Free The Last Place You'd Look by Carole Moore Page B

what he is doing. If your kid was missing, would you want someone to be dishonest with you?”
    And, says McGinnis, officers should stop returning to the liability issue. “If you act aboveboard, you can win.”
    R
    Mary Wegner’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Laurie Depies, vanished on August 19, 1992. She has neither been seen nor heard from since. An employee of a shop at the local mall, Laurie lived in the town of Menasha, Wisconsin. Menasha, a small slice of Americana with a population of more than seventeen thousand, sits about one hundred miles north of Milwaukee, and south of Green Bay, on the northwest shore of Lake Winnebago.
    The Town of Menasha Police Department has worked Laurie’s case since she was discovered missing. As time passes and officers retire, are promoted, or move on, the investigators change, but the central mission remains: find Laurie.
    Detective Lieutenant Michael Krueger and Special Agent Kimberly Skorlinski, Division of Criminal Investigation, Wisconsin Department of Justice, want Laurie’s family to know one thing: their child has not been forgotten.
    Laurie was last seen leaving the Fox River Valley Mall in Appleton. Wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt, shorts, and black shoes, Laurie drove to the apartment complex where her boyfriend lived. It was sometime after 10:00 at night. Her boyfriend and two other people were waiting for her at his apartment complex. He told police that they heard her car pull up because the car had a loud muffler. They waited for Laurie to arrive at the apartment, and when she didn’t, the boyfriend went to check on her.
    He found her older gray Volkswagen Rabbit parked in the lot with a cup sitting on top containing a drink she purchased earlier in the day. Laurie’s purse and bag remained untouched in the car.
    There were no signs of force, no signs of a struggle. No one heard anything out of the ordinary. Police theorize that someone she knew approached Laurie and she voluntarily walked away.
    Police did most things right. Although they initially didn’t take the complaint as seriously as they should have, they launched a search. In order to preserve any evidence that might have been on or in Laurie’s car, they transported it to the agency on a flatbed and processed it in an open bay of a fire engine stall—the most secure place available at the time.
    They dusted for prints and checked the position of the seat, concluding that it was consistent with a driver of Laurie’s size. Additional officers were called in and they checked the parties that had taken place in the neighborhood and began interviewing everyone they could find who either knew Laurie or had seen her.
    They canvassed the neighborhood, then went back and canvassed parts of it again. They gave her mother a packet of information and when the time was right brought in the media. The chief provided regular updates.
    It seemed that everyone wanted to help: the department was flooded with calls, about five hundred tips a week in the beginning. Detectives sifted through leads and everyone worked overtime.
    They drew blood from the family in case it was needed for comparison. The investigators looked at the clientele of the store where Laurie worked, then checked into her finances and personal life. She had money problems—her father was paying off her credit card as a birthday gift and she had asked her landlady about rent payment options. Detectives also read her journals and diaries.
    “We learned a lot about her,” Krueger says.
    Police don’t believe that Laurie planned to disappear. She had made a down payment on a ring for her boyfriend. She showed no inclination toward suicide or a desire to escape from her circumstances.
    Krueger and Skorlinski have looked at suspected serial killers and other criminals who were believed to be in the area at the time Laurie disappeared. Says Skorlinski, “We don’t have that home run, that DNA, that sample yet.”
    They compared her disappearance