One afternoon of 2002, Brenda Heist, a car dealership bookkeeper, left her 8-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son in school and sat down in a park to cry desperately and let her worries out before going to work. She was going through a divorce, had two kids and had just been turned down for housing assistance.
This Pennsylvania mother thought her life was crumbling down, when three strangers reached out to comfort her and offered to let her accompany them as they hitchhiked for a month along Interstate 95 on their way to South Florida.
She slept in tents and under bridges, survived by scavenging restaurant trash and panhandling, and did not tell anyone who she was or what was her past life. She contacted no one and used a pseudonym.
Once she was "settled," working odd jobs and scraping by, she met a man with whom she lived for seven years in a camper. The "relationship" didn't work out in the end and she was thrown to the streets again, forcing her to live in a tent facility run by a social service agency.
While she was gone, her husband, Lee Heist was investigated and then cleared as a suspect. He struggled to raise two kids as a single parent, and had to face the effect that their mother's disappearance had on them, since there were people in the neighborhood who would not allow their children to play with Brenda and Lee's children as he had been a suspect.
Years later he was able to get the courts to declare Brenda Heist was legally dead and collected on a life insurance policy. He then remarried.
As for the kids, their daughter is a West Chester University sophomore, and their son recently graduated from the same college and is pursuing a career in law enforcement.
Nostalgia finally kicked in, or perhaps it was the uncertainty of not knowing where you'll wake up tomorrow, if you're going to eat, if the weather will be nice or you'll freeze to a near death; and Brenda approached the police in Florida to explain that she had abandoned her two children on the spur of the moment, leaving behind her old life in central Pennsylvania to become a vagrant.
"Everybody that knew Brenda told us there was absolutely no way Brenda would leave her children," said Lititz Borough Police Detective John Schofield, who suspected for years she may have been killed.
"She explained to me that she just snapped," said Schofield, who met with her in Florida. "She turned her back on her family, she turned her back on her friends, her co-workers. She has a birth certificate and a death certificate, so she's got a long ways to make this right again. She's got to take it slow with her family, I'm sure, and it's going to be a long process."
When Schofield called recently to meet with Lee Heist and the couple's daughter, they assumed he would be notifying them that her remains were found, the detective said.
Both Brenda and her children have expressed a desire to speak with one another, but for now they are taking things slowly.
Heist's true identity was revealed after she turned herself in to Monroe County sheriff's deputies in Key Largo, Florida, and informed them she was a missing person. She also told them she had been arrested under a different name and was on probation, but the nature of those charges have not been discussed.
Police in Lititz said the missing persons case eventually involved dozens of detectives, and the case had never been forgotten, with Heist's picture tacked to a wall at police headquarters.
Lee Heist said he and the children also remembered, and observed anniversaries. Her valuables were returned to her mother years ago. He says he's unsure of what's going to happen with the life insurance policy that paid off on his ex-wife.
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