Case of missing Glen Park woman, last seen in 1997, revisited

Jul. 15—WATERTOWN — With the summer of 1997 giving way to fall, and Halloween approaching, Alice M. Gordon wondered when her phone would ring.

Her 29-year-old daughter, Jennifer J. Gordon, wasn't a runaway. When Jennifer periodically traveled to other states with boyfriends, her mother always knew where she went. Jennifer called to check in. Jennifer found her way home.

Alice recalls last seeing Jennifer on Sept. 10, 1997.

"I started getting really worried when she didn't contact me around Halloween time to go trick-or-treating with her son," Alice said over the phone from her Glen Park home this week. "That got my attention — where is she?"

At the time, Alice and Jennifer were rearranging custody of Jennifer's 3-year-old son Eric, whom Alice adopted and raised. Even through the process of the custody change, it was typical for Jennifer to call and check on Eric, Alice said, especially around a holiday.

So the prolonged silence that started in September was unusual. Alice speculated that Jennifer, who had abused drugs and alcohol and had been treated in mental health facilities, may not have been "in her own mind." Information from the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office at the time indicated Jennifer had been discharged from the community mental health clinic on Stone Street, Watertown, in early September. She was seen about a week after her discharge. Alice notified police of her concern that November.

"I wondered then," Alice said. "I've never seen or heard from her again."

Sheriff Peter R. Barnett, who took office in January, was a detective for the county agency at the time of Jennifer's disappearance.

"The files are back out and I'm briefing our detectives," Barnett said at the end of June, a missing person poster for Jennifer on his desk in the Metro-Jefferson Public Safety Building.

The sheriff's office doesn't have a budget line only for cold case investigations — those cases that lose momentum, lack enough prosecutorial evidence or just don't have the evidence at all, he said. When leads do surface, they're scrutinized before additional resources are expended. If credible information points detectives somewhere, "this sheriff would spend the money to look at it," he said.

Barnett hopes refreshing the detective unit with old notes will prompt new questions.

"What can we go back and redo?" he said. "Where could it lead?"

In November 1997, Alice told the Watertown Daily Times that she feared for her daughter's life. She did not believe her daughter to be suicidal, but added, "She believes she has no friends and no family that cares about her."

Alice and the sheriff's office started circulating a description of Jennifer: 5 feet, 3 inches tall, 155 pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. She has a tattoo of a bleeding rose on her left shoulder, a roughly 4-inch scar on her right calf and a horizontal scar on her upper lip.

Four months later, in March 1998, no word had come from the General Brown graduate. No promising leads, no evidence to suggest where Jennifer had gone. And by then, the Great Ice Storm had upended the north country.

In responding to Alice's worries that the sheriff's office had forgotten about her daughter, then-Sheriff James L. Lafferty cited different priorities: cleanup from the January freeze and the homicide of Bonnie Lou Hector, the 49-year-old who was shot outside Geico Insurance, where she worked, in Felts Mills. Hector's killer and an accomplice were convicted in 1999.

One of Alice's frustrations with the early investigation was the way her daughter's case was treated. She recalled repeated commentary from some in the detective unit when Jennifer disappeared — that Jennifer's friends had criminal backgrounds, that they were not to be believed, that Jennifer had a history of coming and going.

There is much more to Jennifer than her penchant for moving around and the one-time schizophrenia diagnosis she received. Growing up, "she was a lovely girl," Alice said, a good student with friends from down the street. She graduated from General Brown Central School in 1985. She worked delivering auto parts around Watertown.

Jennifer had a gullible spirit, and was often in relationships with "cruel" men who took advantage of that spirit, her mother said.

She also had grit.

Staying with a boyfriend and his family in Oklahoma in 1990, Jennifer called her mother to check in, as was her way. This was a typical relationship for her, Alice said. Nice until it's not. Jennifer wanted to return to New York but with union bus drivers from Greyhound on strike nationwide, the trip seemed out of reach.

"She said, 'Mom, you wouldn't even recognize me he beat me so bad,'" Alice said, remembering a phone conversation she had with Jennifer. "Finally she stole his car and drove it home. The wreck that it was, it made it."

Through these periods of abuse, "She'd be OK and then she'd be out of it," Alice said. When Jennifer disappeared, police reported at the time, she wasn't taking medication prescribed to her for schizophrenia.

In 2003, a cadaver dog searched 710 State St., Watertown, where Jennifer was living at the time of her disappearance. Nothing was found, the sheriff's office told the Times. The building has since been demolished.

Jennifer would be 56 this year.

"After 26 years, I hope someone could say something that would help," Alice said. "Maybe they know where she is. Maybe she got married and somebody knows her last name or who she is. Or maybe she got married because she didn't know who she was. These are the kinds of things I think about."

James E. Gordon, Jennifer's younger brother by two years, said they grew apart from childhood into their early adult lives. It's complicated, waiting for news about someone who had changed so much from their younger years. There have been days, he said, that he thought Jennifer would walk through their front door again.

"I think somebody's got to know something," James said. "Maybe something that's been bothering them for a long time."

