Life without Rachel
When Rachel Cooke found her namesake on the net, she came across a family tragedy: another Rachel Cooke had vanished from her home in Texas three years earlier. The Observer writer went to America to meet a family left devastated by their loss, and discovered that Rachel is only one of the many thousands of young Americans who disappear each year
Sunday September 19, 2004
The Observer
The Northlake subdivision of Georgetown, some 45 minutes north of Austin, Texas, is as quiet as quiet can be. These few wide streets, named after native American tribes, are roads to nowhere; a driver has no business here unless he is a resident or a visitor. The houses - low-slung, wooden affairs with porches and swings and basketball hoops - are set back from the road and languish in several acres. Out front, on expansive drives and behind picket fences, you see the usual shiny SUVs (Chevys so big, you could live in them) but only rarely their owners, especially on weekdays. Most people here commute into Austin every morning, where they have jobs in the hi-tech industries that have brought the city fresh affluence. A dog barks. Crickets whirr. Otherwise, the only sound to be heard is that of the raspy Texas wind blowing through the long grass.
Until last month, number 224, Navajo Trail was home to the Cooke family. They had their dream house built almost two decades ago, to their own specifications, and loved it for its tranquillity and spaciousness. Robert, like his neighbours, is a commuter; he is a software engineer for IBM. Janet teaches English at a nearby high school. Northlake, they decided, was a good place in which to bring up their two daughters, Rachel and JoAnn. Robert comes from a big, close-knit Texas family, and Navajo Trail was soon the holiday destination of choice for his relatives. On Labour Day and at Thanksgiving, the clan would celebrate with a big barbecue in the Cookes' very own three acres. 'It was wonderful,' says Robert's sister, Elaine Hettenhausen, as we drive by the house. 'It was in the countryside, a real low crime area, and the girls had their own bedrooms.' She slows down the car. 'See the fence? Janet built that herself, the traditional way.'
But this idyll came to a dramatic end on Thursday, 10 January 2002, a day which began - as all the worst days do - like any other. As usual, Robert and Janet both left early for work, and their younger daughter, JoAnn, went off to high school. Only their elder daughter, Rachel, stayed behind at home. Rachel, 19, was a freshman student at Mesa Junior College in San Diego, and had been home for the holidays. Her plan now was to attend her cousin's wedding on 12 January, and then head back to California to join her boyfriend of several months, Greg. When the family left her, she was asleep on the living room sofa. Her father, a big man with haunted eyes, remembers that she complained a little at being woken up by all the human traffic. Like all students everywhere, she wanted to lie in, to enjoy her last days of freedom. 'She wanted to be a fashion designer,' he says, with a smile. In some ways, it wasn't like her to want to sleep: 'Rachel was one of those people for whom there are never enough hours in the day.'
That Thursday, Robert did not hear from his daughter, which was strange - she always found some excuse to call - and when he arrived home, a little before five, she was not there. Still, he was not unduly worried. He knew that she had planned to go out with a girlfriend that evening; perhaps Shannon had already come by, picked her up. Later, though, he called Shannon. It turned out that she had not heard from Rachel at all. More calls were made. Robert rang Wildfire, a chi-chi local restaurant where Rachel sometimes worked for pocket money, and was relieved to hear that, yes, Rachel had done a shift that evening. It wasn't until the following morning, when there was still no sign of their daughter, that he found out from the night shift manager that he had been misinformed. The Rachel in question was not his child. He now knew something was terribly wrong.
'At this point, Janet went to the hospital to see if any unidentified females had come in,' says Robert. 'And I drove Rachel's jogging route because, by this time, we had figured out that the only things that were missing were her running clothes.' At two o'clock, he and Janet met at the sheriff's office where they turned in a missing persons' report. Rachel, an accomplished cross-country runner, ran four miles every day, taking her regular route around the quiet roads of the Northlake subdivision. This particular day, her family believe, she must have left the house mid-morning; they know she spoke to Greg on the telephone at 9.15am. She was wearing a green vest, grey shorts and Asics trainers. In her hand was a yellow Walkman. Around 11am, she ran past a neigh bour's drive; he recalls seeing Rachel as he backed up his car. After this, there are no more reported sightings. Robert and Janet Cooke's beloved daughter had simply disappeared into thin air. And so, the searching began. The sheriff's search, beefed up with the help of hundreds of volunteers, lasted only until Monday. After that, the Cookes brought in Texas EquuSearch, a mounted search and recovery team run by Tim Miller, whose daughter Laura was abducted and murdered in 1984. Miller's search lasted two weeks.
