One of the most prominent influences in a woman’s life is that of her mother. It’s easy to find songs or poems, cards or charms to make iconic motherly thoughts tangible. In fact, according to Hallmark, 141 million Mother’s Day cards are purchased each year. Moms are unarguably important. When you think of your own mom; if you had just 3 words to tell everyone about her, what would they be?
Friday afternoon I spent a few hours with a wonderful mom of 6 children. Ask any and all of them and they will tell the you the same thing, She’s —-always there for me, my biggest cheerleader, showing me right from wrong, teaching me how to cook, kissing boo-boos, wiping noses, worrying when no one else cares and caring like no one else can. The likes of their mom are written all over those greeting cards, and deservingly so. Last week we talked for hours about her own mom. The words used as she spoke of her were much different.
Not yet 5 year old Madonna and her baby brother were living with her mom and dad in West Virginia circa 1970’s where life was stuck in tough times for their marriage. Though they had filed with the courts, divorces were not handled like they are today and a judge had denied her parents’ request noting the two children they had together and told them they should try to work it out.
Whatever happened in between then and the day when Madonna and her brother were sitting on their mom’s lap, a recliner blocking the door that separated them from her dad’s rage upon finding his belongings and himself locked out of the house, reconciliation was not part of it.
The school year was spent with their mom and summers with their dad. Not that any of it was perfect, but Mom’s was a safer place to be. No one, especially totally defenseless children, should have to endure abuse. I saw the papers that were written up charging her dad with kidnapping: his own children, and he took them from their mother. Had it been out of love, had there been none of the evilness in his heart and had that little girl not endured the years of abuse that she had (which her mom had found out about), maybe it wouldn’t have mattered so much. But he did, and it did.
I’m not sure how a parent charged with kidnapping is also rewarded custody, but that’s exactly what happened. Madonna’s dad’s usually spent summers with the kids, but in 1974 he wanted to change that around for some reason and they moved back in with him March, ahead of the ordinary plan. No one will ever know why that change was made or how far her dad’s plans or thoughts were laid out…ever.
Madonna and I grabbed a cup of coffee and continued talking. It was one of those times you wish you were reading fiction-something that could be put down and never revisited because it was so horrible, but it wasn’t. She had more to share.
She was a child. It was a long time ago. And a lot is left blurry at best. Yet, there’s a steadfast memory of the last night she saw her mom. Sometime in the 1980s, while the missing person’s case was active, she was invited to share her ‘dream’ with the active detective on the case.
Paraphrasing:
Aunt Lola was my mom’s sister and the one whom I would call ever now and then when I needed to talk. Soon after my mom’s disappearance, my dad took my brother and I aside and said, “Your mom is gone and she’s never coming back. You, me and anyone else in this family will not speak her name again.” And they didn’t. I wasn’t allowed to see my mom’s side of the family any more, Dad married his mistress Phyllis who became my step mom, and my brother and I grew up with not a mention of our real mom. It wasn’t until I was 18 that my mom’s family reached out to sit down and talk with me. I made a connection with Aunt Lola. As I occasionally would do, I called her one night because it all felt so close-more urgent than other days- for some reason.
Unknowingly to me, a detective had recently spoken with her. A series of events had led to the cold case file on Detective Swiger’s desk being rustled anew. Strangely enough, he was the detective but not in the county where my mom went missing. I was to be kept in the dark until the detective was ready to talk with me and therefore Aunt Lola had not picked up the phone to call me. That ship sank quickly, and with my inconsequential phone call, Aunt Lola spilled the beans.
We refilled our coffee, took a breather for some lighter chit-chat and then got back to it:
Annita Maria Price. Missing Person from Moundsville, WV Since May 30, 1974
God still in the details.
