New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Sisters’ search for missing father featured on true-crime podcast
Jodi Hancock and Tracy Dickson’s father went missing eight years ago. Now, the sisters have brought their search to a true-crime podcast last year in hopes of getting some answers.
Daniel Farrar was 63 on Sept. 11, 2014, when he told the staff at the assisted living facility in Westbrook where he lived that he was going to go for lunch.
“He left with $20 to a local liquor store and never came back,” Hancock said. “We knew he could not go far, since he did not have a lot of money.”
Farrar’s story was featured on a December 12 episode of “The Vanished”, a true-crime podcast about missing people hosted by former paralegal Marissa Jones.
On the anniversary of her father’s disappearance, Hancock posted a flier on a Westbrook Facebook group. A member of the group asked if she had contacted the podcast.
“We’ve never heard of it,” Dickson said. “We reached out and they contacted us quickly, (and) recorded the episode with me, my sister, stepbrother and sister and uncle.”
The podcast episode covers Farrar’s life and his family’s efforts to find him.
Hancock said her father was born and raised in Westbrook, and owned a home improvement business there. She said he lost his business and his apartment because of his struggle with alcoholism, and at one point lived on the New Haven Green.
“During the time he was homeless, he suffered a stroke leaving him disabled,” she said. “He had to live in an assisted living home in Hartford, which he then left to live at Tidelawn Manor,” Dickson said. “He lacked control of his own life after the stroke.”
In September 2014, the sisters got a call that their father had not returned to facility. They believe he went back to the places he knew best around Westbrook and New Haven. They posted flyers in Westbrook and checked shelters, police departments, Salvation Army facilities and the woods.
Dickson and Hancock have since donated their DNA to make any connections with missing persons and unidentified remains found in the Justice Department’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
“We have not been able to find him in Connecticut, so we have expanded and are now looking out of state,” Dickson said.
Farrar would be 71 today. He has hazel eyes, is about 5 feet 7 inches tall and has trouble speaking because of the previous stroke.
Dickson and Hancock still have hope they’ll get answers. They haven’t given up the search, they said, despite the difficulty.
“This search can do so much to you mentally,” Hancock said. “There have been moments we had to stop and regroup because you get very attached. But I can’t say I want my father to be found, but not [be] doing everything I can to assist in that.”