Her body was found soon after in a motel room in Rockford, Illinois, after an apparent suicide.
She left a note saying that her son, Timmothy, was now in safe hands with someone who loved him and that “You will never find him.” And no one has.
Until — maybe — Wednesday.
That’s when a boy who said his name was Timmothy Pitzen, and that he was 14, sprinted across a bridge from Cincinnati into Newport, Kentucky.
Bystanders initially thought he might be trying to steal a car. But when they approached, they saw bruises and abrasions on his face. The boy asked for help, saying he had been held against his will and traded among people for years, and that he just wanted to go home.
Police have not yet said whether the boy really is Timmothy Pitzen, and federal investigators were scrambling to use DNA tests and other methods to try to determine his identity Thursday.
But the boy told them that he had fled from a Red Roof Inn in Ohio, and, according to a police report, “had just escaped from two kidnappers that have been holding him for seven years.”
He described his captors as two white men in a Ford SUV with Wisconsin plates, both of them built like bodybuilders. One had curly black hair and a tattoo of a spider web on his neck; the other man was short and had a snake tattoo on his arms.
A woman who said she was present when police arrived to take the boy to a hospital said that he appeared agitated, and it looked like he had been struck in his face.
“All of this was red, and this was red, like he’d been punched,” the woman, Fray Knight, said, pointing to both of her cheeks, near her eyes.
“He just was real antsy,” she said. “He wouldn’t stand still. The police had to get him up to the car because he wouldn’t stand still.”
Another witness told a police dispatcher that the boy had approached and pleaded for help.
“He walked up to my car and he went, ‘Can you help me? I just want to get home. Please help me,’ ” the 911 caller said. “I asked him what’s going on, and he tells me he’s been kidnapped and he’s been traded through all these people and he just wanted to go home.”
A Newport resident, Sharon Hall, told a local television station that she had initially spotted the boy out of her window, wandering around like he might have been planning to steal a car.
“There was a young man standing by my neighbor’s car,” Hall said. “The way he was acting, he was fidgety, he was moving around, he was looking in her car.”
A spokesman for the Police Department in Aurora, Sgt. Bill Rowley, also told the station that police have “probably had thousands of tips of him popping up in different areas” over the years, and they did not yet have any idea of whether the boy’s story was true.
“It could be Pitzen,” he said. “It could be a hoax.”
As of Thursday morning, authorities still had not determined the boy’s identity but said that they believed they were getting closer to an answer.
“We still have no confirmation of the identity of the person located, but hope to have something later this afternoon or early this evening,” the Aurora police said in a statement posted on Facebook.
“Our primary focus here is in assisting the FBI in their investigation, and provide information from our missing person case involving Timmothy Pitzen, should this prove to be him. Unless or until his identity is confirmed, we have no official statement at this time.”
The FBI has confirmed only that it is working with local police and sheriff’s departments on the case, adding, “There will be no further statement made on this matter until we have additional information.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.