STILL HOPING FOR ANSWERS
Eight years after starting a tireless effort to find missing father, sisters hope to spread awareness of the process of searching for lost loved ones
When Daniel Farrar disappeared from Westbrook eight years ago, his daughters searched for him. They scoured the woods and the marsh near his assisted living facility, looking for clues. They tracked his social security card to see if his limited resources had been tapped into. They wandered through New Haven, asking people living on the green and city streets if they’d seen their dad, but they never found him.
Farrar’s case, recently featured on the true-crime podcast The Vanished, has remained unsolved since he walked out of a Westbrook store on Sept. 11, 2014, and was never seen again. He had $20 in his pocket and told the staff at the assisted living facility where he
lived that he was going to get some lunch.
Farrar’s daughters, Tracy Dickson and Jodi Hancock, were tireless in their search for their father. They felt glimmers of hope on walks in the woods when they’d think they spotted his gray sweatshirt, only to be disappointed. They hung countless missing person posters with his photo, made online profiles to register him as missing and chased down leads, but their hopes quickly began to dwindle.
Now, all these years later, they both assume their father is dead.
“We’re both pretty convinced that he’s deceased,” said Dickson “I don’t think we’re looking for my live father, I think we’re looking for his body.”
Hancock said she goes back and forth. Sometimes she believes that her father, who had struggled with suicidal ideations, died by suicide. She wonders if he wandered off, crossed the border
to New York and died there, his remains yet to be found. Other times she’s convinced that his body is somewhere in Westbrook, not far from where he had been living.
“Anything could have happened,” she said. “But I don’t believe that he would still be alive, that he could go eight years without collecting any social security or using Medicaid, with all his medical conditions. I do believe at this point he is deceased, regardless of did he commit suicide that day or move to another area and died.”
Farrar, who was 63 when he disappeared, grew up in Clinton and lived in the Westbrook area for years with occasional moves to New Haven where he lived on or near the New Haven Green amongst the city’s homeless population. Wherever he was staying, he was well-known by those in his neighborhood.
“Everywhere we went people would say ‘Hi, Danny,’” Hancock said.
“He was a guy that walked around town all the time,” she said. “Until he didn’t.”
After struggling with alcoholism at a young age, Farrar lived 28 years of his life sober. He was active in Alcoholics Anonymous and sponsored many other people in recovery. Around 2000, he started drinking again and experienced a swift downward spiral, his daughters said.
“He lost his home, his business, everything in a year,” Dickson said.
In addition to his relapse, he suffered a stroke not long before he disappeared. It completely changed his life, his daughters said. He was no longer able to read books like he once loved to do, struggled to communicate clearly and couldn’t walk as well as he once did.
He moved into the assisted living facility on the shore of the Long Island Sound and maintained steady relationships with his two daughters, playing a bigger part in their adult lives than he had in their childhoods.
He was funny, generous and loved to dance, his daughters said.
Due to his medical conditions, a Silver Alert was initially issued, but his daughters felt that they led the majority of the search efforts to find him. Both Dickson and Hancock feel that his alcoholism played a role in the investigation that followed his disappearance.
“I don’t think he was treated as
maybe another 63-year-old man who lived at home with his wife,” said Hancock. “I don’t think they treated his case the same way, and I think he deserved that.
“He was more than an alcoholic, he was more than a disabled man,” she added. “I think this is my
biggest hope in finding out what happened to him, is he deserves a proper burial.”
The sisters poured hours of their own energy and emotion into finding their dad, often combing through websites like NamUs — a national information and resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases — looking at photos of unidentified bodies to see if they spotted their dad. They would follow news reports about body parts washing up on beaches and call the state medical examiner to see if there was a match.
Eventually, they said, they had to stop.
“You can’t, you just can’t do it. You go down this rabbit hole. It’s way draining on you. It literally takes a physical toll on you,” Dickson said of the constant searching.
She said she hopes that sharing her dad’s story can help raise awareness about the process of searching for a lost loved one.
By being thrust into a missing person’s case, Dickson said they “discovered a lot about this process in going through the process that had just never dawned on us.”
“The number of remains that go unidentified nationwide is unfathomable,” she said.
According to NamUs, over 600,000 individuals go missing in the United States every year. Dickson hopes that that stark statistic can urge people to be more aware of their surroundings.
“We just want people to have this sense of awareness, if you’re hiking through the woods and you see a shirt that’s out of place,
maybe look a little more carefully,” said Dickson.
“It’s about an awareness for people to pay attention to what’s out there,” her sister said. “To pay more attention to the people around them. Maybe somebody saw him but just disregarded him in some way.”
The sisters both sighed heavily when asked if they had any words of advice for other families who may find themselves in their shoes.
“Push. Push the system to do the things that need to be done,” said Hancock.
She also recommended precautionary steps that families with loved ones with mental illnesses or substance use issues can take, like having access to their DNA and ensuring they carry a card with information about their emergency contacts.
In the end, their hope is that their father is found someday, no matter what has happened to him, and that his life story matters to those that hear about him.
“He had value. He had value as a human being. Everybody has value as a human being,” Dickson said.