Two decades have passed since Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb outside a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, but the memory remains vivid for Tonya McCabe, who sat on the jury that sentenced him to die.

Eleven years after she vanished without a trace, Brenda Heist approached police in Florida last week to explain that she had abandoned her two children on the spur of the moment, leaving behind her old life in central Pennsylvania to become a vagrant.

A US woman has re-emerged 11 years after walking away from her two children, her job and her life in Pennsylvania to hitchhike with strangers to Florida.