Betty was a passenger as the medical taxi traveled through Morganstown, WV, a neighboring town of Moundsville when she happened to be with Kenneth, Madonna’s Uncle. Her question may have caught him off guard as he was 15 years younger than Madonna’s father and therefore more disconnected than some of the other family members. Nevertheless the question was asked: had his family ever found out what happened to Annita? It seems it was met with both emptiness and curiosity. Of course the answer was, No, but why would Betty be asking? Betty and her family grew up with all of the Price children in that small rural area of West Virginia, and at the time her dad worked very closely with Madonna’s dad. Betty knew what her dad told of the day Annita disappeared.
Not able to get it off his mind as he drove back through Morganstown shortly thereafter, Kenneth used the phone booth outside of grocery store to phone the police department with an anonymous tip. The detective, in Morganstown-the wrong jurisdiction for this case-had all but dismissed any chance of a lead for the Annita Price cold case...until that tip came in. He recognized the name and got right to work. He first found out who made that call. He spoke with Kenneth. He spoke with Lola who could only tell him the little she knew that came from the dreams of a little 5 year old girl through the years. Seems like the detective was on a hot trail and was ready to see it through, but first he wanted to talk with as many people he could whose names were on the original police report from 1974. As he listened to Lola, he knew he had to talk with Madonna…but in time. For now, Madonna had no idea the case was being freshly stirred– except that she did. A woman’s intuition is no small thing.
After that phone call to her Aunt Lola, Detective Madonna went back to work. Her own files were deeper and wider than any police departments’ regarding her mom. Did you realize that a “Cold Case” is so because noone has the funds or the time to keep working on it? Did you know that most of the work done in such cases is by the hands of the families? So, it was back to the grindstone and not long before Madonna had the Detective Swiger’s name and makes a phone call. She told him, “Find Tim {Jim} Persinger, he worked for my dad; he knows.”
Madonna’s account (again, paraphrased) of that call after the niceties were behind:
I can’t really tell you too much; I was not quite six years old and it was a long time ago. No one ever spoke of my mom, and when I did, I was punished. The memories I have are in my dream. Prompted to continue, Detective Swiger encouraged, “Humor me…” So I did. I don’t know why or how we crossed paths that night, but my brother and I were lying down and told to go to sleep in the back seat as my dad drove down the road with one of my uncles following him. My mom met him along the road on her way to work, purportedly after dropping of her boyfriend for his own nightshift work she was heading to her own job but never showed up. However she got there, I remember my mom being in the front seat of the car and her and dad yelling at one another. The car stopped and they got out, I remember being on the construction site near some power lines as I sat up from the back seat of the car. I saw my dad shoot my mom in the head and my uncle appearing in front of me, stood on the other side of the window peering in at me with his pointer finger vertically in front of his lips and shaking his head from side to side. I never saw my mom again.
What Madonna didn’t know as she retold her dream was that the detective had one informant: her dad’s right hand man at work in 1974, Mr. JIM Persinger. She’d had all the details right, and it seems, as only the detective knew, hers and Mr. Persinger’s stories were one in the same.
I was scribbling a mess of notes while my own logically driven mind kept going back to the facts and the questions, which seemed so obvious, rolled off my tongue. Why did your dad get custody of you when he’d been charged with kidnapping you only a short time before? Didn’t anyone else know? Why would Mr. Persinger keep quite all these years? Couldn’t the detectives see the connections? Why, when they knew you had a great case, would they not prosecute?
Why, why, why?
Her answer?
No body.
Reasonable doubt because of no body would throw any jury.
HER DAD murdered her mom, buried her body amongst the power lines and kept the secret there all these years.
Small town means friends in high places. Secrets deep can, and were, dismissed with a simple “No.” Over and over. Still, due to the validity of the evidence, trained dogs were brought out to those power lines. Five dogs trained in tracking human remains, from 2 separate groups of handlers,
all zeroed in on one area...
in the same spot as Madonna’s “dream” had her so long ago, and all too frequently. Sadly, some Smithsonian’s “experts” very shallowly got involved only to shake it off as a dump of trash and nothing more….despite the collaboration of those 5 highly trained dogs who had never worked all together before.
