Lynne Schulze Missing Since 1971. Middlebury, Vermont

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Lynne Schulze

MIDDLEBURY — Accompanied by an intuitive counselor, family and friends of Middlebury’s longest standing missing person were in town last week looking for more answers in the 1971 disappearance of Lynne Schulze.
“We’re not going to stop until we know what happened,” said Susan Randall, an Idaho resident and one of Schulze’s childhood friends who was among a group of five people in town on a fact-finding visit to local police and the Middlebury College campus on July 27 and 28.
On Dec. 10, 1971, Schulze, then 18, disappeared from Middlebury College, where she had been rounding out her first semester. Schulze, a native of Simsbury, Conn., had been walking to an exam hall when she suddenly told her friends she needed to run back to her dorm room to get a pencil.
That’s when Schulze disappeared into thin air. Authorities found all of Schulze’s possessions — including her wallet — still inside her room. Police throughout the region searched in vain for the young woman, whom the Middlebury Campus newspaper reported on Jan. 28, 1972, as having been seen on Route 7, presumably hitchhiking.
The Addison Independent profiled Schulze’s case — and the ongoing efforts by Middlebury police to solve it — in its June 23, 2005, edition. Schulze’s friends and relatives said last week it was that story that prompted them to unite late last year to resurrect the search for answers into the fate of their loved one.
Anne Rozmovits, one of Lynne Schulze’s four siblings, said she recently re-read the roughly three-dozen letters Lynne had exchanged with her family and friends during her semester at Middlebury.
“There was every indication in her letters that she would have finished the semester at Middlebury,” Rozmovits said. “She was not the kind of person who would run away.”
Two of Lynne’s childhood friends agreed.
Randall and Joyce Prescott Persing had both grown up with Lynne in Simsbury. Randall said she had visited Lynne at Middlebury College.
“She was fun-loving, and loved to be outdoors,” Randall said.
Persing, who now lives in Canton, Conn., acknowledged that Lynne was feeling homesick and was considering withdrawing from school. But she stressed it was not in her friend’s character to suddenly drop out of sight.
“She didn’t have an opportunity to make the adjustment (to life at Middlebury College),” Persing said. “Her parents knew she was unhappy, and were going to talk to her about it.”
The women are convinced that Lynne is deceased, but want some closure that can only come from the discovery of remains and/or evidence of how she met her fate.
To that end, Randall last fall got in touch with Michelle Factor, an “intuitive counselor and healer” based in Haley, Idaho. With most of the investigative leads in the 35-year-old case now very cold, Lynne’s friends and family hoped that Factor could, in some way, channel the young woman’s spirit in an effort to turn up clues.
“I’m the door, the voice,” Factor said.
Last Dec. 29, Factor said she was able to communicate with Lynne. Factor is convinced that Schulze was murdered, but that “she is at peace.”
Persing and Randall said that Factor was able to uncannily describe Lynne, and places she had been.
“I described certain places and people that have all panned out,” Factor said. “Each thing is leading to something else I saw.”
With that in mind, Rozmovits, Factor, Randall, Persing and friend Mary Jane Oresik scheduled a trip to Middlebury. They arrived late last week. It was the first time the Schulze family had visited Middlebury in 10 years, and the first time that Randall had been back since visiting Lynne on campus during October of 1971.
While here, the women looked through archived information at Middlebury College and at the Addison Independent. They also spoke with Middlebury police officer Vegar Boe, who is in charge of the Schulze case.
The women said they wanted to keep details of their police discussion confidential, but were generally upbeat about their visit.
“We met some very wonderful people who have opened their hearts,” Factor said.
“It’s been very emotional,” Persing said. “It’s been really affirming to people.”
The women and other friends of Lynne Schulze held a gathering in her memory in Connecticut on Sunday, July 30. There, they shared reminiscences of their friend and reiterated their resolve to clear up the mystery that has been haunting them for more than three decades.
Recent months have allowed Rozmovits to become spiritually reacquainted with her sister, through letters, memories and testimonials from those who knew her.
“Lynne was a very caring person, who valued her friends and her family tremendously,” Rozmovits said.
She continues to hope that new evidence will surface in the case.
“There is much more to the situation than the myth she ran away,” Rozmovits said.
Anyone with information on the case should call Middlebury police at 388-3191.

http://www.addisonindependent.com/?q=node/194

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Garza disappearance revives '70s missing student case
Submitted by Addison Independent on February 28, 2008 - 2:36pm.

