After Mollie Tibbetts, others with missing loved ones try to cope with decades of pain

Mike Kilen | The Des Moines Register

Show Caption Hide Caption What should you do if someone is abducted or goes missing? Here's what you should do if someone you know is abducted or goes missing.

It’s been a hard summer for the families of the long-term missing in Iowa.

People are asking them how they are coping after two well-known cases that emerged in 2018 were apparently resolved in August, while they wait in limbo. (Mollie Tibbetts' death has been confirmed, and authorities say they've recovered remains consistent with those of Jake Wilson.)

Some cope by dedicating their lives to the investigation, even buying a gun and interviewing suspects. Others continue to hand out photographs, or scan the internet for stories of unidentified remains found. Some petition to have their loved one declared dead.

“Everyone finds their own coping skills,” said Carolyn Pospisil, whose 15-year-old stepdaughter Erin Pospisil was last seen on June 3, 2001, in Cedar Rapids. “But the biggest part, for me, is remembering that you have a life, and you have to go on with it — move forward. That doesn’t mean I give up.”

Erin was a social young woman who was going to visit a friend but didn't come home that night. It was a weekend, so her parents thought she had stayed overnight and had not told them. Carolyn called around and no one had seen her.

She waited until Monday to call the police, thinking she had to wait 72 hours before filing a missing-person complaint. That requirement changed after one of the nation’s most notorious missing-person cases.

Johnny Gosch, 12, went missing while delivering newspapers in 1982. He has never been found, but the case has had wide-ranging impact because his mother has never quit pushing.

"You have a choice: Are you going to rise up and do something, or are you going to sit there and feel bad?” Noreen Gosch told the Des Moines Register last year.

She advocated for a change in the Iowa law that previously required a three-day wait.

Carolyn Pospisil and her family, who have since moved to the Omaha area, had moments of hope, such as when a friend of Erin’s reported seeing her in the back seat of a car the following spring. But years passed with no answers.

She had a year of dreams of Erin trapped in a hole, in a barrel, in an attic. She became too much of an expert on human trafficking. She and her husband, Jim, who have four other children, let loose balloons on Erin’s birthday.

“You do what have to do to get through the next day. I used to feel raw when something happened in the news — like the girls who were found in Cincinnati a few years ago. It would bring up this raw emotion. I don’t get that way anymore, but I’m 17 years out on this.”

She sought solace through Team Hope, a support group through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an organization launched two years after Gosch went missing.

“I wouldn’t have been able to get through this without their help,” she said.

More: 'Bring these kids home': As officials search for Mollie Tibbetts and Jake Wilson, vigil honors missing Iowans

Limbo, grief eats at families

There were 377 people listed as missing in Iowa as of Aug. 27. Police say most are suspected runaways, while some of the 78 listed as endangered or involuntarily disappeared on Iowa Missing Person’s Clearinghouse have been gone for years.

Family members are left with racing thoughts: Were they murdered? If so, by whom? If they are alive, what are they going through? Some kind of torture? As time goes by, a hope remains that can almost become a pain by itself.

“They can't properly grieve the loss of the loved one because there's always that uncertainty — that perhaps they are still out there, that maybe they'll be able to get away and return home,” said Jody Ewing, who has worked with numerous Iowa families over years to post information on the website Iowa Cold Cases.

It’s tragic, says the author of “The Long Term Missing,” a guide for family members of missing persons.

“I met parents whose daughter went missing in 1979. That couple is elderly now, and they are still dedicated to finding their daughter’s remains,” said Silvia Pettem of Boulder, Colorado.

Not all families react the same. Pettern recalls one that believed their daughter had run off and was living her life elsewhere.

“But when they found out she was murdered, they felt guilt that they should have been out looking for her — it brings up a lot of wounds,” Pettem said.

She suggests families take an active role: acquire police files, do your own research, ask the media for coverage, and list your DNA sample on namus.gov in case remains are found and can be matched. Communicate frequently, but don't hound investigators, who are sometimes criticized by families who feel their case isn't getting the same attention as others from the media.

Previously: In Iowa, 48 juveniles went missing in July. Here's why that number might be misleading.

More: Despite concerns following Mollie Tibbetts disappearance, missing juvenile numbers remain steady, state says

'I have to. It's a must. I can't let this go.'

Jerry Leopold of Boone is taking the active approach. He wakes up every day and dedicates it to finding his son Jesse, who went missing on Oct. 13, 2016. The 6-foot-1, 185-pound man was 23. He was last seen leaving work at a food processing plant in Jewell. His purple Ford pickup was later found in Ledges State Park with the keys in the ignition.

