She knows only her name. Here’s her story
The strange tale of a woman with amnesia, and the detectives trying to solve her mystery
On a hot and humid day in early September, a neatly dressed middle-aged woman walked into a crowded shelter for the homeless in downtown Toronto. All she had with her was a jealously guarded tote bag filled with scraps of paper, a bottle of water, a map of Toronto bus routes and a wallet with a Canadian $20 bill. She had no ID.
The shelter was full, so the next day she was sent to Heyworth House on Danforth Ave. in the city’s east end, an emergency shelter with 70 beds and links to agencies that help with mental health problems. For three weeks the woman followed the shelter’s rules and routines. She was free to come and go, but didn’t leave the building much. One day someone stole her tote bag and its miserable contents. She rarely spoke and remembered almost nothing. After failing to confirm her identity, staff called police. The report of a woman with no memory landed on the desk of Det. Roger Caracciolo, a 43-year-old with a shaved head and 13 years of police experience.
He was skeptical.
“She remembers a road and walking — lots of walking. And when I asked her about family, she said she’s an orphan. I said, since when? And she said, since forever.” DET. ROGER CARACCIOLO
TORONTO POLICE
“Is this person faking it?” he wondered. “Is she running away from a bad marriage? Is she running away from someone’s abuse? Or has she done something that is so egregious that she just has to get away from it all?
“I mean, I haven’t heard of this, and I’ve investigated a lot of things.”
Caracciolo went to the shelter early on Oct. 3. He met a woman he guessed was between 55 and 60 years old. She wore the clothes she had the day she appeared, including a pink bandana holding back blond, shoulder-length hair. Nothing about her suggested she made shelters or the street her home. To Caracciolo, she looked like she had “walked out of a Second Cup in a downtown trendy neighbourhood.”
“We’re looking at very nice, clean, slipon leather shoes, white ankle socks, black capris — not faded black capris, not ripped black capris, not tattered black capris, but black capris — a fitted Old Navy jacket, not one that I found in a dumpster or that I stole from the person next to me on the (shelter) bed, but a fitted Old Navy jacket. And a nice T-shirt underneath,” he continued.
“Her nails — I’m not going to say they’re manicured, but they’re not weathered in any way. Eyebrows done. Nice glasses; I’d almost say designer glasses. And a very nice watch.”
He also detected what seemed to be a hint of refinement: the woman preferred lemon in her tea. But something was off. Her blue eyes seemed empty and her voice was weak. “Within six seconds,” Caracciolo said, he suspected she had mental health troubles.
The woman didn’t know what day it was, where she came from or what city she was in. She didn’t remember the Summer Olympics or the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States. “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” was pretty much all she would say.
“She remembers a road and walking — lots of walking,” Caracciolo said. “And when I asked her about family, she said she’s an orphan. I said, since when? And she said, since forever. And that’s the only family thing she said to us.”
One piece of information promised an early solution to the mystery: she blurted out a full name — Linda Goodman. Police quickly linked it to a Toronto address. But the Linda Goodman there didn’t know the mystery woman and had no idea why she would be using her name. Linda would throw out more names during the investigation, all of which turned into wild goose chases. But on one thing she was consistent: her first name was Linda.
Caracciolo used police powers under the Mental Health Act to have Linda taken to Toronto East General Hospital. While waiting in the emergency ward, her glasses were lost or stolen. Shortly after noon on Oct. 3, police issued a news release asking for the public’s help in identifying the woman calling herself Linda.
“She is unable to provide any other information about herself,” the release said, “and doesn’t remember anything about herself.” It described her as five-foot-seven and150 pounds. Attached was a picture of her wearing a dark blue jean jacket, her eyes alert, her face in a half-smile.
Cases like this usually get solved in a couple of days. The picture is sent to police forces and shared on Facebook and missing persons’ websites. Someone inevitably makes a connection. But weeks later, despite six police officers rotating through the file around the clock, Linda remained a mystery. During coffee breaks, baffled police at 54 Division, the precinct handling her case, spun theories of crime and abandonment.
“In my 20-some-odd years of police work, it’s the first time I’ve seen this,” Det. Chris Burke, who was on the case from the start, said in early November. “Somebody out there has to know her.”
TIPS POURED IN from Canada and the United States. Some came from families looking for loved ones who disappeared as many as 30 years ago. Most were immediately dismissed. But one got everyone’s attention.
“I personally saw this woman in Vancouver just over a year ago,” someone from the Missing People of Canada website wrote on the Toronto police’s Facebook page. “Yes her name is Linda, un- sure what her last name is, she is/was a brain injury client at the Lower Mainland Brain Injury Association in New Westminster. She is also a mental health client in Vancouver.”
The tip referred to Linda Muriel Stephen, who first went missing from her home in Surrey, B.C., in May 2010. She was 57. At some point after she was found, she was admitted to Riverview psychiatric hospital in Coquitlam, B.C. She disappeared in April 2011.
“Stephen suffers from a mental disorder and requires medication, without which Stephen may become paranoid,” said the RCMP news release. “Stephen has previously left Riverview grounds, however she has returned on her own accord within the same day.”