'After that, I continued to run searches on weekends,' says Robert. 'We carried on for nine months. But at some point, we thought: we've done our best. If they took her 12 miles, there's no rea son why they shouldn't have taken her 15 miles. We could search the whole of Texas and still not find her.' Cooke relates all of this in the carefully neutral tone of one who has told the same story, over and over, and has learned to drain it of emotion. It is a hot day, and we are sitting by an Austin lake. Behind him, women his daughter's age are swimming. Every now and then, one of them will pull themselves out of the water and head off down the wooded paths at the side of the lake. In spite of the sunshine, and the crowds, I suddenly find that it is all I can do not to call after these lovely girls. 'Be careful,' I want to shout. 'Please don't go that way alone.'
For me, this story begins in vanity (my own) and ends in humility (also my own). I stumbled across the story of Rachel Cooke's disappearance two months ago, on the internet. A couple of friends had come over to my house for dinner and we got to talking about Googling. They informed me that, these days, people not only use the world's best search engine to vet prospective dates; they use it to follow their own progress in life, too. Apparently, an acquaintance of ours has even published a novel about this. I spent the evening teasing my friends about their extreme narcissism but, naturally, no sooner had they hopped into their respective taxis than I ran upstairs and Googled myself. The first site that came up was the one set up by Robert Cooke to help return Rachel to her family.
The site was so striking, and Rachel's story so troubling, that I never got beyond it. Soon after, I contacted Robert (for obvious reasons, I used my sister's email address rather than my own) and asked him if I might write about what had happened to his family. His reply was swift. On the first anniversary of the disappearance of his daughter, he told me, he had made her a vow: 'I promised her that I would find her, and I intend to do it. I don't want to let her be forgotten.'
In the two years and nine months since he last saw Rachel, her father has learned - somewhat against his quiet nature - to be an extrovert, to talk to anyone who is willing to listen. He has become schooled in the way of sound bites, and adept at capturing the quicksilver interest of a fickle media. 'We are willing to do anything that can help bring Rachel back to us,' he told me. 'So I would love for you to write a piece about her.' Three weeks later, I flew to Austin to meet him.
Even if I hadn't known of his loss, I might still have sensed that Cooke carries with him some unspeakable burden. He walks gingerly, in the manner of one who fears what may be around the next corner, and his face is a soft planet of shadows, those beneath his eyes being the darkest and most heart-breaking. He tells me that he is able to sleep, but I am not sure I believe him. I imagine, also, that he does not take the best care of himself, that he is a comfort eater (although, in this context, that expression seems horribly insulting). When I visited his house - he and Janet have now divorced, and he has finally moved out of Navajo Trail - it was still crammed with packing boxes. On a coffee table, however, he had placed the bare essentials: his mobile phone and laptop computer, from which he cannot be parted, and a big, exuberant tub of red liquorice.
Since the searching stopped, Cooke has focused his attention on keeping his daughter's story in the media. He and other members of the family have appeared on television - notably on America's Most Wanted , a Fox show presented by John Walsh, whose son Adam was abducted and murdered in 1981 - and made the difficult decision to turn the anniversary of Rachel's disappearance into a media event, to be picked up by the local television news. Candlelit services, balloon releases, the sending out of white doves into the sky: sometimes, it is tough coming up with new ideas. The family also produces car bumper stickers and badges asking for help in finding Rachel, and a website, rachelcookesearch.org, where you can read her father's daily journal. Finally, the family has established the Rachel Alert Network, a charitable organisation which aims to prevent abductions through education and self-defence training, and which provides support and information to the friends and families of the missing. RAN recently published a fundraising cookbook, Recipes to Remember, which includes Robert's way with egg rolls and a dish called shrimp confetti from Janet.
All of these activities help to keep Robert going, but, at bottom, he is sustained, even after all this time, by hope - however worn, however wizened.