By MEGAN JAMES

MIDDLEBURY — In the three weeks since Middlebury College freshman Nicholas Garza disappeared, search and rescue teams have overturned each inch of the college campus, finding nothing. The Middlebury Police Department has interviewed more than 100 people, but still their timeline for the night the 19-year-old went missing, Feb. 5, ends with an unanswered phone call at 11:06 p.m.

Just this week, Middlebury police called in a Texas nonprofit search and rescue squad called Equu-search to scour the snow-covered grounds once again.

All the while, a woman named Anne Schulze has been closely following the case from her home in New Hampshire. The dearth of leads looks a lot like something she’s seen before: Her sister, Lynne, vanished from the Middlebury campus 37 years ago.

She was never found.

“Since my family and Lynne’s friends found out about Nick’s disappearance, we have been hoping and praying along with the Middlebury community and Nick’s family that he be found safe and soon,” she said in a telephone interview.

Later this week Anne Schulze plans to meet with Middlebury Police officer Vegar Boe, who is handling the disappearances of both Garza and Lynne Schulze, to discuss her sister’s still open case. She also hopes to offer her time to speak with Garza’s parents.

Boe is the sixth investigator to work on the Lynne Schulze case since she went missing on the way to a final exam in 1971. According to Schulze, Boe has shown a renewed interest in that case since Garza disappeared earlier this month.

The two cases are completely unrelated, Schulze acknowledged, but she couldn’t help but hear an echo of her sister’s disappearance when she first found out about Garza’s.

“It is just uncanny that a freshman student has disappeared completely at a break time, again,” she said. “You can see how when no one’s around, it’s harder to realize that someone is missing. Days go by and at last someone notices.”

But those first 24 to 48 hours are crucial in a missing persons investigation, she said. Unfortunately, in both Garza’s and Lynne Schulze’s cases, at least five days passed before official searches began.

It was Friday, Dec. 10, 1971, the first day of final exams before students took off for Christmas break, when Lynne Schulze vanished. Her roommate had seen her that morning, asleep in bed. Around 12:30 p.m., one of Lynne’s good friends dropped by her dorm room so they could walk together to their exam.

As they made their way across campus, Lynne stopped and told her friend she had forgotten her favorite pen; she had to go back to her room and get it.

“It really was her favorite pen,” Schulze said, laughing, “Everyone knew about it.”

But Lynne never made it to her exam.

“She disappeared,” Schulze said. “Into thin air. In the middle of the day.”

Lynne had talked about going away for the weekend, but no one knew where she would have gone.

“Like Nicholas, she was not a person who was likely to just take off,” Schulze said. “Her friends would have been the first to be contacted.”

Three days earlier she had registered for January and spring semester classes.

When her roommate got up early the next morning to take a bus home for Christmas break, she noticed Lynne wasn’t there. But she didn’t think much of it, Schulze said. It was the end of the semester; when people finished their exams, they just took off.

“It was a different era,” she said. “It was a much more open, freer time. There wasn’t quite the concern then, nor was there the security.”

By that Monday morning, two days after Lynne was last seen, someone alerted campus security that she was missing. They searched her room and found all of her belongings, including her ID and her checkbook — $30 had been cashed on the day of the exam.

Five days went by before Lynne’s parents found out their daughter was missing, according to Schulze. One of Lynne’s close high school friends, who also went to Middlebury, told another mutual friend in Simsbury. That friend broke the news to Lynne’s mother.

“Our family, quite honestly, never believed the rumors that (Lynne) had taken off and was hitchhiking,” Schulze said. “My mother, in particular, believed that foul play was involved from the start.”

Plenty of people reported sightings, but all the leads resulted in dead-ends.

Lynne’s father got the FBI involved for a while, and he tried to get assistance from his Connecticut state senator. Her family spent the year of 1972 searching, working with Middlebury and Vermont State Police.