However, there was a little bit more knowledge to be added to the missing pieces through that time. One of the reasons given for dismissing the site as what Madonna remembered it for, was that power lines would have been grounded by wires and secured in the ground but they had no evidence of that (said poked pole 18” deep in a few places). Mind ever-churning, Madonna accepted that as a challenge. The detective in her went back there-videographer in tow. Not only did she find the power line poles, she found exactly what they said they’d need but didn’t see before. Measuring it out meticulously on a site where once was open ground construction, she found each power line post was the exact same distance apart in two directions,
except for one.
That one was in the area where the dogs alerted to human remains. Knowing that if she could find, buried decades ago, the eye of that ground-laden securing tie, she’d have the proof that they were looking for. She didn’t have to look hard. She stepped back only to realize she was stepping right on it!
Still, no body.
The ‘experts’ who had been out from the Smithsonian claimed this was little more than a trash pile they stood upon and no human remains would be found…despite the collaboration of those 5 highly trained dogs who had never worked all together before.
No…..body….
In my own flux of frustration I walked back through the past 30-40 years with my friend. With each next word, my heart’s ache doubled: Tami, I lived with the tiniest grain of doubt. What if she was still alive? What if she was really just missing and not dead? Would she come back for me? If I sang well enough-would she listen and approve? If I acted in the best school play, would she come? If I looked good enough, would that win her running back to get me? I would try doing all the ordinary and any extraordinary with hope against hope that my mom would come back to me.
Madonna’s abuse from her dad was evil and continual until, using all that her dad had taught her about guns, she put a dead stop to it as a 15 year old girl. She told trusted adults of her abuse, they didn’t believe her. PLEASE, when someone tells you they’re being abused-especially if they’re children-BELIEVE them! The absolute worse is they’ll be proved a liar, and the best can’t begin to compare.
I flashed back to my years of teaching as she retold of another day longing for her mom, and for her mom to just be acknowledged as hers –and as real. As if we went back in time, I the teacher and she a little girl, I pictured her in a navy blue dress and saddle shoes, red bow in her hair looking up at me with her precious brown eyes as her heart -carried on her sleeve-questioned, “You know my mom?”
I was sitting in school filling out a form where it asked for my mom’s name. I penciled in: “A.n.n.i.t.a.” Caught by surprise only knowing of my step mom, my teacher said, “That’s not your mom’s name.” When I responded with, “No, Phyllis is my step mom, Annita is my real mom.
And the next question rolled off her tongue, “Where is your real mom?”
“She’s dead, My dad shot her in the head.”
Immediately I found myself in the office where the school had called my dad and had him pick me up within minutes. You can only imagine what that meant when I got home.
Eventually, I learned to just shut-up. I quit telling my story,
but my story never quit on me.
This tragedy has no happy ending. It does, however, have a few miracles. The cycle of abuse, the lack of acceptance and love from her dad all stopped when she married as a 19 year old woman and started her own family. Madonna is a wonderful mother of six children. She is Jeff’s lovely wife-and he’s not quiet about telling you so. She’s a loyal friend; I’m thankful to know her and call her just that. All this despite what could have ruined her and left a wake in her life’s path much the same of what she lived. Her resolve stared with,
“I determined {I told her she could stop there as her determination was clear. Crystal clear. She continued.} this would stop with me-it would not continue to my own family...” I’m so thankful.
Even so, that didn’t stop the hurt-the old hurts, the broken– to-smithereens hurt when you would swear no pieces were even left bigger than a speck to be sift-able. And it didn’t stop the new hurt.
I can’t imagine the roller coaster of emotions that accompany living through her mom’s disappearance. The continual catch-22 of growing up both hoping she’d come back and reliving the night she was murdered. Days of watching girls your age doing girl mother/daughter things with their mom as you were at home being abused by your dad. Years of wondering if and if so, how, the pain would stop. A lifetime of realizing, it hasn’t. Seasons continue to pass of birthdays, Mother’s Days gone by and Memorial Days recalled finding her case still cold, still missing, and still unfounded by any authoritative documents.
