Missing Without A Trace Read online

  MISSING

  Without a Trace

  8 Days of Horror

  MISSING

  Without a Trace

  8 Days of Horror

  Tanya Rider and Tracy C. Ertl

  with Carol Lieberman, M.D.

  Missing Without a Trace: 8 Days of Horror

  Copyright ©2011 Tanya Rider and Tracy C. Ertl

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, except for passages excerpted for the purposes of review, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, or to order additional copies, please contact:

  TitleTown Publishing, LLC

  P.O. Box 12093 Green Bay, WI 54307-12093

  920.737.8051 | titletownpublishing.com

  Edited by Katie Vecchio

  Cover design by Erika L. Block

  Interior layout and design by Erika L. Block

  PUBLISHER’S CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Rider, Tanya.

  Missing Without a Trace : 8 days of horror / Tanya Rider and Tracy C.

  Ertl. -- 1st ed. -- Green Bay, WI : TitleTown Pub., c2011.

  p. ; cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-9823008-6-2

  1. Rider, Tanya. 2. Adult child abuse victims--Psychological

  aspects. 3. Traffic accident victims--Psychological aspects.

  4. Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc. 5. Missing

  persons--Investigation--Washington (State)--King County.

  6. Missing persons--Investigation--United States--States. I. Ertl,

  Tracy C. II. Title.

  HV6762.U6 R53 2011

  363.2/336--dc22 1101

  Printed in the USA by Thomson-Shore

  first edition printed on recycled paper

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to NCMEC,

  the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

  (and Adults)

  and Morgan Nick, a beautiful six-year-old girl.

  Morgan is missing and we are waiting for her to come home.

  —Tracy C. Ertl, publisher and co-author

  This book is dedicated to hope…

  …Hope that no one else will ever suffer an ordeal like mine.

  …Hope that you and your loved ones will have faith, no matter

  what you face.

  …Hope that my story sheds light into the darkness of agencies

  that should protect and serve us.

  …Hope that money will never again come before duty.

  …And hope that this book forewarns those who suffer the ordeal

  of a missing loved one.

  —Tanya Rider, co-author

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: 8 Days

  Chapter 2: Recovery

  Chapter 3: Your Loved One is Missing

  Chapter 4: What if YOU Are the One Who is Missing?

  Chapter 5: Dr. Carole’s Couch: Overcoming Trauma

  Chapter 6: Fixing the System

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Tracy C. Ertl

  Carole Lieberman, M.D.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Missing Without a Trace would not have been possible without the continual support of my family. My children—Andrew, Christine and Bradley—believed in the importance of Missing from the beginning. Bradley accompanied me to Rock Island where I wrote part of the manuscript. He, along with my brother, Stephen, provided sanctuary in the evenings when I desperately needed to relax and debrief from intense writing sessions.

  My publicist, Michael Wright, who is vice president of Garson & Wright Public Relations, was the guiding force behind this project. Without him, there would be no Missing Without a Trace. Wright gave his vision for the book and infused his energy at times when we felt we had nothing left to give to the partnership. I will always be deeply grateful to him for believing in TitleTown’s ability to produce the book and in me to write it with proper care for the heart of a survivor.

  The TitleTown team was invincible. Katie Vecchio not only edited Missing but also stepped in as a significant ghost voice when my publishing responsibilities swallowed additional writing time. Designer Erika Block captured the essence of a missing person with an undeniably brilliant cover and interior design. Both Block and Vecchio worked long, grueling hours. Research assistants Jessica Engman and Katie Stilp were invaluable in gathering extensive information on the missing person process. Without their expertise, the book would be incomplete.

  Brown County Public Safety Communications, a multi-jurisdiction emergency-response center handling fire, police and EMS calls in Green Bay, Wisconsin, is my second family and has provided me with a backdrop of understanding and passion for survival topics unprecedented by any publisher in the industry today. My 911 family has waited in anticipation of this title as they know writing and publishing has always been my other love and my destiny.

  I thank my friends for accepting my absence while I was trying to bring voice to Tanya Rider and the plight of other survivors like her.

  My associates at the Association for Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO) have been supportive in my chase of this project and brought me in direct connection with the NCMEC staff, who give their lives to the missing and those who are searching for them.

  I extend my deep gratitude to the men and women of law enforcement who dedicate themselves to the pursuit of the lost, taken and missing. We need you.

  I thank Dr. Carole Lieberman, who accompanied me to Seattle, Washington, to work with Tanya Rider in the hopes of bringing greater understanding to the process of being a survivor. There is no timeline to healing and we must be patient in its pursuit. That, perhaps, is the greatest lesson in Missing.

  Lastly, I thank Tanya Rider for trusting me to help her tell her unbelievable story of survival against every odd. Tanya, you are a true survivor and it is my honor to have learned your story and been given the chance to share it with others, both as your co-author and publisher. God bless you.

  —Tracy C. Ertl

  No matter what, my husband Tom is the one person in the world who has always been there for me—and always will be—and I want to thank him for so much. He can be a pain but he is my pain, and I thank him for never giving up on me! To help him get through his anger, he wrote for therapy, and he has shown me how to vent constructively. It was Tom’s idea to write about my story and our situation.

  I’d like to thank many people in the public for your love, concern and prayers for my recovery as well as for your cards and letters of encouragement. I extend a special “Thank you!” to the person who went down into that hole that was my home for eight days to bring me my books and papers. You were very kind and considerate to do this and I will never forget your thoughtful, anonymous act. I’ll always be thankful.

  So many people stepped up to help in any way they could and I am so grateful to all of them. I thank several nurses, doctors and other caregivers who went above and beyond to save my leg. I even want to thank the nurse who threatened me with a nursing home! More than anyone else, she motivated me to get home and convinced me that I could not live under the control of other people!

  Most of all, I thank God. If not for my faith in Him, I don’t know where I would be now. Without His help, I could never have survived for eight days. Without His protection from the pure horror, I would probably be insane and lost to the world. Without His love, I would probably not have had the strength to cope with my injuries. I thank God for keeping me alive and, for the most part, whole.

  —Tanya Rider

  First, I want to thank my wife, Tanya. Thank
s to her pure spirit and iron will—and through the grace of God—Tanya fought her way back from death’s door. Through everything that she had to endure, her courage never wavered. She fought to keep her leg as well as her life, and has had to live through many trials that would have destroyed a lesser person. I know that, if I had been trapped in that ravine, I probably would have been dead long before they found me, and I am so grateful that Tanya returned to me.

  While she survived for eight days without food or water, her body began the process of shutting down; her cells diverted the precious fluid that pumped through her veins, began to consume her muscles to produce energy, and damaged her kidneys. By the time she was finally found, Tanya was well past the point of any rational hope for survival.

  My employer at the time—Gary Racca, owner of SoundBuilt Homes—did so many things to support us and to make our lives easier in those first few weeks after Tanya was rescued. I would never have asked anyone in the world for the things that Gary and my coworkers at SoundBuilt did for us, and they did it all without my asking—even offered up their vacation days to help cook or clean for Tanya when she got home. Throughout the ordeal, they were the best people I could have had around me when I needed them the most. I thank all of them from the bottom of my heart.

  I also want to offer a heartfelt thanks to my friend Adam, who took care of our dog for those first few weeks, allowing me to stay at the hospital with Tanya full time. And words can never express my gratitude to all of the people who pitched in to make life a little easier for Tanya and me.

  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

  PREFACE

  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.

&n
bsp; 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.