Missing Without A Trace (2 page)

Through Tanya’s recovery, no matter how many times her doctors cautioned her not to get too optimistic, she displayed incomparable drive and absolute determination to get herself out of the hospital. Her strong will and refusal to quit fueled her daily routine for months on end and
stunned all of her treating doctors and everyone who heard her story. Later, this same drive motivated her to return to work, which provided us with health insurance; this is how Tanya saved my life, as I was soon diagnosed with dangerous diabetes.

Battling infection after infection, Tanya continues to work hard. With every two steps forward, she hits another bump in the road, and I sometimes worry that she will reach a point when she does not want to fight anymore. But, with every bump, she gets back up and takes the next two steps. And though the road ahead is marred with more battles, Tanya fights on. As she does, part of me knows that she fights for me because she knows I need her. Though I am filled with pride, it is tainted with sorrow. Watching firsthand as she fights so many battles, I wish that she didn’t have to fight. I wish that she could have it easy for a while and be able to have some fun.

For now, I believe that God’s plans for her are much greater than I can now know. But I do know that my beautiful wife Tanya is the strongest woman I know. She is my hero. I pray that the future brings her all that she could ever want, and that she wins her fight sooner rather than later.

—Tom Rider

My heart pounded. I tried to slow my breathing, to control the fear crawling through my mind. I wanted to focus on the computer screen but I felt panicky. My stomach swirled with nausea as I realized that one wrong move would send me tumbling off the rock ledge that barely held my body and my laptop.

I put myself on the precarious but gorgeous ledge seventy feet above the rocks and water of the coast of Rock Island in Door County, Wisconsin. Entrusted to write Tanya Rider’s survival story, I wanted to try to put myself in her place—a place of terror and desperation—so that I could capture her respirations, her sense of imprisonment and the cramped feeling of being unable to move and held against her will.

Curled up there and trying to write, I drank water. I continued to drink, even when I felt like I had to go to the bathroom. I wanted to feel the intense pain of needing to use the restroom—and trying desperately not to void on myself. A 911 dispatcher for eighteen years, I have had to stay locked in place for hours while on the phone with a suicidal caller or while dispatching during a weapon call. Forgoing a bathroom break is one of the requirements of the profession.

When I was a young girl, my father would load all of us into the car for a road trip and use bathroom stops to control us. However, I had never been forced to make the decision to soil myself and sit in it. There is something subhuman about that process. But, over and over again and for more than a week, Tanya Rider was forced to surrender that control of her
body while she was trapped in her car. I could not ghost her story without moving through some of that pain, humiliation, filth and acceptance of predicament.

The ledge on Rock Island became my captor as I wrote much of
Missing Without a Trace
. I wanted to feel the claustrophobia and inability to breathe that must have come when Tanya realized that her legs were pinned, she was harnessed in, no one could hear her and no one was coming. As a reader, you will probably be able to feel through the writing when I hit the most difficult moments.

Although I had free will to leave, I pinned my body up against a sheet of rock in a small, open cave on the island and, again, I wrote on my laptop, trying to bring you into Tanya Rider’s SUV as she fought to hang on.

As you will learn from Tanya’s story, she feels blessed to be alive and to have emerged from the missing, and she thanks God for giving her the strength to make it. She is one of the lucky ones, who made it home. Tanya is a survivor, but not a writer. She wanted to be able to share her story with others so that they might know the power of faith. She also hopes for changes in law enforcement protocols for the handling of missing person reports.

Tanya Rider came to me uniquely. Apprised of my work as a publisher, Tanya knew nothing of my background as a dispatcher and national instructor in missing persons protocol. A 911 dispatcher for almost two decades, I have heard the cries of parents and loved ones when they called in to report their family members missing, and I have been on the receiving end of the joyful calls, when loved ones have returned or when we somehow reunited them. I am also a volunteer instructor for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (and Adults), and I teach protocol on how to increase the odds of finding our missing across the country.

