Mum-of-two who vanished 11 years ago goes to police

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.

Her journey began when three strangers reached out to comfort her as she cried in despair in a park in 2002, then offered to let her accompany them.

Heist, a car dealership bookkeeper, was going through an amicable divorce and had just been turned down for housing assistance. She left the half-done laundry, the defrosting dinner and her daughter and son, then 8 and 12 years old.

“Everybody that knew Brenda told us there was absolutely no way Brenda would leave her children,” said Police Detective John Schofield of Lititz Borough, who suspected for years she may have been killed.

“She explained to me that she just snapped,” said Schofield, who met her on Monday in Florida. “She turned her back on her family, she turned her back on her friends, her co-workers.”

He said she expressed shame and apologised for what she did to her family.

“She has a birth certificate and a death certificate, so she’s got a long ways to make this right again,” Schofield said. “She’s got to take it slow with her family, I’m sure, and it’s going to be a long process.”

After she dropped off her children at school one day, Heist decided to join the three strangers as they hitchhiked for a month along Interstate 95 on their way to South Florida. She told Schofield she slept in tents and under bridges, survived by scavenging restaurant trash and panhandling, and kept her previous life a secret, contacting no one and using a pseudonym.

Now 54, Heist told police she spent seven years living with a man in a camper and working odd jobs, but more recently she was homeless again, living in a tent facility run by a social service agency.

“She said she was at the end of her rope, she was tired of running,” Schofield said.

Her husband, Lee Heist, who was investigated and then cleared as a suspect, struggled to raise their children. By 2010, he was able to get the courts to declare her legally dead and collected on a life insurance policy. He has remarried.

Today, their daughter is a West Chester University sophomore, and their son graduated from the same college and is pursuing a career in law enforcement.

“They knew that I was there, and I loved them and would take care of them,” Lee Heist told reporters.

He’s angry because of the effect their mother’s disappearance had on the children, but he also said he has forgiven her.

“There were people in the neighbourhood who would not allow their children to play with my children” because he had been a suspect, he said.

Both his ex-wife and their children have expressed a desire to speak with one another, but for now they are taking things slowly.