Still hoping for an answer
eyes, weighing about 175 pounds. She was last seen wearing an ankle-length black coat, black shirt and jeans, and may also have been wearing a black cord necklace with a silver medallion, a gold bow ring and a silver frog-shaped ring.
In the search for their daughter, Mary Lyall and her husband, Doug Lyall, who died in 2015, became advocates for missing persons both in and outside the Capital Region. They founded the Center for Hope in Ballston Spa, which Mary Lyall continues to run, and helped pass state and federal laws to help find missing people, among other endeavors. Those blue lights with emergency phones on Ualbany’s campus? They had a hand in that too, Lyall said.
Lyall has also spoken with other families of missing persons, advising them to continue contacting police and keeping their loved ones’ names in the media.
“You can’t let them put your case in the drawer,” she said.
Writings that echo through the years
With every news story or piece of legislation, Lyall hopes for new information about her daughter.
“I don’t know when it’s going to happen,” she said. “But it will, eventually.”
Since she was born, Mary Lyall knew her youngest, known as Suzy, was different. She recalled coming home once to see her husband holding their infant daughter upright and staring straight at her.
“We’re having a conversation,” he explained, as Suzy babbled back to him.
Growing up, Suzy was constantly working on something, whether it was stitching sequins onto T-shirts or making animals to sell. In the 1990s she was one of the few people who knew how to work a computer — she had a Commodore she took apart and put back together to figure out how it worked, her mother said.
She was also constantly writing poems and stories, often on scraps of paper or napkins, if she had to, Lyall said. One day her daughter came running out of the shower, shampoo still in her hair.
“I just got an inspiration for a poem,” she called out to her mother. “I have to write it down.”
Some of her poems were later published online by Condon. But Lyall has been going through those scraps of paper this past winter to transcribe them. She hopes to publish them as a book.
“I got a better feel of who she was,” she said. “Suzy coped by writing down her emotions.”
Subjects ranged from somewhat dark (she’d once written a postbreakup story about cutting off a boy’s hair to make a voodoo doll) to leaving Lyall’s mouth agape. Among them is a poem Lyall and her husband struggled initially to read after her disappearance.
“Crisis acts as a catalyst for change,” she read out loud. “The times when things are going badly are the times when I find change to be most necessary, like sand that irritates the oyster yet yields something beautiful.”