Because Tanya was left in the ravine without a proper search, I viewed her as a victim who suffered an unbelievable ordeal of pain and trauma. But most of our missing never come home, and so I also viewed Tanya as an incredibly lucky survivor. Although her journey begins with a terrible accident, her story is more about survival and missing persons than anything else.

It is a risk to try to partially ghost write the very book that I have agreed to publish, but Tanya’s story commanded my passion for the subject to such a degree that I was simply unwilling to give her to someone else. Since nearly everyone else seemed to have failed Tanya, I wanted to ensure a proper journey with her story. The endeavor was daunting and I brought in another ghost to help.

Writing
Missing Without a Trace
was painful. As a 911 professional, I am very much a part of the family of law enforcement and the centers that support them. Punished within the media for the slightest error and judged by a public that rarely understands our processes or constraints, those of us in law enforcement are taught never to sit in judgment of our own. However, some of the material in this book exposes mistakes made by my second family—the law enforcement community. Though this was hard for me to write and publish, humbly I believe that we
must
examine what we have done so that we can have a chance to improve our service to the missing and the families who are looking for them.

My own agency, Brown County Public Safety Communications, is currently working in unison with the law enforcement agencies we serve to create a missing person protocol that safeguards the public while diligently using our limited resources. NCMEC has combined forces with several federal and private agencies to form best-practice standards in handling the missing. As a proponent of standards, I hope that we can avoid anyone else suffering the near death experience and subsequent trauma that Tanya Rider has endured.

In March 2009, I went to NCMEC headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, to attend an executive training program for law enforcement professionals and policy implementers. NCMEC taught us the best case protocol and practices when working with missing person and exploitation cases. One of our victim/survivor speakers was Colleen Nick, founder of the Morgan Nick Foundation. While I had always had an interest in writing or publishing stories about the plight of the missing, Colleen Nick was the person who gave me the courage to take Tanya Rider’s story and to give voice to her experience.

Colleen recounted to us the story of her abducted six-year-old daughter, Morgan. In 1995, Colleen and other parents were sitting in the simple stands of a small town Arkansas baseball field, cheering the children who played ball on the diamond. Just a few feet away, in the adjoining dirt parking lot, Morgan and some other children chased fireflies and giggled with joy, as children do. Minutes later, when the game ended, the parking lot cleared. Morgan was missing.

The last image of Morgan was of her smiling while she removed one of her shoes and dumped the sand out of it. She bent down, presumably to put her shoe back on, and no one reported seeing her again. Ever. Witnesses recounted seeing an unknown male in a red truck.

Listening to Colleen, we sat motionless in the room. It was the first time in years I had seen silent tears from police chiefs and other administrators, assembled from all over the country and hoping to make a difference in the lives of missing children, missing adults and their families.

Colleen Nick wept openly but with full grace as she described the journey of her search for Morgan over the years that would follow. Her marriage did not survive; when a loved one goes missing, it creates such incredible pressure on a family and on a marriage that eighty percent of married parents who lose a child end up in divorce as a result.

We all stopped breathing again when Colleen asserted, at the end of her speech, that though it was 1995 when Morgan disappeared, she still believed that Morgan was out there. Morgan needs to be brought home, said Colleen, who has not given up the search because “a mother knows.”
All
of our missing, she said, deserve to have that search.

She is right, and I am with her. Just months after that training program, this belief was renewed once again with the astounding recovery of Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped at age eleven and recovered at age twenty-eight.

Regardless of circumstance or odds,
every
missing person deserves to be searched for, and we—American law enforcement—need to follow up, to search, to investigate, and to bring to bear any and all available resources and technology.

One problem is that we must balance this imperative with the rights of people who
want
to go missing, to start a new life or to escape those who have harmed them in the past.
Missing Without a Trace
explores these issues. In the process, we hope to create discussion and bring changes and improvements in these areas.

