Misty LaBean has spent her entire life wondering why her mother abandoned her family when she was just one year old.
Connie Christensen’s disappearance from Wisconsin 40 years ago was not a sudden event for her other relatives: She had left before, running away as a teenager and even serving at a carnival.
“How could he leave me like this after my own children were born?” I thought. LaBean told CNN. “I would never do this to my children.”
Throughout his life, LaBean has heard only whispers about his mother. The rest of his family was hurt and afraid to even talk about Christensen because they believed he had chosen to leave when he was only 20 years old.
But all this time, there was something else LaBean didn’t know: Strangers hundreds of miles away were searching for answers to the same mystery.
With its help, the key to unlocking this lock will be time as well as the relentless progress of science. Eventually those seeking the truth would connect. And an adult daughter will understand why her mother’s departure “may not have been her choice.”
Hunters in the forest and in the laboratory
Lauren Ogden, deputy chief medical examiner for the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, said a sketch artist was the first to use the clay bust of the person trying to recreate the face of remains found in eastern Indiana in December 1982.
He said hunters found them near Martindale Creek in a rural area used mostly for hunting and farming. However, due to the flood, the remains were damaged beyond recognition and were taken to the University of Indianapolis for storage.
But the coroner never gave up trying to find their identities.
And science was developing in those years. Within two generations, investigators had moved from relying on drawings to identify the missing and murdered to examining the evidence itself for tiny, delicate threads that could pinpoint who someone was.
Technology has gotten so good that in 2021, the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office went back to evidence found near Martindale Creek to see if it could extract any DNA to figure out who the remains belonged to, Ogden told CNN.
The first attempt failed: There wasn’t enough genetic material to create a usable DNA profile, he said.
They tried a second DNA extraction.
Another failure.
He later explained that Ogden and his team had tried to extract DNA from a bone in the foot.
A critical link waiting to be found
Around the same time, someone in Christensen’s family became interested in genealogy and encouraged relatives to submit DNA records to public resources that would help people build family trees, Ogden said.
Lauded as a way to discover personal history and connect with previously unknown relatives, DNA matching has also been used to link victims to criminals such as the Happy Face Killer, who killed at least eight women. He helped police find the Golden State Killer, suspected of a dozen murders and more than 50 rapes.
Using the free genealogy and DNA database GEDmatch, authorities in the Golden State case linked crime scene DNA to a pool of possible suspects created using DNA profiles or genealogy data from public services like Ancestry (the kind that Christensen’s relative encouraged his family to use).
GEDmatch is also used by the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization that uses investigative genetic genealogy to identify anonymous remains.
Ogden said the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office is working with that group (and DNA remains recovered from the foot bone in Martindale Creek) to try to build a potential family tree for the person hunters found in 1982.
Lori Flowers of the DNA Doe Project told CNN they had a strong lead within 24 hours.
GEDmatch narrowed down the pool of possible DNA links to the Christensen brothers’ Martindale Creek remains, the nonprofit said. Later, investigators combing through the family’s social media posts and relatives’ obituaries realized something: Connie Christensen had disappeared from her family’s public records.
But they still had to approve it.
Ogden reached LaBean, the missing woman’s child.
“Because I was on the ground floor, he called his daughter and said, ‘I’m a total stranger, can I come over and… take your cheek?'” Ogden said. “I was the one who said,” he recalled.
He wants his own mother’s identity back
The match was his mother.
Beyond Christensen’s identity, Ogden also shared a discovery the medical examiner’s team made about how LaBean’s mother died: a gunshot wound.
The brutal detail revealed a new set of questions: What was Christensen doing in Indiana? Who killed him? And why?
LaBean said he went to the spot near Martindale Creek where his mother’s remains were found and wondered how the killer had gotten Christensen so far from the nearest bus line.
“In some ways, it makes me feel a little better,” LaBean said of learning the true story of his mother’s absence. “But it also makes me angry because I could have had a chance to know him and someone took that chance away from me.”
LaBean said perhaps publicizing the case could help his family find more answers.
But even without that, knowing what happened to Christensen had released the hold his family had kept tightly on his memory; This was a gift to the boy who had wondered why he had been abandoned for so long.
“The biggest thing is that I have always loved animals,” LaBean said. “Then I found out he really loved cats. That’s kind of what I took away from him.”
LaBean also recovered the opal ring his mother wore when she died; This is a reference to her own childhood, when she said some of the first pieces of jewelry she treasured were opals. The gold band with two diamonds and opals hangs on a chain around the neck of the adult daughter, who is now a mother herself.
“It’s really come full circle,” Ogden said. “He’s wearing the ring that was there 40 years ago, and it’s mind-boggling to think that your DNA could provide that closure.”
Meanwhile, the obituary stated that Christensen’s body was buried among relatives, including his parents, in April. “We were able to take her family back to where her mother was so they could leave flowers and spend some quiet moments there,” Ogden said.
Some aspirations will remain unrequited, she told CNN, such as LaBean wishing she’d done her hair like she reportedly did to her own sisters before her first middle school dance.
Yet the adult daughter, along with her entire family, is eager to bring back the young mother she lost in an embrace that has grown exponentially over the decades, finally mourning all they have truly lost.
“If Connie were still here with us, she would be surrounded by all her nieces, great-nieces and nephews, aunts, uncles, and many cousins on both sides of the family,” her obituary read. “Connie would be a great mother to her only daughter Misty and her husband Dan LaBean. She never had the chance to be a wonderful and loving grandmother.
CNN’s Andy Rose contributed to this report.
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