After three decades of uncertainty, the Andersen family finally know their daughter, sister and mother is dead.

The Frazee family found out last week that Mary Lynn Andersen, who left Minnesota in 1981, was killed two years later in Gillette, Wyo., where she had been living at the time. She was 23.

“She’s coming home,” said her sister, Wendy Ketter.

Andersen and her husband went to Wyoming in 1981, and she last had contact with her family in 1982. The family finally got hold of Andersen’s husband, and he told them that she was missing. The husband, Herb Shondel, died in 2002.

When Wyoming authorities found Andersen dead in a gravel pit on Aug. 10, 1983, they had no identification of the body, and after taking tissue samples and creating a file on her, they buried her on Aug. 28, 1983.

Her skull and teeth were missing. Authorities said at the time the remains might have been damaged and scattered during a road repair project. Investigators said in 1983 they believed that Andersen was killed after Oct. 18, 1982, because records showed she had been hospitalized at that time. No record of her exists after that.

Since her contact with relatives was sporadic, the family didn’t file a missing person’s report until a few years later.

Becker County sheriff’s deputy John Seiling said in a news release that since the report was filed after the body had been found in Wyoming, the connection wasn’t made sooner.

With Andersen registered as missing through the Becker County sheriff’s office, Ketter said the family held out hope that they would see Andersen again.

Ketter and Andersen’s daughter, Crystal, spent countless hours scouring missing persons websites, hoping to find anything on a Jane Doe who would turn out to be Mary Andersen.

Crystal Andersen was adopted and raised by Ketter and Mary Andersen’s parents, Eileen and Wilfred Andersen. She last saw her mother when she was 2.

“We spent hours and would lose sleep,” Crystal Andersen said of searching websites. “It’s very frustrating.”

The family realized later that Andersen’s case hadn’t been entered into the system, so they submitted DNA and made sure the file was up to date and active.

Then on July 2, Ketter said, Becker County sheriff’s investigator Dan Skoog showed up on her doorstep. At first she wondered who was in trouble, but when she saw a man from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension with Skoog, she knew right away it had to do with her sister.

“I was happy they came and told us rather than a phone call,” Crystal Andersen said. DNA samples that Ketter, Crystal Andersen, and Eileen and Wilfred Andersen had submitted matched those of the Wyoming woman.

Andersen’s death has been ruled a homicide, and Wyoming authorities are still working on the case. Crystal Andersen said the Gillette area was known for its oil boom in the early 1980s when her mother went missing and that there were other homicides in that area around the time. Several people were interviewed, to no avail.

There are no leads in the case, but Ketter and Crystal Andersen remain hopeful it will be solved.

Now that they have some answers, it comes with a lot of mixed emotions.

Crystal Andersen said she feels sadness and anger, but also happiness.

“I’m happy she’s coming home. She’ll have a name and not a plot number,” she said.

She said the family knew by this time that Andersen had died because she would have contacted them by now. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t hold onto a glimmer of hope.

Andersen’s body is being cremated and sent back to Frazee, where the family plans to have a funeral. An account has been set up at Frazee Community Bank to pay for expenses.

Though it’s not the ending the family had hoped for, it’s good to have closure, too.

“Thirty-one years — it’s been a fight,” Ketter said.

This report includes information from the Associated Press.