Though you will likely feel much anger through the book,
Missing
is not a witch hunt. It was impossible to capture the story of Tanya Rider and leave out the anger she felt while left to rot in the ravine. Trying to put their lives back together, Tanya and her husband have also experienced much helplessness and hopelessness in the years after the accident. Still, they press on, and Tanya continues to express incredible faith in God to move her and her family on to a better place.

More important than anger is that
any
of us could become one of the missing at any time.
Any of us
could say goodbye to our sweetheart or our child and have them disappear without a trace. If you knew in advance that
you
were going to go missing sometime in the next forty-eight hours, or you knew that someone you couldn’t live without was about to go missing, what would you do to prepare? What
could
you do? We wrote
Missing
Without a Trace
to prepare you and those you love for the unthinkable, because you
can
increase your odds of surviving and making your way back to your family, and you
can
increase the odds of getting your child back.
Missing
provides concrete suggestions to help you and your loved ones remain safe—and to know what to do when you aren’t.

By watching the success of people who have navigated trauma and adversity, we learn to handle it ourselves. Though Tanya Rider remains in much pain today—and she faces many challenges—she is a survivor. Conducting the research for this book, my team and I contacted many professionals who called Tanya a miracle. I think she
is
a miracle, but there were physical and psychological components that helped her make it to that eighth day. I believe anyone can learn from her, take that information and apply it to their own challenges and traumas. Thus, I have designed
Missing
to provide you with practical information to help you and your loved ones to survive tragedy, and also to help you believe again in the miracle of the impossible through the eyes of an indomitable survivor.

—Tracy C. Ertl

By Carole Lieberman, M.D
.

When Tanya Rider’s SUV, which she’d fondly named Skywalker, went over the embankment on a rural road outside of Seattle, it ruthlessly trapped her inside. But the feeling of being held prisoner in a nightmarish world that she could not control was all-too familiar to her. The cold metal carcass that entombed her in the ravine by the side of the road replicated the walls of the cold loveless homes that had entombed her as a child. And just as no one ‘saw’ her or felt her pain when she was a little girl, because they were too self-absorbed to look, no one ‘saw’ her this time, either, despite the missing-person reports and the countless cars that passed as the hours ticked by. Indeed, she was trapped—again.

Tanya’s mother, Nancy, was very young when she met Randy, the man who would become Tanya’s father. Though her parents had picked up on warning signs that Nancy had missed, she married him anyway, despite their disapproval. Randy’s good looks and charm fleetingly concealed his dark side: drug addiction and a violent temper. Tanya was born in 1974, when Nancy was nineteen and Randy was twenty-one. As it turned out, when Tanya was a baby, he beat Nancy and their tumultuous marriage ended. Tanya’s grandmother quietly planned to move Nancy and Tanya
across the country. The night before they left, Randy got wind of this. He stole the furniture that the grandmother had provided, as well as Tanya’s baby clothes and toys. According to Tanya, Randy’s problems with drugs then drove him to break into a pharmacy to feed his habit, and landed him in a federal penitentiary. The next time she saw her father, Tanya was entering adolescence. She had not been given a choice to see him sooner and she had desperately longed for him.

Living with her mom was like living in a house of horrors. Nancy, lonely and miserable, turned to different men and nightly parties, where drugs and alcohol were served. Sometimes, Nancy hosted these parties at home. Other times, she went to the men’s homes and taught Tanya, at a young age, to make sure to lock the door while she was left home alone.

There was never adequate food in the house. “My whole childhood was about starvation,” she recalls. Growing up, her diet consisted of Froot Loops, Pop-Tarts, chili and rice. When Tanya’s grandmother gave her money for doing chores, Tanya used it to buy food. If her mother cooked, which was rare, it was because Nancy’s latest boyfriend was there. “My mother gave me dirty looks if I came out when her boyfriend was there, or when she was having a party,” Tanya says. “So I spent lots of time in my room with my Barbies.”