On July 7, 1962, Audrey Backeberg cashed her paycheck at a textile factory in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, and disappeared. She was 20 years old, had two small children and, three days earlier, had reported that her husband threatened to kill her with a gun. No one heard from her again.
For 40 years, her family assumed the worst. In 2002, a cadaver dog searched a rural property in Sauk County looking for her remains. They found nothing, but the case remained filed as one of the region’s most persistent cold cases. What no one knew was that Audrey had hitchhiked to Madison, taken a Greyhound bus to Indianapolis, and built, from scratch and in silence, a completely new life for six decades.
In 2025, Detective Isaac Hanson located her through an Ancestry.com account that belonged to Audrey’s sister. The woman on the other end was over 80 years old, lived in another state, and still did not want to be found. Sheriff Chip Meister confirmed that there was no crime: the disappearance was voluntary. She has no regrets. And her whereabouts, at her express request, remain secret.