A second picture taken of Linda hinted at a faint resemblance to Stephen. In the photo, she sat without glasses in a hospital gown, looking haunted. She seemed to have visibly deteriorated.
The RCMP sent Stephen’s dental records to Toronto, and X-rays were taken of Linda’s teeth. Expectations were high, but the two records didn’t match. That left two mysteries unsolved.
“So where is Linda Stephen?” Caracciolo asked. “That could be a whole other story in itself. And who’s looking for her?”
Linda’s X-rays indicated she had dental work done “in the not too distant past,” according to Det. Robert Russell, one of the police officers on the case. Until recently, she had been well enough to care for herself, or someone cared for her.
One day, while being treated by doctors at Toronto East General Hospital, Linda named streets forming a busy Halifax intersection near Dalhousie University. The alumni association was contacted, and Halifax police broadened the search. But nothing panned out.
Facial recognition checks with the passport office and every provincial ministry of transportation in Canada came up blank. Fingerprint checks, including with the FBI, didn’t produce a match.
“It’s very strange,” Russell said. “You don’t know the frustration on this side. . . . Somebody should be missing her.”
Suddenly someone did. Caracciolo got a call from an Ottawa woman in tears, convinced Linda was her lost 57-year-old aunt, Rae Allison. “She can barely get it out she’s crying so much,” he said.
The Ottawa woman directed Caracciolo to Allison’s brother, Toronto resident Norman Sutterlin. He spoke of a sister who grew up in Toronto and worked for a pump manufacturer before becoming increasingly paranoid and often refusing medication.
“She believes everyone is following her,” said Sutterlin, 50. “She had a lot of dental work done and she believes the dentist put tracking beams in her head. She doesn’t trust telephones or electronics anymore. In her last apartment, she disconnected all the lights, all the plugs and was basically living by candlelight because she thought the outlets were transmitters of information.”
Sutterlin last saw his sister three years ago, when she gave up her Kingston apartment and showed up at his doorstep intent on making Toronto her home. In May, she appeared at a sister’s home in Perth, Ont. She hasn’t been heard from since. Even Allison’s son doesn’t know where she is.
Sutterlin looked at Linda’s picture and thought it could be his sister. After going back and forth with Sutterlin for hours, Caracciolo thought the chances were high enough to invite the brother and his siblings to meet Linda.
“They come down, they bring me the pictures of their sister and, almost immediately, I knew it wasn’t Linda,” Caracciolo said. “My heart sank. I’d say it was the best lead we had until he showed up here with the picture.”
He concealed his dejection. At that point, he knew Sutterlin would have to see Linda for himself.
“Every inch closer we get to that room, his anxiety level gets higher and higher,” Caracciolo recalled. “They wanted it to be her so badly. And you look at the care on these people’s faces and, quite frankly, I wanted it to be her, too, because these people love this person and want her cared for.
“Then you see the concern on the person’s face. He goes, ‘Yeah, it’s not her, which means my sister is still missing.’ ”
Sutterlin has braced himself for the next time he might get news of his sister: “I know that one day that call is going to come again,” he said, “and it might be to go to the morgue.”
A second family taken to see Linda ended in a similar scene.
Linda was then transferred to psychiatric care in a long-term facility. Her DNA was sent to the provincial Centre of Forensic Sciences. In late October, it was compared to the DNA of someone who went missing in the 1970s. That was a dead end, like everything else.
“My theory is,” Caracciolo said, “one, she’s been living by herself — no problem, everything is fine. Then one day it isn’t, and she walks away from everything. The flaw in that theory is, while she was living perfectly fine, how does no one know her?”
Caracciolo’s other theory he calls “dropping off the baby at the church.”
“Out of all the places in the world she could have walked to, she ends up at a Toronto shelter. Does that mean someone has been caring for her for a long time and they’ve had enough? Are they elderly and they can’t care for her any more? Does she not have coverage for meds any more and they can’t afford her medication? Is it something sinister?
“It’s not your run-of-the-mill investigation,” he added. “This is one of the ones I bring home with me.”
Linda had become a regular topic of conversation at Caracciolo family gatherings. He learned about amnesia from doctors treating Linda. And he watched the movie The Vow, a romantic drama about a woman who forgets chunks of her past and can’t recognize her husband after a car crash.
“I’d like to sit with her and say, ‘How does it feel not knowing anything?’ There are so many questions I’d like to ask her,” Caracciolo said. “And there’s always the fear I have that she wanders away again. Then what?”
AT A TWO-STOREY apartment building in Newark, Del., across from the Newark Country Club’s golf course, uncollected mail was piling up for the tenant at apartment 203. Linda Hegg hadn’t been seen for weeks.
“The mailman said to me, ‘Someone should check on her because usually when that happens, they’ve either passed away or are very sick,’ ” said one of Hegg’s neighbours, who spoke on condition his name would not be used.
Hegg, 55, has lived in the building for years. She used to share a two-bedroom unit, but after tension with her roommate she moved to a studio apartment. The apartment building is well-kept, close to a