by Misty LaBean has spent her entire life wondering why her mother left her family when she was only one year old.
The disappearance of Connie Christensen from Wisconsin 40 years ago was unknown to the rest of her relatives: she had left before, running away when she was a teenager and even doing a trick at a carnival.
“After my own children were born, I was like, how could she have left me like that?” LaBean told CNN. “I would never do that to my children.”
All her life, LaBean only heard whispers about her mother. The rest of her family was hurt and she was reluctant to even talk about Christensen, believing she had chosen to walk away at just 20 years old.
All that time, though, there was something else LaBean didn’t know: Strangers hundreds of miles away were looking for answers to the same mystery.
Their key to unlocking it – with her help – is time, along with the inevitable progress of science. Eventually, those seeking the truth would connect. And a grown daughter would understand why her mother would leave “maybe it wasn’t her choice.”
Hunters in the woods – and in the lab
It was a sketch artist who first used clay busts to try to recreate the faces of the remains found in December 1982 in east-central Indiana, said Lauren Ogden, chief deputy coroner for the County Coroner’s Office. Wayne, Lauren Ogden.
They were found by hunters near Martindale Creek in a rural area used primarily for hunting and farming, she said. But due to flooding, the remains were damaged beyond recognition, and they ended up at the University of Indianapolis for storage.
But the coroner’s office did not stop trying to determine their identity.
And over those years, the science was improving. Within two generations, investigators had turned from drawings to try to identify the missing and the murdered to mining the evidence itself for tiny, sensitive threads that could identify just who it was.
The technology was so good, in fact, that the Wayne County Coroner’s Office went back in 2021 to the evidence found near Martindale Creek to see if it could extract any DNA to determine who the remains belonged to, said Ogden with CNN.
The first attempt failed: There wasn’t enough genetic material to generate a usable DNA profile, she said.
They tried a second DNA extraction.
Another failure.
Next, she explained, Ogden and her team tried to extract DNA from a leg bone.
Critical link, waiting to be found
Around the same time, someone in Christensen’s family became interested in genealogy and was encouraging relatives to submit DNA records to public sources that help people build family trees, Ogden said.
Hailed as a way to explore personal history and connect with previously unknown relatives, DNA matching has also been used to link victims to criminals such as the Happy Face Killer, who killed at least eight women. He helped lead police to the Golden State Killer, who was suspected of a dozen murders and more than 50 rapes.
Authorities in the Golden State case used the free genealogy and DNA database GEDmatch to match crime scene DNA to potential suspects created using DNA profiles or genealogical data from public services like Ancestry – the kind Christensen’s relative encouraged her family to use.
GEDmatch is also used by the Doe DNA Project, a non-profit project that uses investigative genetic genealogy to identify anonymous remains.
Working with that group — still with DNA from the Martindale Creek leg bone — the Wayne County Coroner’s Office attempted a possible family tree for the person the hunters found back in 1982, Ogden said.
Within 24 hours, they had a solid lead, Lori Flowers of the Doe DNA Project told CNN.
The nonprofit had narrowed down the number of possible DNA links GEDmatch had to the Martindale Creek still with the Christensen siblings, she said. Then, combing through family social media posts and relatives’ obituary comments, investigators noticed something: Connie Christensen had disappeared from her family’s public record.
But they still had to confirm it.
Ogden contacted the missing woman’s child, LaBean.
“When I was on the ground floor,” Ogden recalled, “I was the one who called her daughter and said, ‘I’m a complete stranger, can I come… your cheek?'”
Getting her own mother’s identity back
Her mother was the match.
Beyond Christensen’s identification, the coroner’s office also shared a discovery its staff made about how LaBean’s mother died, Ogden said: a gunshot wound.
Let go of these grim details to new questions: What was Christensen doing in Indiana? Who killed her? And why?
LaBean went to the spot near Martindale Creek where her mother’s remains were found, she said, and wondered how Christensen’s killer got so far from the nearest bus line.
“In some ways, it makes me feel a little better,” LaBean said of learning the real story about her mom’s absence. “But it also makes me angry because maybe I had a chance to get to know her, and someone took that chance away from me.”
Maybe publicity about the case will help her family get more answers, LaBean said.
Even without that, however, when Christensen knew what had happened to Christensen, she released the stranglehold her family held so tightly on her memory – a gift to the child who had long wondered what why she was abandoned.
“I’ve always loved animals the most,” LaBean said. “And then I found out that she really liked cats. That’s what I got from her.”
LaBean also claimed the opal ring her mother was wearing when she died, a nod to her own childhood, when opals were some of the first pieces of jewelry she loved, she said. The gold band with two diamonds and an opal hangs on a chain around the neck of the grown daughter – now a mother herself.
“It’s really in full swing,” Ogden said. “She’s wearing the ring that was found there 40 years ago, and it’s a stretch to think that your DNA can provide that closure.”
Meanwhile, Christensen’s remains were laid to rest in April among her relatives, including her parents, whose obituary was read. “We were able to bring her family back to the site where her mom was found so they could leave flowers and have some quiet moments,” Ogden said.
It won’t be necessary for several years, as LaBean wished her mother could do her hair before her first middle school dance the way she is said to have done her own sisters’, she told CNN.
Still, the grown daughter – with her entire family – is now desperate to bring back the lost young mother in a suit that has grown over the years as they finally mourn all they have lost.
“If Connie were still here with us, she would be surrounded by her great nieces, nephews, great nieces and nephews, aunts, uncles, and many cousins from both sides of the family,” her obituary read. “Connie would be a wonderful mother to her only daughter, Misty, and her husband, Dan LaBean. She never had the chance to be a wonderful and loving grandmother.”
CNN’s Andy Rose contributed to this report.
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