ld be missing her’
large grocery store and walking distance from downtown and the University of Delaware. It’s run by the non-profit National Alliance for Mental Illness and its 17 tenants pay 30 per cent of their federal disability benefits in rent.
“Everybody who lives here, except for the property manager, has a severe mental health diagnosis of one kind or another,” the neighbour said in a phone interview. “That doesn’t necessarily mean psychosis. It could mean severe depression or anxiety or both.”
Hegg has four siblings. She always wanted to be a veterinarian, but ended up studying languages at the University of Rochester in New York state before enlisting in the navy. Her 83-year-old father, Tom Hegg, describes her as “quiet and very sharp — she had a photographic memory.”
For a couple of years she was stationed at a U.S. military base on the Japanese island of Okinawa. She rose to the rank of lieutenant, but left around1987 after what her father described as a traumatic experience involving a pregnancy.
“It was difficult for her,” said Tom Hegg. “I think it was a changing point.” He last spoke with his daughter six years ago and didn’t know she was missing when the Star contacted him in November.
She never married, and her father doesn’t recall her having a full-time job after the navy. In Newark, she didn’t own a car, but the neighbour said she would sometimes rent one. She was close to a man tenants describe as her boyfriend.
“Our detectives are working with Toronto police, and we’re hoping this will have a positive outcome and we’ll be able to identify this person as being one and the same.”
LT. MARK FARRALL NEWARK (DEL.) POLICE
She apparently broke up with him in 2007. After that, her neighbour noticed a change.
“She stopped communicating with the other tenants and that’s how she’s been ever since,” he said. “The most she’ll say to anybody is hello. Usually she won’t even do that; she’s never said hello to me.”
The former boyfriend had kidney failure and died about a year after the breakup. Hegg’s neighbour, who grew up on the same street as the boyfriend, said the man refused dialysis treatment.
Sometime after the neighbour’s chat with the mailman, UPS boxes were left in front of Hegg’s door and sat there for days. The neighbour called the building manager. She entered Hegg’s apartment, carried the boxes in, took a look around and left.
Shortly after, on Nov. 3, Newark police were notified of Hegg’s disappearance. Two days later they issued a “gold alert” asking the public for help finding her. Included was an old photo from Hegg’s driver’s licence. She was described as fivefoot-four, 130 pounds, with short blond hair and blue eyes.
“We’ve been in contact with her family in Indiana and they have no idea where she may be,” police Lt. Mark Farrall told the Newark Post that day.
The next day, Toronto police renewed their call for the public’s help in identifying Linda. The request was posted by the Facebook website Missing People of Canada, along with Linda’s picture.
On Nov. 7, the Star published an online story noting the renewed request for help. At 9:45 a.m., a woman named Kathy Forsyth posted this message on Missing People of Canada, below Linda’s picture: “There is a Newark woman missing since September. Just googled and found it. Her name is Linda Hegg. Blond with blue eyes, age 55. It says Gold Alert issued in the write up. Some similarities.”
Three hours later, Leona Landry of Toronto posted the police-issued picture of Linda Hegg, which she found on the University of Delaware website: “yaaa wow she looks like her a lot.”
Late that afternoon, Liz Duford Colclough, of Chippawa, Ont., posted that she had emailed both pictures to Newark po- lice. It was the first they had heard about Linda in Toronto. “I pray it is her,” Colclough wrote.
The next day, a member of the websleuths.com forum spotted the same connection, unaware others had already done so. “This woman sort of resembles her. Although the height is off a few inches,” wrote someone from Colorado who posted as DylansMom34. She emailed the information to the Toronto Crime Stoppers 222tips.com site.
“I found her in a very primitive way,” DylansMom34 added. “I did a google for “missing blonde woman” and started scrolling through recent news stories. Luckily they had just done an update on November 6 so it wasn’t very far down.”
By then, police in both Newark and Toronto were focused on Linda Hegg.
“She lives by herself. She has no family in the area, so there was quite a delay in reporting her actually being missing,” Farrall said in a phone interview. “We’re not actually sure when it was that she went missing.”
“Our detectives are working with Toronto police,” he added, “and we’re hoping this will have a positive outcome and we’ll be able to identify this person as being one and the same.”
DNA has been collected from a Hegg family member and the Centre of Forensic Sciences has agreed to put a rush on the results. Caracciolo believes there is a “strong likelihood” the woman with no memory is indeed Linda Hegg. If so, how did she cross the border into Canada? What happened to the ID she may have had? And how, or why, did she end up in Toronto?
These questions might never be answered. There are few Hollywood endings in real-life cases of amnesia. The missing pieces of their memory are seldom recovered. Much about their world remains a mystery, even as they enlighten science on the workings of the mind. Linda’s story shone a light, too. It fell on others like her, lost to their families if not themselves.
“One thing,” Caracciolo said, “that is becoming very clear to me: there are lots of people out there that no one is looking for — lots. That’s a sad reality.”