A missing Wisconsin mother found alive more than 60 years after vanishing was happily living a new life with a new husband all along, according to police.
Audrey Backeberg, 82, spent six decades living under a new identity after running away from the Reedsburg home she shared with her two kids and allegedly abusive husband in 1962, according to the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office.
“She had her reasons for leaving the area,” said Detective Issac Hanson, who located Backeberg “alive and well” in March after reopening her cold case missing persons file.
“I told her I wouldn’t discuss her location because it is important to her. Based on the things that she told me, I think that she is confident in the decision that she made. ‘Did what she had to do,’ type thing,” he told the Chippewa Herald.
Backeberg — who was 20 years old when she disappeared — remarried and started a new life out of state, though she declined to disclose whether she had kids with her new husband when cops reached her in March.
She was declared missing 63 years ago after she picked up a paycheck from work and never came home — and family members came to fear the worst as the case eventually went cold.
Witnesses saw her at an Indianapolis bus station within days of her disappearance, while a babysitter who worked for the family reported that she’d taken a bus to Indiana after swallowing a Coke can full of pills.
That was the last anybody saw of her, while her husband Ronald — who Backeberg married when she was 15 — insisted he had nothing to do with her disappearance and family members were adamant that she wouldn’t leave her kids behind.
Just days before she vanished, Backeberg had filed a criminal complaint against Ronald, alleging he’d battered her so badly she was left with head injuries — and that he even threatened to kill her.
“[She reported] her husband had loaded a couple of guns and put them into the trunk of his car and threatened to kill her,” former Sauk County sheriff Randy Stammen told the Baraboo News Republic in 2002 on the 40th anniversary of her disappearance.
Backeberg apparently didn’t contact any family in the decades she was gone. One of her children died in 2006, while Ronald died a short time later.
And Backeberg’s mother died in 2023, reportedly without ever learning what happened to her daughter.
“She left things behind, has done her own thing, and has done well,” Hanson told the Chippewa Herald.
He was assigned the case in January after the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office started a review of its cold cases.
Backeberg’s case file hadn’t been opened since 2002 and many of the documents within weren’t digitized, so Hanson was forced to manually comb through reams of papers and microfilms.
He also reached out to about 20 family members and witnesses, and even used information from an Ancestry.com account linked to Backeberg’s sister to piece things together.
“It was just a bunch of puzzle pieces,” Hanson said. “It was just digging and digging and digging and digging, and kind of putting it all together.”
The detective eventually identified an address he thought might be Backeberg’s — and when he called the home’s landline, she picked up.
“She was very cooperative, answered all my questions,” Hanson said, explaining that he talked with her for about 45 minutes and that her story lined up with everything in the case.
Her family was “elated” to learn that Backeberg was alive and well, Hanson said, but added that the discovery also came with complicated emotions.
“It’s a lot,” he said. “Sixty-two years, then, 10 minutes later, she’s talking to somebody, her locator, when she doesn’t want to be bothered or located.”
“I was happy that she talked with me and I was able to get as much as I did,” he added.
Read the full article here
