Her body was found soon after in a motel room in Rockford, Illinois, after an apparent suicide.
She left a note saying 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 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 had not determined the identity of the boy who had been found but said they believed they were getting closer to an answer.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.