A mother-of-two managed to remain in hiding for more than 60 years, leading her family to think she had been murdered, before she reappeared unharmed.
Audrey Backeberg has been found 'alive and well' decades after she disappeared without a trace in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, when she was just 20 years old.
She left behind her husband and two children in July 1962, leaving what is said to have been an abusive home.
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Her case went cold, with her distraught family eventually accepting she was dead after more than six decades.
Now 82, she has been found alive just outside of Wisconsin, not far from where she lived, detectives confirmed.
Sauk County Sheriff Chip Meister revealed that officers revisiting her cold case had managed to make contact with Audrey and speak to her.
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Even worse for her family, Audrey apparently has 'no regrets' about what she did.
In the days before she went missing, Backeberg logged a criminal complaint against her husband.
She left the house to pick up her salary, before hitchhiking to the capital city Madison with her 14-year-old babysitter on July 7.
The teenager eventually became worried and travelled home, making her the last person to see Audrey before she went missing and last saw her walking towards a different bus stop.
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Over the decades, Audrey's family insisted she would never have left her children willingly and insisted she had been murdered.
Her husband was initially suspected in her disappearance, so he undertook a polygraph lie detector tests which showed he was innocent.
Detective Isaac Hanson was reponsible for re-opening the cold case of the strange disappearance.
As part of his investigation, he re-interviewed several key witnesses.
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The breakthrough came when Audrey's sister had an Ancestry.com account, and by using the available death records and census reports they tracked down an address.
He asked the local sheriff to 'pop in' and see if it really was Audrey: "I had high hopes; there wasn’t a certainty that we would know it was her," he recalled.
Audrey then phoned Detective Hanson and had a 45 minute conversation with him.
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He promised to keep the nature of their conversation private, but he has said he could not rule out the difficult marital issues being the reason why she left.
The detective did say he did know know why she stayed away for so long and never came back.
He said: "I think she just was removed and, you know, moved on from things and kind of did her own thing and led her life."
Detective Hanson added: "She sounded happy. Confident in her decision. No regrets."
Police have closed the case and no further action will be taken, as they say her disappearance 'was not the result of any criminal activity or foul play'.
Her discovery comes weeks after another similar case, where a British woman, Sheila Fox, reappeared close to where she went missing in 1972 aged just 16.
She had planned to leave school, before disappearing without a trace with many locals speculating she had run away with a local insurance salesman as she was thought to be pregnant.
Topics: Crime, True Crime
Jen Thomas