The phone calls began a year after Gina Bos disappeared from
outside of Duggan's Pub. The 40-year-old mother of three performed at open mic
night, stashed her guitar in the trunk of her green Saturn and vanished before
she could close the lid.
Sometimes it's smack that killed
her.
Sometimes it's meth.
Sometimes it's the Mexican Mafia, silencing her because she
knew too much about the drug trade.
"It's never first-hand information,"
says Lincoln Police Detective Greg Sorensen. "But it keeps going around and
around in a vicious circle."
Four years after Gina's disappearance, the
detective contends with a case as baffling as any in his 25 years on the
force.
He has no evidence to make him believe the rumors are true. But he
will say this: Gina knew the person she left with that night. And Gina is
dead.
"We don't have enough information to say who killed Gina, but I
don't think Gina just walked away."
Some of the rumors came from busted
drug dealers, bartering with the cops.
Sometimes people called to say
they knew the truth and just wanted to clear their consciences.
"At the
time one of the rumors was coming in we were having heroin overdoses in the city
and that was the link," says Sorensen.
"A couple of times I thought,
‘This is it.'"
And then it wasn't. People lied. Trails
dead-ended.
But, someone out there knows, he says.
They know where
her body is. They know how she died.
Jannel Rap doesn't clean her closets
anymore. She lets the clutter in her house settle around her.
She calls
her sisters. They tell her the same thing: They don't have the energy to set
their households straight.
"What kind of metaphor is that for what's
going on inside our heads?" asks Rap, a songwriter with a husky voice, a voice
like her missing sister's.
Then she answers her own
question.
"It's so cluttered inside our heads," she says. "Why clean the
house?"
The clutter comes from four years of not knowing. Four years of
waking up, missing Gina, consumed with finding her.
Growing up they sang.
All seven sons and daughters of Carl and Dee Rap.
Gina was in the
middle.
They didn't have much money, but their daddy was an itinerant
preacher, and they went from church to church praising God and entertaining
congregations with gospel music.
Gina took up the guitar in her 20s. She
loved her acoustic guitar so much she gave it a name: "Harley."
It
was like her fourth child, her friends joked.
And she loved to
perform.
"Stage junkie," they'd tease the petite, outgoing
woman.
She'd climb onto the stage at Duggan's whenever she could. She
played with her brother Von every week until she got a job at Kinko's a few
months before she disappeared.
Sometimes people turn up missing and no
one is too alarmed.
It wasn't that way with Gina.
Police called
her disappearance suspicious from the start.
Duggan's had just closed
when she walked out onto 11th street, a slim, auburn-haired woman wearing a
beige blazer.
Later, someone will remember her talking to two men near
her car. Someone else will remember walking by and seeing the singer, alone,
near her car and hearing nothing out of the ordinary as he headed
home.
The case was immediately visible. HuskerVision featured Gina on the
big screen the Saturday after she vanished.
The media covered the case,
and family and friends distributed 12,000 fliers.
Over the years,
detectives investigated more than 500 tips.
Rap, who lives in Los
Angeles, has staged 70 concerts across the country since her little sister
disappeared to bring attention to Gina and others who are missing.
She's
hosting a television series aired in Southern California called "America
Lost and Found."
She's started an organization: G.I.N.A. for Missing
Persons. The letters stand for "Greater Information Now
Available."
Sometimes the rumors drift out west to her. Last month
someone called with the same old story. A friend of a friend was at a party.
Gina was there. She OD'd. They took her body and buried it in the
country.
"It's, ‘OK, here we go again.'"
She doesn't believe her
sister used drugs. "She was against them."
Sorensen agrees. "We have
found no evidence that she was a drug user."
Gina was taking medication
when she disappeared. She'd struggled for years with depression and then the
opposite, too much energy, a mania that took hold and wouldn't let
go.
Gina knew better than to take street drugs with her prescription, Rap
says.
She had a new job in the fall of 2000. A new boyfriend. She and the
kids had been selected to receive a Habitat for Humanity house.
Life was
good.
Rap has new friends now — mothers and brothers of the
missing.
She has a new job selling real estate, hoping to earn enough to
finance the dreadful hobby foisted upon her four years ago.
It's a
strange life.
"It's like you are constantly late for an appointment and
you don't know how to get there, what time you are supposed to be there, who you
are supposed to meet …"
One night this summer, in the house she can't
seem to keep clean, Rap went to a Web site.
She'd been there before. "The
Doe Network."
She clicked on the missing, the Jane Does, bodies no one
claimed.
One by one she searched the faces, looking for links to
Gina.
She found a woman in Canada. Physically, she sounded like Gina. A
computer-enhanced image on the computer screen looked like Gina.
She
called Sorensen. They are waiting for DNA results.
"It's probably not
her," Rap says. "I want it to be, though. I think we all do."
They've
chased a lot of ghosts, the detective says. In Colorado. Arizona. California.
Michigan. Canada.
"I'm reaching in the dark," he
says.
He doesn't have enough information to know whether the rumors carry
any weight whatsoever.
He's looking for someone.
"Somebody with a
conscience who has the guts to come forward and let us know where her body
is."
They can call him, he says. They can call Crime Stoppers. They can
stop a cop on the street.
Anything.
"Find a way of letting us find
the body," he says. "The family deserves to know.
"Her children deserve
to know."
It's hard losing hope, Rap says.
But she agrees with the
detective: They need a body.
They need to clear the clutter from their
minds.
"We want to bring her home."
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick
at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.