A woman’s memory of self, but little else
New Yorker’s dementia veils what happened while missing for 42 years
MONTICELLO, N.Y. — The 78-year-old woman’s mind was clouded by dementia. But she recognized the brunette with a slight smile in the faded picture from the 1970s that detectives showed her.
“Me,” the woman uttered in a voice barely above a whisper.
The picture helped investigators visiting an assistedliving facility near Boston last month verify they had finally found Flora Stevens. She had been a $2.25-an-hour chambermaid at the grandest hotel in upstate New York’s Catskills when she was dropped off at a hospital one summer night in 1975 and vanished.
The discovery of a woman missing for 42 years drew widespread attention and news coverage, accompanied by a police photo of the smiling woman in a wheelchair with a teddy bear in her lap and flanked by the beaming detectives.
But the elation was mixed with mystery. Where did she go and what did she do all those years? Investigators put together some of the timeline, including stints at other care facilities.
“To be honest, I don’t think she ever really wanted to be found,” said Festus Mbuva, a former worker at the Boston-area facility who helped care for her for a decade. “You can tell something happened in her past that she didn’t want any part of.” Florence “Flora” Stevens was among the hundreds of hotel workers who once flooded into this lake-laden area north of New York City each summer. She worked for several summers at The Concord, a sprawling resort with more than 1,200 rooms. A Concord job application from 1975, signed “Mrs. Flora Stevens” in neat cursive, says she went to high school less than two hours away in Yonkers.
The man she listed as her husband, Robert Stevens, worked there, too. Police have not confirmed they were actually married.
On the evening of Sunday, Aug. 3, 1975, 36-year-old Flora Stevens was dropped off by Stevens at a small hospital a couple of miles from the hotel in Monticello. Two hours later, he came to pick her up. She was gone.
Authorities say they don’t know what she did once she was dropped off. But there was a bus station nearby, and she might have had some money that Sunday evening.
“She had just been paid, probably had a weekend full of tips in her pocket,” said Sullivan County sheriff’s Detective Rich Morgan.
Robert Stevens reported her missing soon after. Transient summer workers disappeared all the time. But Art Hawker, a sheriff’s detective in 1975, said he gave this case extra attention because with her last being seen by a companion, it raised “red flags.” The break did not come until September this year with the discovery of skeletal remains east of Monticello that matched Flora Stevens’ general characteristics. That turned out to be a false lead, but it led Morgan and Detective Sgt. Ed Clouse to cross-check more recently available databases that showed someone in Lowell, Mass., had Flora Stevens’ Social Security number and a similar name, Flora Harris.
Flora Harris had been at the Care-One facility in Lowell since 2001. She had a court-appointed guardian from New York state, which paid her bills. .
Mbuva said the woman rarely talked about her family other than to say she came from a bad marriage and her husband had been abusive.
Mbuva noted she never gave up much about herself. “Her favorite phrase was ‘none of your business.’ ”
While police were able to close the missing-person case, the prospects of finding out more are unclear.
“Most of the secrets are locked inside of Flora,” Morgan said. “And I don’t think we’ll ever get them.”