Daughter's disappearance means lifetime of regret
25 years later, mother has only memories left
By Darcy Henton, The Edmonton JournalMay 25, 2009
Twenty-five years have passed since 18-year-old Carolyn Pruyser vanished without a trace from a hillside overlooking Peace River, but time has not eased her mother's pain. Annemarie Pruyser thinks about her youngest daughter often, but May, the month Carolyn disappeared, is an especially tough time for her. While life blossoms all around her on the rural property where Carolyn and her three sisters were raised, Annemarie, now 82, mourns.
"I would trade anything to have her back, but this is what life has passed on to me," she says. "My husband passed away three years ago. He never got over it -- the fact that he wasn't able to do anything for her. He just gave up. So I am sitting here alone on top of this hill. On days like this, I think about her -- especially these days in May."
Carolyn had borrowed the family's blue sedan on Friday, May 17, 1984, to drive into town to watch Game 4 of the Oilers-New York Islanders Stanley Cup playoffs with her girlfriend. After the Oilers victory, the teens grabbed a submarine sandwich at the local mall. The blue-eyed, blond University of Alberta student then ducked into a store to purchase a pack of cigarettes before driving her friend home shortly after midnight. It was the last time anyone reported having seen her.
When her father, Kees, then a 58-year-old agricultural field man, awoke early that Saturday, he immediately noticed the car wasn't parked in the yard.
He checked his daughter's room, asked his wife to start calling their daughter's friends and headed out to look for her. He travelled only four kilometres down the road toward town when he found the car parked on the shoulder.
When he saw the driver's window was open and his daughter's purse had been left inside, he called police. RCMP were on the scene within minutes with a tracking dog and began combing the hilly, wooded terrain between the town limits and the Pruyser home.
Later, hundreds of volunteers methodically searched a 220-square-km grid, but their efforts were hampered by three days of pouring rain. Forestry officials flew over the area with heat-detecting cameras, divers checked 30 area lakes and ponds and RCMP searched the nearby Peace River in boats.
For three nights, police set up a roadblock on Kaufman Hill road where the car was abandoned to determine who was travelling the road that led to oil camps, farms, acreages and a First Nations community. After two weeks, the search was called off, but RCMP continued to follow up on hundreds of tips, amassing more than 2,000 files in their efforts to solve the mystery.
"I don't know how it can be possible that one minute you are around and the next minute you are gone," says Annemarie. "I sit in my chair and wonder: 'Did this happen to me?' It's kind of surreal. It's like I'm between two lives."
Over the years, some people have written letters suggesting where her daughter's body could be found -- under a certain bale in a haystack or near a sawmill -- but the family's incessant searching never turned up a single clue.
"There's nothing I can physically do anymore," laments Annemarie. "I can't go look under trees or bushes. For all I know, she could be in the river. Where do you start?" She says in the first years after her daughter disappeared, the family was constantly looking. "I went from tree to tree to tree. After awhile I thought, this is ridiculous, but I had to do something in the beginning."
Through it all, Annemarie has stayed rooted in the same home and has no plan to move. Two of her daughters live in the area and the third lives in Port Alberni, B.C.
Sometimes some of Carolyn's friends call, but others shy away from her when they happen to encounter Annemarie in town. "I imagine it's very painful for them," she says.
A Facebook page has been set up in Carolyn's memory. The last friend to see Carolyn posted a heartfelt note. "I can remember that nite like it was just yesterday," she wrote. "I still remember a phone call that morning from her dad -- the airplanes, the dogs, the RCMP, and the question of 'If it didn't rain we would have more of an idea what happened.' She will always be remembered in many ways ... Her friends will never forget her."
There have been rumours over the years that a local man might be responsible. Annemarie says she once thought about confronting the man, but her husband was against it. "I thought I would go and speak to him and see what he has to say for himself and see how he would behave, but my husband wouldn't let me do it."
Carolyn's brother-in-law, Derek Hanebury, wrote a book of poems called Nocturnal Tonglen that chronicles the family's anguish and the journey of healing that followed. Annemarie said her daughters thought the poems might be too painful for her, but she had to read the book. "I thought it was beautiful," she says.
She keeps it, with Carolyn's graduation photo depicted on the cover, in her bookcase. It's all she has left.
dhenton@thejournal.canwest.com© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Daughter+disappearance+means+lifetime+regret/1627448/story.html
Topic: Carolyn Pruyser - Missing - Peace River (1984) (Read 1278 times)
