BUXTON, Maine — More than 35 years after teenage runaway Wanda Mitchell was found dead in the woods, her family still doesn’t know how she ended up there.
Sheila Simoneau has a death certificate for her daughter, but no idea how, or even when, she died.
Wanda ran away from her Buxton home in November of 1979, the day before her 15th birthday.
“My husband called and said, ‘Wanda’s not downstairs,’” said Simoneau. “I said, ‘What do you mean Wanda’s not downstairs?’ He said, ‘Well, I went to get her up for school and she’s not there.’”
Simoneau said Wanda had been breaking their rules by staying out late and spending time with boys. It’s what she thought was typical teenage rebellion.
She said this was the first time Wanda ran away.
“First and only,” she said. “I mean, she was defiant. Very defiant, but no, that was it.”
They quickly discovered she was staying at a nearby neighbor’s house, and later, a shelter for homeless girls in downtown Portland, which frequently called them, troubled by her behavior.
“She’d break all their rules and regulations, so they’d have to have her leave and a couple days later she could go back,” Simoneau said.
Wanda kept in touch with her sister and turned up occasionally until March of 1980.
“Off she went and so that was the last time I saw her,” Simoneau said.
What happened after that remains a mystery.
“For a long time, I mean, I would just sit here every night and think, ‘phone’s gonna ring and she’s gonna be on the other end,’” said Simoneau. “Well, that wasn’t that way.”
It was September when a dog found a skull in a wooded lover’s lane in Poland. Dental records confirmed the bones belonged to Wanda.
“Horrible, and then you know, what do you do?” said Simoneau. “You’re mad. You’re mad that it’s happened. You’re mad that you didn’t have control of your daughter, but you couldn’t.”
Simoneau said Maine State Police did an autopsy, but the body was too deteriorated to determine a cause of death.
“One of their profilers said that the person that did it wouldn’t feel bad because they didn’t feel she was worth anything anyhow,” said Simoneau. “Living on the streets, so she’s not worth anything. She’s still a human being. She’s still my daughter. She’s still a sister.”
It didn’t take long for the case to go cold.
“I don’t know when. I don’t know where. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I don’t know who,” said Simoneau. “Like I told them, she didn’t walk in there and lay down and die.”
Wanda may have been a runaway, but her mom said, she didn’t deserve to be robbed of her future.
“So she had a problem. Kids have problems, they grow out of it,” said Simoneau. “But she won’t have a chance.”
Simoneau doesn’t care if anyone ends up behind bars. She just hopes for closure.
“I’d like to know before I die what happened to my daughter,” she said.
Wanda Mitchell isn’t on the state’s list of unsolved homicides, because police said her death is classified as “unexplained.”