The Daily Populous Monday May 5th, 2025 night edition
Authored by bbc.com and submitted by bendubberley_

Woman missing since 1962 found 'alive and well'

The sheriff said she was living outside Wisconsin, but did not provide any further details.

In a statement, Sauk County Sheriff Chip Meister said Ms Backeberg's disappearance "was by her own choice and not the result of any criminal activity or foul play".

Audrey Backeberg was 20 years old when she disappeared from her home in the small city of Reedsburg on 7 July 1962.

A woman missing for nearly 63 years has been found alive and well after the case into her disappearance was reviewed, police in the US state of Wisconsin said.

According to Wisconsin Missing Persons Advocacy, a non-profit group, Ms Backeberg was married and had two children when she went missing.

The group said that days before she went missing, Ms Backeberg, now 82, had filed a criminal complaint against her husband, whom she had married at the age of 15, alleging he had beaten her and threatened to kill her.

On the day she disappeared, she left home to pick up her pay cheque from the woollen mill where she worked.

The couple's 14-year-old babysitter told police she and Ms Backeberg then hitchhiked to Madison, Wisconsin's state capital, and from there caught a bus to Indianapolis, Indiana, about 300 miles (480km) away.

The babysitter then became nervous and wanted to return home, but Ms Backeberg refused and was last seen walking away from the bus stop.

The Sauk County Sheriff's Office said investigators pursued numerous leads in the case but it had gone cold before a comprehensive review of old case files was carried out earlier this year.

The detective who solved the case, Isaac Hanson, told local news station WISN that an online ancestry account belonging to Ms Backeberg's sister was crucial in helping locate the missing woman.

Det Hanson said he contacted local sheriffs where Ms Backeberg now lives, and spoke to her on the phone for 45 minutes.

"I think she just was removed and, you know, moved on from things and kind of did her own thing and led her life," he told WISN. "She sounded happy. Confident in her decision. No regrets."

Frozboz on May 4th, 2025 at 21:02 UTC »

My father abandoned his wife of 6 years and 3 small children in 1964. Literally went out for cigarettes and never came home. The act completely wrecked the family: the kids were adopted out to other family members and the mom was never the same again.

2 years later in 1966 he met my mother, settled down under an assumed name, and had my sister in 1968 and me in 1973. He took my birth certificate and created a new identity for himself (I never got a SS card until I was 12, and officially I am "Junior" even though my birth certificate says otherwise). We found this out after his death in 2019, when I found an envelope addressed to me only, with 3 fake birth certificates, 3 sets of legit Social Security cards, 3 identities and a bunch of still-cryptic papers no one quite knows what to make of.

No one knew. We got in contact with our half siblings. They are lovely people who have come to peace with the whole situation and are pretty well adjusted. My sister and I are not and feel constant guilt over it.

Ralife55 on May 4th, 2025 at 18:33 UTC »

My grandmother effectively did this to her first two kids. her first husband was wealthy and influential. He was also abusive and controlling of her. He told her if she divorced him she would never see her children again. She left anyway and she wouldn't see her kids again until she was eighty years old after he died and her kids found out she was still alive (the husband told them she died).

The way she put it, the kids would have had a dead mother whether she stayed or not, so she chose to leave and live with the hope she would see them again one day instead of staying and either being killed by him or killing herself.

Edit: I'm seeing a lot of comments under this arguing over different scenarios so I'll add more context to the story to help clear things up.

My grandmother married this man when she was sixteen and he was nearly thirty. She had her first son when she was seventeen and the second at eighteen. The oldest was three when she left.

Her husband was a literal piller of the community type. Very wealthy, from a well-to-do family, very involved in local and state politics due to his business connections. Donated to the local police department to keep them on side, had a team of lawyers at his disposal, the works.

Meanwhile my grandmother was from a poor family of nine growing up in a rural community. They had nothing and her marriage to this man (who she met after she participated in a beauty pageant, of which he was one of the producers, and who asked to marry her mere months after said meeting) was seen as her and her family's way out of poverty.

From how she described it to me, she knew she could not leave and keep her kids. Everyone she knew was local and she couldn't risk hiding out with them, it was the 50's and she had no job experience, she knew if she tried to kidnap her children she would be tracked down, labeled insane and put away somewhere where she would never see her kids again. She knew she would lose a legal battle for custody given her husband's connections, and she also knew the cops wouldn't help because one night she did call them and when she told them what was happening and her address, they hung up on her. He apparently beat her the next night because his buddies at the station told him she called.

According to her, he never touched the kids, and she didn't think he ever would. What gave her that confidence, I don't know.

He granted her the divorce on the grounds she gave up custody, never contacted them again, never went public about what he did to her, and collaborated his story that he chose to divorce her due to her having a drinking problem and him not feeling safe with her around the kids.

To quote my grandmother as best as I can remember

"I thought about killing him and running away with them, stealing all the money I could from the house and starting over somewhere, but I knew I wouldn't get away with it, and my boys would end up living with his parents while I was thrown in jail. I had this mentality, despite everything, that the boys deserved to have at least one of us around, so I agreed and left. My family knew the truth, but we never let it get out out of fear of him coming after us. I've had to make a lot of hard decisions in my life, but leaving my boys with him was the hardest thing I've ever done. I wish I could say I did it completely out of selflessness, that it was all for them, but there was always a part of me. A small, small part, that was just relieved I was free of him forever".

She was so scared of him that when her sons contacted her over sixty years later the first thing she asked was if their father was still alive. He had died a month prior to pancreatic cancer, they had spent the better part of a year looking for her after their step mother told them the truth. After learning everything from their father, who apparently became very truthful in his last days. they had no anger towards my grandmother for what she did.

For their father's part, he never abused them though he was very much a tough love parent with them while they were growing up which had already left them with a strained relationship prior to all this coming to light. They grew up very well off, both going to Ivy League schools. I know the one went into biomedical engineering I can't remember what the other did.

They would only meet my grandmother a few times before she herself passed away a year later due to a head injury from a fall. I only met them once and it was at the funeral. I haven't spoken to them since and neither has anybody else in the family as far as I know. Not due to hostility but simply due to us all having our own families and lives.

I hope that helps clear any questions up.

fxkatt on May 4th, 2025 at 18:24 UTC »

The group said that days before she went missing, Ms Backeberg, now 82, had filed a criminal complaint against her husband, whom she had married at the age of 15, alleging he had beaten her and threatened to kill her. On the day she disappeared, she left home to pick up her pay cheque from the woollen mill where she worked.

I'm wondering what happened to her two children from that very early marriage. Anyway, the story makes lots of sense... she just hitch-hikes out of town with her baby-sitter... they split up and go their own ways...Backeberg out of state and lost almost forever.