'I know someone took Rachel,' he says. 'I don't know exactly where they took her, or what they did with her, but I know she's probably not alive. I know that. We faced that a long time ago. There's a slim chance that she might be alive, that she hit her head and has amnesia, she's somewhere else, living as another person. But the chances are so slim. You don't want to get your hopes up. You have to be ready for that phone call. Any time they find unidentified human remains... it's really bad. One last year was found only nine miles from our house. That was the worst one.'
Would a body give him some kind of relief? 'There's no answer. Part of me wants to find her no matter what. Another part hopes she is alive.' But he is growing painfully used to waiting for the results of DNA tests to come in; since Rachel disappeared, eight bodies have been found in or around his Williamson County home.
America has a terrible missing persons problem. You might even call it a crisis. According to the FBI's National Crime Information Centre, there were 840,279 missing person entries in 2001 of which, horrifyingly, 85-95 per cent were juveniles. (In the UK, 200,000 people are reported missing every year, although the two figures are not properly comparable because they are compiled in different ways.) And this figure includes only those who have someone who cares enough to notice that they are gone; the reality could be far worse. But were you unaware of these numbers, the situation would still be impossible to ignore, even for the casual visitor. I do not visit America often but I was in the country when Chandra Levy, 24, a former federal intern, went missing (her disappearance in 2001 was widely reported thanks to her relationship with a congressman; her remains were found a year later in a Washington park). I was there, too, last year, when 27-year-old Laci Peterson disappeared in California (her husband, Scott, is now standing trial for her murder and that of her unborn child). And only last week, I saw the 'amber alert' signs on a Texas freeway asking drivers to look out for 12-year-old Jami Hicks from Mesquite, who had been abducted by her violent stepfather. (Jami is now safe and well.)
Whether or not America's missing are ever found depends, to a frightening degree, on where they were living when they disappeared. There is no single clearing house for missing people in America, and not every law enforcement agency is connected to the relevant FBI computer - so even when remains are found, it may prove impossible to discover if they are those of a person registered as lost. Law enforcement in America is infuriatingly fractured. 'Every individual law enforcement agency has their own database,' says Robert Cooke. 'Each country within a state has several different law enforcement agencies; Texas alone has some 250 counties. Texas has a DNA database, and it can talk to the FBI database, but not every state has one and even if they do, it may not talk directly to the others. So someone may be found just 10 feet over a state line, and they may not be recognised.' His daughter's case was handled by the Williamson County Sheriff's department. 'It's a real small force: just the sheriff and a couple of deputies, and no specialists in cold case work.'
When an adult goes missing, even a young adult, it can be hard to get the attention of the police. In America, the law has recently been changed so that anyone missing who is under the age of 18 now counts as a juvenile, and is therefore a priority; unfortunately for the Cookes, however, Rachel was 19. 'I'm currently working with the National Centre for Missing Adults on a training course for law enforcement agencies. I want them to look at each case individually, not just to go with the statistic that most adults leave on their own. If someone has a mistress or a lover, they may have gone of their own volition. But if such an action was against a person's nature, the police need to take their disappearance seriously right from the very start. It took us a while to convince them that she hadn't gone off on her own. The first deputy kept saying that she'd run off to Mexico with her boyfriend.'
Robert advises relatives that it is important to act fast, even if the missing person is an adult. 'We thought there was a 24-hour waiting period before a missing persons report could be filed. Turns out that's a myth.' He also urges family members to try to rule themselves out as suspects as early as possible. 'I hired an ex-FBI profiler and he told me to request a polygraph test. It's an awful thing, but the family are always suspects. Polygraphs are not admissible in court, but if you volunteer, it can help move their attention on.' Finally, he thinks the more publicity a case gets, the better - though this is often easier said than done. 'They want blond, blue-eyed females. In the eyes of the media, there are strikes against you. If you're low income, male, belong to a minority or from a broken home, they won't touch you. The problem with Rachel was that she was just that little bit too old.'
All of this stuff - so humdrum and yet so desperate - is very far from the way missing persons investigations are represented in the gritty-but-glamorous CBS television series, Without a Trace .
