by Misty LaBean spent her entire life wondering why her mother abandoned her family when she was only one year old.
Connie Christensen’s disappearance 40 years ago from Wisconsin was not unexpected to the rest of her relatives: She had been gone before, running away as a teenager and even working at a carnival.
“After my own children were born, I thought, how could he have left me like this?” LaBean told CNN. “I would never do that to my children.”
Throughout his life, LaBean only heard whispers about his mother. The rest of her family was hurt and reluctant to even talk about Christensen, believing she had decided to leave at just 20 years old.
All the while, though, there was something else LaBean didn’t know: strangers hundreds of miles away were searching for answers to the same mystery.
The key to unlocking it (with your help) would be time, along with the inexorable advance of science. In time, those seeking the truth would connect. And an older daughter would understand why her mother’s departure “may not have been her choice.”
Hunters in the forest and in the laboratory
It was a sketch artist who first used a clay bust to try to recreate the face from remains found in December 1982 in east-central Indiana, said Wayne County Coroner’s Office Chief Deputy Coroner Lauren Ogden.
Hunters found them near Martindale Creek, in a rural area used primarily for hunting and farming, he said. But due to flooding, the remains were damaged beyond recognition and ended up at the University of Indianapolis for storage.
But the coroner’s office never stopped trying to discover his identity.
And throughout those years, science improved. In two generations, investigators had gone from relying on drawings to try to identify the missing and murdered to mining the evidence itself for tiny, delicate threads that might identify exactly who someone was.
In fact, the technology had gotten so good that, in 2021, the Wayne County Coroner’s Office revisited evidence found near Martindale Creek to see if it could extract DNA to determine who the remains belonged to, Ogden told CNN. .
The first attempt failed: There was not enough genetic material to generate a usable DNA profile, he said.
They attempted a second DNA extraction.
Another failure.
Next, he explained, Ogden and his team tried to extract DNA from a foot bone.
A critical link, waiting to be found
Around the same time, someone in Christensen’s family had become interested in genealogy and was encouraging relatives to submit DNA records to public sources that help people build family trees, Ogden said.
Praised as a way to explore personal history and connect with previously unknown relatives, DNA matching has also been used to link victims to criminals such as the Happy Face Killer, who murdered at least eight women. He helped lead police to the Golden State Killer, suspected of a dozen murders and more than 50 rapes.
Authorities in the Golden State case used the free genealogy and DNA database GEDmatch to match DNA from the crime scene to a pool of potential suspects created using DNA profiles or genealogical data from public services such as Ancestry, the type which Christensen’s relative had encouraged his family to use.
GEDmatch is also used by the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization that uses genetic genealogy research to identify anonymous remains.
Working with that group, and with DNA from the foot bone from the Martindale Creek remains, the Wayne County Coroner’s Office attempted to put together a potential family tree for the person hunters found in 1982, Ogden said.
Within 24 hours, they had a solid lead, Lori Flowers of the DNA Doe Project told CNN.
The nonprofit had narrowed down GEDmatch’s pool of possible DNA links to the remains of Martindale Creek and the Christensen brothers, he said. Then, reviewing family social media posts and obituaries of relatives, investigators noticed something: Connie Christensen had disappeared from her family’s public record.
But they still had to confirm it.
Ogden approached the missing woman’s son, LaBean.
“Being downstairs,” Ogden recalled, “I was the one who called his daughter and said, ‘I’m a complete stranger, can I come… wipe your cheek?’”
Claiming the identity of his own mother
The couple was his mother.
Beyond Christensen’s identity, the coroner’s office also shared a discovery its team had made about how LaBean’s mother had died, Ogden said: a gunshot wound.
The grim detail unleashed a tangle of new questions: What was Christensen doing in Indiana? Who killed her? And because?
LaBean went to the spot near Martindale Creek where his mother’s remains had been found, he said, and wondered how the killer had driven Christensen so far from the nearest bus line.
“In a way, it makes me feel a little better,” LaBean said of learning the true story of his mother’s absence. “But it also makes me angry because I could have had the opportunity to meet her and someone took that opportunity away from me.”
Maybe publicity about the case will help his family find more answers, LaBean said.
Yet even without that, knowing what happened to Christensen released the stranglehold her family had held so tightly on her memory: a gift to the girl who had wondered for so long why she had been abandoned.
“The most important thing is that I have always loved animals,” LaBean said. “And then I found out that she really liked cats. That’s something I got from her.”
LaBean also claimed the opal ring her mother wore when she died, a nod to her own childhood, when some of the first pieces of jewelry she cherished were opals, she said. The gold wedding ring with two diamonds and an opal hangs from a chain around the neck of the adult daughter, now a mother.
“It’s really come full circle,” Ogden said. “She is wearing the ring that was found there 40 years ago, and it’s mind-blowing to think that her DNA is capable of providing that closure.”
Meanwhile, Christensen’s remains were buried in April among his relatives, including his parents, according to his obituary. “We were able to take her family to the site where her mother was found so they could leave flowers and have a few quiet moments,” Ogden said.
Some longings will remain unrequited, such as LaBean wishing his mother had been able to do her hair before her first high school dance the same way she was said to have done for her own sisters, she told CNN.
Still, the adult daughter, with her entire family, is now eager to return the lost young mother to an embrace multiplied over decades as they finally mourn all they truly lost.
“If Connie was still here with us, she would have been surrounded by all of her nieces, nephews, great-nieces, aunts, uncles and many cousins from both sides of the family,” her obituary read. “Connie would have been an incredible mother to her only daughter, Misty, and her husband, Dan LaBean. “She never had the opportunity to be a loving great-grandmother.”
CNN’s Andy Rose contributed to this report.
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