A few weeks ago a new phone call came in. This time it was about her dad. To say they had any relationship would be a stretch yet Madonna did indeed extend herself, while firstly protecting her own children, overtime. A few years ago she went to speak with him. That conversation opened with something along the lines of Madonna telling him that if no one else knew, she knew and he knew what he did to her all those years. She was a child-his child, and he was suppose to do the dad things with her. Things such as protect and provide for, brag about and tenderly hold. Instead, he did the detestable. He knew it and she finally told him that to his face. I wish the next line to report would be that he had some sort of apology to offer, but instead he said continued in pace with all his life and said what no daughter would wish to hear from her father,
“As far as I’m concerned, I have no daughter…”
If only it was that easy.
The phone call came in was to inform her of her dad’s sudden death.
Madonna went to the funeral to be with her brother who had seemed to mesh some sort of relationship with their father in the recent past, and she didn’t want him to feel alone. She watched a slideshow presentation, “…of a stranger. I didn’t know this man they were saying all those things about.” And, she sat there, half-way numb and a little more angry. To sum up the raw emotions of this new twist to her life of a missing mother’s daughter, she mutters with an unequal mix of anger and emptiness,
“The person who we believe murdered our mother just died, and he was my father, taking all these secrets with him.”
Can you imagine?
One of my favorite scriptures come to mind: Isaiah 26;3 You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusts in thee.
Madonna’s faith has been tested and tried, but it’s the Lord who sustains her.
Wrapping it altogether:
As it would happen, just a few years ago there was a Gypsum Plant built on the grounds of where, some 40 years ago, Madonna’s dad worked being responsible for
putting in power lines.
It was there that five sophisticatedly trained cadaver dogs alerted authorities to human remains, yet,
like numerous valid parts of this case over the years, they were dismissed.
Most of the names on the original police report for Annita Price in 1974 are now dead, including the number one suspect in her dad,
but, Madonna and others believe, there are some who know what happened. All the evidence is still available. A few people can still talk and tell the truth.
God is still in control.
Her dad will never validate her abuse, and he will never confess to her mother’s murder.
Reality doesn’t need validation to be real. Though he has died, the truth has not changed.
What next? Is there something you can do? YES!
Through all of this, Madonna has becomeVA State Coordinator for CUE Center for Missing Persons.
She is an advocate for helping others who are going through what she did/is,
and for using current technology to give them every chance for a different outcome.
She has resources available to help further her own missing person’s case, and she believes you can help.
She believes you can help.
*First, share this blog post. Share it with anyone you know for no reason known to you other than to say you want to help…share it.
*Second, if you know the Lord, prayer is vital. Madonna wants to get back on site where the Gypsum Plant is built with some new dogs to see if their handlers have the same outcome. Sharing this story may find someone who has a contact to Moundsville, West Virginia and that Gypsum plant who can lead her to the right people for permissions to get on property. She really just wants to get back there and do this as the next first step. Always starting anew.
*Third, pray for those who are still alive and who have information to feel convicted enough to tell their stories, to share the truths and for the right people to hear it. It’s a tough thing to think about, but giving her mom a known resting place and some dignification in both her life and in death would mean more than we, who don’t life with this reality, can understand.
*Fourth, pray for the family, Madonna, her brother, Aunt Lola and the others whose hearts have been breaking over and over for these 40 years. God can heal the broken hearted. Would you pray for broken hearts healed with me?
Psalm 147:3 He heals the brokenhearted And binds up their wounds.
Thank you, Madonna, for inviting me in to where it hurts to talk but where silence is brutal. Love and prayers.
If you believe you have any tip, any knowledge that possibly may help, please contact Wet Virginia State Police Moundsville. Sgt. Danny Swiger. 304-329-1101
PS. Today is Annita’s birthday. Madonna’s mom is still missing. Madonna is still missing her mom.
Madonna’s Mom is missing