The devastating effect that losing someone this way has on a family can not be overstated, and I struggle to find the right words to describe it. The Cookes now find themselves in a kind of mortal aspic, unable to move forwards, unable to go backwards, their lives on hold, their loss ever present, always running on an exhausting loop inside their heads. Robert regards himself as 'disabled', unable to function properly as a human being.
'In some ways, it's harder now. A lot of the people who helped us have gone back to their normal lives, and we're still stuck with the nightmare.'
Was his marriage a casualty? 'If you have a really good marriage going into something like this, you might be able to survive it. But if your marriage is at all shaky, it's just the last straw.' His heart clenches when he thinks of his surviving daughter JoAnn. Once, she called him late at night to say she had a puncture. As he drove to pick her up, he was beside himself with fear.
Meanwhile, his ex-wife Janet has twice been admitted to psychiatric hospitals, where she was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. 'I still see my shrink,' she says. 'And there are days when I don't want to get up, when I just want to stay in bed, when it hits me all over again. What keeps me going is that I need to be there for when she comes back. I prefer to keep on hoping even if I have to do that for another 20 years because Rachel was so precious to us. We brought her up right. This shouldn't have happened to her.'
Even so, these days her hope is self-conscious, willed, rather than instinctive. 'She would have found a way back to us if she was still alive. I know it. The Navajos have a saying that a person's spirit lives on so long as somebody remembers them. Well, we have a lot of good memories.'
Since Rachel disappeared, her younger sister has graduated from high school and is now a student at the University of Texas. Her parents are proud of the way she has coped but, clearly, it has not been easy.
'Rachel was my best friend,' she says. 'We had the same mannerisms, the same sense of humour.' She tells me that she has not been able to develop many close friendships at university, and when people ask her if she has any siblings, she is uncertain what her response should be. She dreams about Rachel often. 'They're always very happy dreams. I say to my mom, "See, I told you she wasn't gone!" Then I wake up, and I have that same sense of loss all over again.' Rachel's boyfriend, Greg, a carpenter and musician, has not been on a date since he lost her. 'I can't find her in other girls, so I don't give them a second chance. I think about her all the time.'
Over a Tex-Mex lunch, Rachel's aunt, Elaine, told me how she fears for her brother, who indulges in so much displacement activity, and worries about her niece, who is sometimes very quiet. Rachel's grandparents, she says, aged suddenly and dramatically after she disappeared, and seemed to lose both their innocence and, in the case of her mother, her religious faith, too. The family had already gathered for the wedding of Rachel's cousin when they finally discovered that she was missing, and Elaine will never forget the sight of her father standing outside her hotel room having taken a telephone call from Robert. His face was blank with disbelief. The wedding went ahead, without Robert, Janet and JoAnn, but she still does not know, quite, how they got through it. Rachel's uncle, a pastor, conducted the service. She shakes her head.
By the lake in Austin, I ask Robert Cooke to tell me about his daughter. This is the only time in our conversation that his emotions get the better of him. He takes a deep breath, a sigh of both trepidation and longing, and then the words begin to spill out.
'She was very outgoing. She used to sing all the time. She was a good worker. She lived life for the moment. She was a daredevil. She loved rollercoasters. As a little girl, she would always be standing on her tippy toes, trying to look taller. I never go for more than an hour without thinking of her, and sometimes I can't even go more than five minutes. It's a shame... It's a shame. That some low-life animal took her away, when she could have given the world so much.'
Lost and found in America...
· In March 2003, 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart, who had been abducted from Salt Lake City nine months earlier and was presumed dead, was rescued from a religious fanatic who forced her to wear a wig and veil.
· Scott Peterson told police that his wife Laci, a substitute teacher, vanished from their Modesto home on Christmas Eve 2002 when he was out fishing in San Francisco Bay, 90 miles from their home. Four months later her body was washed up close to the spot he had named. He currently stands trial accused of murdering her to be with his mistress.
· Washington intern 24-year-old Chandra Levy disappeared in May 2001 after revelations she had been having an affair with Democrat congressman Gary Conduit, which also lost him the congressional elections in California. Her body was found in a park a year later. A year of forensic tests failed to establish cause of death.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/revie...307571,00.html
Thank you for visiting the website of Project Jason, a 501c 3 nonprofit organization. Your presence means that you care about the missing, and that means so much to us and the families of the missing.