hoped someone in the public who knew her or the
family would come forward with information.
“She was very involved in the community in Philadelphia,” he
said.
Heiser said he remembered going to the Jersey Shore and
strolling along the boardwalk with his mother.
“She took care of us, and we had good times when I was
smaller,” he said. “She was just a good person.”
William Heiser Sr. was a member of the Philadelphia Police
Department’s Highway Patrol from the 1950s until the early 1960s, the police
said. The patrol was known for performing thrill shows in stadiums and arenas,
and Heiser had to leave the force after being seriously injured while
rehearsing for a show, police said.
He went on to work as a truck driver and moved to South
Daytona Beach, Florida, in the late 1970s, police said.
In June 1977, the New Castle County Police responded to the
discovery of a woman’s remains in the Townsend area. The Delaware medical
examiner determined at the time that the woman was the victim of a homicide,
and police conducted an extensive investigation.
But authorities could not identify her or obtain any leads,
police said. The case went cold, as fingerprints and dental records failed to
turn up any matches.
Then, in 2008, investigators extracted a DNA profile from
the remains. But, police said, the DNA failed to lead to a match after it was
entered it into a national database.
In February 2017, police sent the sample to a Virginia
company, Parabon NanoLabs, where a forensic artist, Thom Shaw, used the sample
to create a sketch of the victim. The lab also mapped her potential family
tree.
In 2019, a police officer in Montgomery County, Maryland,
Steven Smugeresky, took over the ancestry research and worked tirelessly to
develop leads on the identity of the remains, police said. The New Castle
County Police followed up on those leads and obtained DNA samples from possible
relatives.
Heiser said he got a call about two months ago from an
investigator who asked him for a DNA sample and explained, “We think we might
have found your mother’s remains.”
“It was a shock to us,” he said. “You’re never expecting a
phone call like that, ever.”
A few weeks later, he said, police called him again to say
the remains had been conclusively identified.
“You’re thinking, ‘Well, as horrible as this story is,
there’s some closure,’” he said.
But the discovery has also raised more questions, he said,
about who might have killed his mother.
“Before, we wondered where our mother was,” he said. “Now,
we’re wondering what happened to our mother. So one door closes, another
opens.”
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