Unresolved missing persons a wound that never heals - Part II in a series
By Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service, October 26, 2009
Judy Peterson (...) wants a national missing children's registry. Peterson's daughter Lindsey disappeared 10 years ago.
When the Jaycee Dugard horror story broke in late August, news of the California woman's kidnapping at age 11 - and her 18-year imprisonment in the squalid backyard compound of her alleged abductor and rapist - struck Vancouver Island resident Judy Peterson in a way that might puzzle most Canadians.
"People I've talked to say they feel so sorry," for Dugard and her family, Peterson says. "I'm thinking, oh man they're lucky. It's like they've won the lottery. Obviously, it's a horrendous situation that it happened but, for her to come out the other end of it alive, I'm sure the mother is very, very grateful."
Peterson's perspective arises from her own immeasurable, unresolved grief. Her own 14-year-old daughter, Lindsey, went missing near Courtenay, B.C., in August 1993 and has never been seen or heard from since.
In her quest for closure, the 54-year-old Peterson has spent the past decade championing a cause that could help solve hundreds of missing person cases in Canada - none, perhaps, with the relatively happy ending the Dugard family is now experiencing, but with an ending at least. (...)
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