“This was my senior year of high school,” Schulze said. “I spent many weekends coming up to Vermont, looking for her, following up on leads.”

But trying to track down a college student, especially an 18-year old, who in Vermont at the time was considered of legal age, was difficult.

“There was really no missing person network at the time, no Internet, no ‘America’s Most Wanted,’” Schulze said.

By the end of 1972, most of the local leads had died out, and the case went cold.

In 1994 Lynne’s parents provided DNA samples, which might have served to identify her remains, but to no avail. Two years ago, they enlisted the help of an intuitive counselor. Schulze has posted information about her sister on various missing persons Web sites, like the Jane Doe Network.

“We are very hopeful still that there is someone, perhaps not necessarily locally, who may know what happened to my sister, and may be willing to come forward under the right circumstances,” Schulze said.

Lynne’s family, which includes another sister and two younger brothers, believes all they might find at this point are her remains and the missing pieces of a 37-year-old puzzle. But they have not given up hope.

That’s the only way to survive the uncertainty of having a family member go missing, Schulze said.

“Keeping your thoughts and memories, writing everything down, lots of prayer,” she said. “Everyone in our family has gone through one side of this, with all the questioning, and come to another side where we are now, a place of peace.”

Anyone with information concerning the whereabouts of Nicholas Garza or Lynne Schulze may contact the Middlebury Police Department at 388-3191 or the Middlebury College Department of Public Safety at 443-5911.

http://www.addisonindependent.com/node/1182

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Fate of missing college student from Simsbury still a mystery
4/17/2008

