MIDDLEBURY — Her beaming face, forever young, beckons from a black-and-white flyer pinned to an otherwise naked bulletin board in the Middlebury Police Department headquarters on Lucius Shaw Lane.
The young woman, peering serenely through a loosely-parted mane of light-brown hair, could be anyone’s daughter; anyone’s heartache.
But to two generations of Middlebury police officers who have repeatedly walked by her photograph, Lynne Schulze has become the personification of a 33-year-old crusade — the ultimate “cold case,” needle-in-a-haystack, missing persons quest with just enough twists, turns and leads to have kept her search alive since 1971.
“Until we can remove Lynne from the system as a missing person, it’s still open,” said Middlebury police officer Vegar Boe, the latest in a long line of investigators to “inherit” the Schulze case.
Indeed, it is the longest, active missing-persons case in Middlebury’s history. And though many have given up Schulze for dead, state and local authorities are still working sporadic leads in a case they hope to ultimately solve with Internet tips, modern forensics and a lot of luck.
“It’s a sad situation,” Boe said, “but we don’t give up.”
Lynne Schulze entered Middlebury College as a freshman in September 1971. President Richard Nixon was still in the White House. Protests were raging against the Vietnam War. The 26th amendment to the U.S. Constitution had just lowered the voting age to 18.
That was the exact age of Schulze, a native of Simsbury, Conn., who had been settling in well at Middlebury College, by all accounts. While authorities believe she may have been a little depressed and self-conscious — due in part to an acne condition — she appeared to be well-adjusted.
“She was a typical, wholesome, all-American kid off at college,” said Boe, reading from loose notes, police reports and correspondence tucked into the eight-inch-thick Schulze file. “From all indications, she wasn’t into the counter-culture scene of that time.”
THE LADY VANISHES
All of this made the events of Dec, 10, 1971, all the more confounding.
On that day, Schulze had been sitting in her room with some friends, getting ready to take one of their final exams before holiday break.
“They started to head over (to take the exam), and (Schulze) said ‘I have to go back and get a pencil,’” Boe said.
That’s when Lynne Schulze fell off the face of the earth.
“She didn’t show up for the exam,” Boe said. “Later, her friends went back to her room. All her stuff was there, but she was gone. Her wallet was still in the room. That’s not normal for a runaway.”
Middlebury College Campus Security launched a search and called local police. There were few solid clues, but a lot of rumors.
Fred Spencer Jr. was head of campus security at the time of Schulze’s disappearance.
“I remember it,” Spencer, now long-since retired, said on Tuesday. “We checked all around, in the buildings.
“As far as I know, she was never found,” Spencer added. “She could be anywhere.”
The case generated little copy in the college newspaper. After all, it was a tumultuous time in history during which a lot of young people marched to their own tune.
“She was last seen walking south of Middlebury on Route 7, and was presumed to have been hitch-hiking,” reads a three-paragraph blurb that ran, along with her picture, on the front page of the Jan. 28, 1972, issue of the Middlebury Campus newspaper.
The article indicated that Schulze — listed at 5 feet, 3 inches tall and weighing 113 pounds — had left with nothing more than the clothes on her back and $30 cash.
FRUITLESS SEARCH
Police could not confirm that report, nor other alleged sightings of Schulze at Middlebury’s old Lockwood’s Restaurant, in Rutland and in Burlington.
An article in the Jan. 27 issue of the Addison County Independent reported a Bristol man had given a ride to a woman fitting Schulze’s description. The man said he had taken her to the interstate, where she planned to hitchhike to Washington, D.C. But at the same time, calls came in from Northampton, Mass., and Claremont, N.H., from people swearing they’d seen Schulze.
Meanwhile, Otto and Virginia Schulze — Lynne’s parents — came to Middlebury to clean out their daughter’s dorm room and join in the search. The couple circulated photos of Lynne, but every promising lead turned into a dead end.
Authorities thought they’d solved the mystery in May 1972, when they believed they’d tracked Schulze to a commune in Greensboro Bend in Orleans County.
Former Middlebury Police Chief Robert Van Ness reported that two officers — including former Vergennes Police Chief Norman Gadue — had positively identified her as being at the commune. Van Ness was so sure he’d located Schulze, he was preparing to cancel a 50-state missing persons alarm that had been sounded after her disappearance.
The commune tip, however, proved to be a case of mistaken identity.