Jerry Leopold said he raised his son since he was 6 years old, after a split with the boy’s mother. The two went fishing and mushroom hunting together and worked on their cars and around the house together. He said Jesse was diagnosed as bipolar but often didn’t have enough money at the end of the month for his medication, so he turned to illegal drugs.

But Leopold said he had gotten clean of drugs and had landed a job.

“It makes a father feel good when you can get past that barrier,” he said. “We made it to the end of that crap.”

Leopold said he knew his son was mixed up in a threatening crowd, so he immediately swung into action when Jesse came up missing and found his pickup in the park.

“I flipped out down in that canyon. We searched the park high and low, all winter,” said Leopold, who is disabled. “I was up and down the river near Fraser — myself and a couple of other people — for weeks.”

He hasn't stopped looking.

“I have to. It’s a must. I can’t let this go,” he said.

He wakes up every day and the memories of his son are all around his home. Then he gets to work on his computer, putting information on a Facebook page: “Find Jesse Leopold.” He asked people who were going to the Iowa State Fair to hand out flyers. He was interviewed for a popular podcast called “The Vanished.”

“I miss him bad,” he said. “I can’t derive pleasure from anything I used to do. So this is something I have to do or, I feel, I will be failing him once again. He was the only one to continue the Leopold name. When they killed him, they killed my family line.”

He said he’s 99 percent sure his son is dead. Most never get to that resolution in their mind.

Pauline Boss calls that limbo “ambiguous loss.” She has studied it for 40 years and is a pioneer in the research.

“You can’t cope with something until you know what it is. To give it a name helps them,” said the emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota and author of “Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief.”

It’s a place of limbo — neither here nor gone — that, for some, can last a lifetime.

“When someone is missing, we are frozen in place," Boss said. "Some are waiting for the person to come back home and others are afraid to grieve because they think it’s disloyal to the person who may be alive.”

Decades of questions

Midwestern culture is particularly prone to clear either-or answers that don't leave room for ambiguity.

"They need to move from absolute thinking — 'He is either dead or alive; either here or never coming back' — to, 'He may come back' or 'He is probably dead — but maybe not,'" she said. “The only place to find peace is in that paradox.”

There is, she said, no place for the word “closure” — family members hate that word. What loved ones are looking for is a resolution.

Betsy Showers of Indianola, however, isn't looking for a resolution. She is convinced her father, William Douglas Sr., is dead.

She said they were best friends. He called every day, without exception. She says he instilled his strong work ethic in his daughter; she rarely misses a day of work as a trucker.

“I hunted and fished with him; I pulled calves; I drove tractors — I did everything. I was like a boy,” Showers said.

The family was gathered, having beers and watching the Super Bowl in 2004 on her 63-year-old father’s farmland outside Woodburn. After she left that day, she never saw him again.

The farm pond was drained. Questions were asked. A psychic was consulted by one family member. The trauma led to a split in the family with her brother.

Showers, 53, is so convinced he won’t be found that she petitioned the court to have him declared dead to settle his estate, and in 2009, he was. Yet his missing person case remains open.

“It’s still tough. My kids don’t have a grandpa,” she said. “And we never did have a grave.”

Others have wrestled with questions for nearly 30 years.

Lindsy Crews, 32, was just 3 when her mother, Barbara Lenz, went missing at age 31. She has flashes of memories of her mother with their cat and its kittens or sitting in their apartment in Woodbine.

Her father raised her in Omaha. She found out a few years later that her mother was not coming back. She felt a significant part of her life had been taken from her — a mother with a free spirit who loved art and horses. At age 18, she decided to talk to detectives and got hope that someday there might be a resolution.

“I believe as some people come to the end of their life, they might say something,” said Crews.

In 2006, remains were found in a barrel. Crews had her DNA entered into a database, but there was no match. The hard part is keeping on top of the case, knowing when remains are found so she can call to authorities to confirm they didn't belong to her mother.

The hardest part is hearing or reading the name “Barbara.” Against her rational thinking, she thinks it could be her mother, who might walk back into her life and tell her why she's been gone so long.

Crews said it was jarring when she turned 31, the same age her mother went missing.

“Becoming a mother myself and seeing the moments she experienced has helped — it helped me get over some of the bitterness and have peace,” Crews, the mother of children ages 11, 8 and 5, said. “But it never goes away.”

A couple of years ago, she took her children to visit a memorial marker that her aunt and uncle had planted nearby. It had been a surprise gift to her.

The stone is engraved with these words: “Mother of Lindsy.”