For some older residents of Middlebury, Vt., and college professors at Middlebury College, the recent disappearance of a college freshman is reminiscent of the earlier disappearance of a college student who was originally from Simsbury.
According to the Middlebury Police Department, the latest victim's winter coats, I-Pod and laptop computer were all left in his dorm room. To date, neither his cell phone or his credit cards have been used nor have any withdrawals been made from his bank account.
Police and volunteers have tried to find Nicholas Garza for nearly two months. Unfortunately, since his disappearance, several feet of snow have fallen in Vermont making the search more difficult. The Garza family is offering a $20,000 reward for their son's safe return or for information that could lead to the conviction of anyone responsible for his disappearance and possible homicide.
Lynne Katherine Schulze was just about to complete her first semester at Middlebury College in 1971. Her first time away from home was not an easy one for Schulze. The light brown-haired, blued eyed co-ed had stated to family and friends that she was homesick and thought about withdrawing from college.
On the afternoon of Dec. 10, 1971, she went to take a final exam with one of her friends from her college dorm. As she was walking to the exam with her friend, she said that she had to go back and retrieve her favorite pen. She never made it back to take the exam and that was the last anyone had seen or heard from her. Middlebury Police found her all of personal belongings, including her checkbook and ID in her dormitory room. They also found evidence that she had cashed $30 from her checking account on the day of her disappearance.
What happened to Schulze since that day has plagued her family for nearly 40 years. At the time of her disappearance, law enforcement and college officials speculated that Schulze ran away and would eventually reconnect with her family in Simsbury. The Schulze family, desperate for answers on their daughter's whereabouts, even contacted then Connecticut's United States Sen.Abraham Ribicoff for help. As a result, the FBI became involved in this case for an albeit brief period of time.
According to Lynne's sister, Anne Schulze, the theory of her running away doomed the investigation from the start. Anne was a year and a half younger than Lynne. She was in her senior year at Simsbury High School when her older sister vanished. Anne and her father spent many weekends in Vermont that year looking for answers.
"When my sister was first reported missing, my mother immediately thought foul play had occurred," said Anne. "Many of us [Lynne's siblings] tried to sway that thinking. However, when the first Christmas came by and Lynne wasn't there, the rest of the family started to fear the worst."
It's been 36 Christmas holidays that Anne has not seen her sister. Since that time, she and the rest of her siblings have moved out of state. Her parents passed away and never had closure as to what happened to their eldest daughter. The family did leave DNA samples and Lynne's dental records with law enforcement in case human remains are found and need to be compared with Lynne's.
The National Crime Information Center of the Federal Bureau of Investigation states that there are 50,930 active missing adult cases in the United States as of Jan. 31, 2007. It also lists that there are 5,218 cases of deceased unidentified persons. Lynne is one of 18 missing persons listed on the Vermont State Police Web site. The state of Connecticut has no official published number of missing persons. However, the non-profit missing person website, the Charley Project, lists for adults and children. Among them are the 1952 vanishing of young Connie Smith from a Salisbury sleepover camp, the 1973 abduction of 7-year-old Janice Pockett just a few hundred feet from her Tolland home, and the suspicious disappearance of 31-year-old Billy Smolinski in 2004 from his Waterbury home.
According to missing persons' activist and Doe Network Media Director Todd Matthews, the number of missing persons nationally may be twice as many as reported. He states that many families do not report loved ones missing - sometimes out of fear of the truth or out of false hope that their loved ones will return.
Decades later, foul play has been strongly considered in Schulze's disappearance. According to Middlebury Police, some people have confessed to murdering Schulze, but all of these were proven to be false.
Anne and several of Lynne's high school friends got together in Middlebury back in 2006 to be interviewed for an article about Lynne for the Addison Independent Newspaper in Vermont. They continue to press police for answers and have managed to get her case profiled on several different crime websites such as the Doe Network, the Charley Project and Connecticut's Cold Cases. Lynne's case has even been discussed by individuals on various Internet forums who offer their own theories as to what happened.
Anne appreciates the attention that her sister's case has recently received, but does not believe her sister decided to cut ties with her family and close friends and started a new life.
"My sister was a happy person, who loved her family and friends," she said. "When she was at college, she would always write to friends and family members. Just three days before she disappeared, she had registered for second semester classes. I strongly believe that there may be one or more persons that know what happened to my sister and might come forward to share that information with the Middlebury Police or with our family given the right circumstances. It would give our family a great sense of peace to know what happened to Lynne and to finally get closure on her disappearance."
The possibility of foul play is one that the detective in her case, Officer Vegar Boe, has looked at carefully. Vegar is also the detective handling the Nicholas Garza case. "When Lynne went missing, the police back then were too quick to assume she ran away," he explained. "Even though there was no evidence that supported that, we are looking at this case through all possible angles."
One problem with Lynne's case was that her parents were notified five days after she was last seen. It took five days before an investigation was even started. In most missing person cases, the first 48 hours are the most crucial in trying to recover the person alive. There were some alleged sightings of Lynne weeks after she disappeared, but they were never verified to be true.
Boe has put much time on Lynne's case. He has tracked a lead all the way to Florida to see if an individual had a connection to Lynne's disappearance. He also stated the Middlebury Police looked at Robert Garrow as a person of interest, but eventually ruled out the now deceased upstate New York serial killer. Vegar considers it highly unusual that if Lynne Schulze did start a new life, that she never made a contact with any friends or family members.
"She was very close to her family. Her parents gave her a way out of Middlebury College. She could have transferred after the semester. In the end, she never showed up for that final exam," Boe said.
While the national media has focused some attention on Nicholas Garza, Anne made it a point to speak to his mother, Natalie Garza. Natalie Garza has a 9-year-old son who has had a difficult time dealing with the absence of his older brother.
"I know what they're going through," Anne said. "Sadly, my family has been living it for almost 40 years. I hope she gets her son back safe soon. My family wanted the same with Lynne. We have reached out to Natalie Garza and her family to share information we have learned about Web sites and other resources to contact when your family member is missing. We also believe that if any greater good is to come of my sister's disappearance, it is to help another family in a similar situation of despair and to give them empathy, hope and prayers."

For more information about Nicholas Garza go to www.nicholasgarza.org/
Other websites of interest are
www.doenetwork.org/
www.charleyproject.org/
www.ctcoldcases.com/


If you have any information regarding the disappearance of Lynne Schulze, contact Officer Boe at the Middlebury Police at 802-388-3191 or www.ctcoldcases.com.
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19494707&BRD=1666&PAG=461&dept_id=553675&rfi=6

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