As the Gordons wait at the home Alice has kept for more than 50 years, resolutions to missing person and homicide investigations in the county have given other families answers.

A year before Jennifer was last seen, 30-year-old Watertown resident Alicia C. VanVranken Wasilewski was reported missing. She had recently given birth to a premature baby and was making regular visits to Samaritan Medical Center for feedings.

It wasn't until 2007, more than a decade after she was last seen, that her skeletal remains were found in a wooded area off Ives Street Road in the town of Watertown. An ex-boyfriend of Alicia's, Michial E. Foster, was convicted in 2008 of killing her. He is serving a term of 25 years to life in state prison.

When a size-11 New Balance sneaker with a right foot inside washed up in Mud Bay in June 1999, the sheriff's office didn't yet know it was the foot of Joseph "Ronnie" Gibbons.

Ronnie's torso was found on the northeast shore of Grenadier Island overlooking Mud Bay in the town of Cape Vincent in September 2000.

The torso was clad in a pair of dark blue gym shorts, which bore NYAC — New York Athletic Club — in gold lettering with a gold winged-foot emblem below the letters.

Other than the shorts, the torso was so unidentifiable that for a time investigators thought the remains could have been Jennifer's or Alicia's, according to Times files.

With the use of DNA, analysts learned in 2011 that the remains were from the same man, 42-year-old Ronnie, a retired boxer born in Liverpool, England, who was connected to the $7.4 million heist of a Brinks armored truck in Rochester in 1993.

Ronnie had been reported missing in 1995 to police in Greece, a suburb of Rochester.

Patrick S. Rust, a 24-year-old from Russell, was last seen by friends March 16, 2007, walking along Arsenal Street toward his Sterling Street apartment after having been at Clueless tavern, 545 Arsenal St.

The sergeant, stationed at Fort Drum and a veteran of duty in Afghanistan, was not under orders for a new deployment for at least another year, according to Watertown police at the time. On Sept. 16, 2007, what was identified as Rust's body was discovered by a farmer cutting hay in a field off Old Rome State Road in the town of Hounsfield.

Alicia and Patrick's remains were found within 24 hours of each other, according to Times files.

Jennifer's case, Barnett said, is likely the longest-standing open file with the sheriff's office that has turned up no physical evidence.

She just vanished, the sheriff said.

With cellphones not yet a permanent pocket fixture of the masses and the internet just emerging for the public, he added, the '90s didn't help.

New investigative tools and a global wave of advancement were happening just as these Jefferson County cases were opened.

The World Wide Web, a project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, opened to the public in 1991. The New York State DNA Databank went live in 1996, and the National DNA Index System, NDIS — an arm of the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, CODIS — was launched in 1998. DNA analysis has vastly improved and those networks for sharing samples expanded. Alice has provided a DNA sample twice for Jennifer's case.

New York investigative agencies use crime analysis centers to share information and review evidence. The North Country Crime Analysis Center covers Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Franklin, Clinton, Essex and Hamilton counties.

Combined with on-the-ground investigating — starting with asking questions — Barnett said there are more investigative resources than ever.

Jennifer's case was also added in 2006 to the U.S.-based Doe Network, a volunteer-run database that attempts to match John and Jane Does for families.

With better resources and a fresh look at still-open case files, there's hope, the sheriff said, for answers.

With cold cases especially, there's a certain attachment the sheriff said many detectives develop. Learning about missing persons from their loved ones and meeting them through photographs draws on a deep curiosity.

"And it really hits you that this is a human being," Barnett said. "There's a family out there that's hurting."

Alice, now 76, includes Jennifer in her nightly prayers. She maintains hope for her daughter's return — "one way or the other," she said. "It really wears on your mind the older you get."

Through the early years of waiting, Alice kept her focus on supporting her adopted son Eric J. Reynolds, now 29. She owned and operated the newsstand on the second floor of the Dulles State Office Building for 30 years before retiring in 2008.

"If I hadn't been working to keep my mind busy, I would have probably gone nuts wondering where she was and trying to get to her," Alice said. "Maybe I could have traveled to try to find her, but as it was, I was trying to keep the roof over our heads."

Eric has always known about his mother being missing.

"When I was younger, I knew I was different in that respect," Eric said. "But I think people assume it negatively impacted me more than it did."

He expressed gratitude, repeatedly, for Alice adopting him. And for the pain he thinks he was spared because he was only a toddler when he was last with Jennifer.

Eric said he has a hazy single memory, he's not even sure it's real, of being with his mom. He holds that close, but has determined that fewer memories are probably better.

"It's less painful that way," he said.

Eric, adopted mom Alice and Uncle James take care of each other now. Alice has faced cancer and is now considering a hip replacement. Her dog, an 18-year-old Shih Tzu mix named Tiffany, keeps them energized.

She is heartened by the sheriff's office renewing its interest in Jennifer. The waiting, though, hasn't gotten any easier.

"I've kept this number," Alice said, "just in case she ever wanted to call home."

Anyone with information about Jennifer Gordon is encouraged to call the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office Detective Unit at 315-786-2671.