Subsequent police interviews with some of Schulze’s friends added a further element of intrigue into the case.
“She apparently had made some comments about dropping out of society,” Boe said. “Some people thought she had more or less succeeded.”
Days turned into months, and months turned into years. The more time went by, the colder Schulze’s trail became. The hole in Otto and Virginia Schulze’s heart grew larger. There was nothing in the family history to indicate friction between Lynne and her parents.
“As a parent, your heart goes out to the parents in this case,” Middlebury Police Chief Tom Hanley said. “They went through a whole lifetime, not knowing what happened to their daughter. That is a motivating factor in keeping this case alive.”
MODERN TECHNOLOGY
Otto and Virginia Schulze died several years ago, but not before leaving a genetic key that could one day unlock the secret of their daughter’s fate.
In 1992, authorities went to Florida to take DNA samples from the parents that, together with dental records, could produce a match for remains that fit Lynne Schulze’s profile.
That information is on file with Vermont State Police, as well as on the “Doe Network,” a Web site for unidentified and missing persons.
Boe explained that each state has a Doe Network coordinator who tries to match missing people with profiles that periodically pop up on the Web site.
“Recently, we have gotten lots of tips from the Doe Network,” Boe said.
The hottest of those tips came in 2002, when authorities in Columbus, Ohio, uncovered a set of bones they believed could have belonged to Schulze. Middlebury police sent along Lynne’s dental records and DNA profile.
“They could not rule her in, or rule her out,” Boe said of the results of that investigation.
On another front Lynne’s face appears, with 11 others, on a Vermont State Police Web site devoted to missing people. VSP Lt. Tim Oliver has maintained the site for the past year and a half.
There Lynne holds court, with Vermont’s other “lost children,” which include Gracie Reapp, last seen on June 6, 1978; Heidi Wilbur, who disappeared on Feb. 11, 1991; and Brianna Maitland, last seen on March 19, 2004.
“The cases on the Web site are the ones we felt have a chance of being solved,” Oliver said. “We are hoping that someone will see a face and it will jog their memory.”
PURSUING LOCAL LEADS
But Middlebury police have not been overly reliant on such Web sites; they’ve been doing their own field work on the case.
Hanley recalled that in 1991, a fisherman snagged some hair while angling beneath the Otter Creek falls.
“We put some divers in, but found nothing,” Hanley said. “It was human hair, but not consistent with (Lynne’s).”
Middlebury police occasionally check the banks of the Otter Creek, to see if any human remains may have washed up on shore.
“She didn’t just vaporize,” Hanley said, summarizing the frustration of his department.
It’s a frustration that’s been exacerbated by false murder confessions from inmates in prisons stretching from New York to Florida. One suspect, implicated in the disappearance of some teen-aged girls in upstate New York at the time, confessed to killing Schulze.
“Each time, (the suspects) were ruled out,” Boe said. “They were trying to stay their own executions.”
Authorities have also looked into cults, to see if Schulze may have been brainwashed into abandoning her former life. Again, no sign of her.
“The whole surroundings of how she disappeared mystifies us,” Boe said.
The Addison Independent’s current efforts to find Lynne Schulze’s three siblings were unsuccessful at press time. The Independent contacted five local members of the Middlebury College class of 1975, but those former students had no recollections of Lynne as a fellow classmate. Schulze was only at Middlebury for three months prior to her disappearance, giving her little time to forge substantial friendships.
NO GIVING UP
While many members of the Middlebury police were not even born when Schulze disappeared, they vowed to continue their search for the mysterious girl they simply refer to as “Lynne.”
She would now be 52 years old.
“She’s our missing girl; that’s the way it’s been since 1971,” Boe said. “We hope we can give her peace, and her family peace, but we have yet to get to that point, unfortunately.”
“It’s tough for us to not know what happened,” Hanley said. “It’s a local tragedy, (that’s) what it is.”
Along with Schulze’s flyer, Hanley draws resolve from a small piece of paper he keeps in his desk drawer. The paper bears the name, picture and vital statistics of Doreen Vincent, a 17-year-old girl who vanished in Wallingford, Conn., on June 15, 1988. Hanley, at the time, was an investigator on the Wallingford force.
Vincent has never been found.
“It’s a case that’s still haunting me to this day,” Hanley said.
Boe believes the case will eventually be solved, though it’s not likely to have a happy ending.
“There are a lot of woods out there,” Boe said. “She could be 30 feet away from the campus.”