Rosemarie Doederlein was 14 years old when her mother sent her to a bakery a few blocks away from her apartment one afternoon in 1954. She never returned.
Vera Hastie (maiden name Doederlein) finally saw her sister Rosemarie and her voice It's been almost 68 years since I heard about it. — And she says it's only a day when she doesn't think about herself.
Rosemarie Doederlein finds her girl and a few weeks later in a bakery a few blocks away from Notre Dame de Grasse's apartment by her mother one afternoon in late 1954. I was 14 years old when I sent. Her parents had arrived in Montreal from Germany.
She never came back.
"It was after 4 o'clock that her mother suddenly realized that Rosemary should come back," 79 in a telephone interview from California, where she had lived since the early 1960s. Bella, aged, remembered.
When he got home from work, her father went to a bakery: Rosemary had never been there. He tried the Merton School in Côte Saint-Luc, but the door was locked. Then her parents went to the police. Police unlocked the school and searched, but it didn't help.
Vera, then 11 years old, remembered a police detective in her family's Randall Avenue apartment when she returned home from school the next afternoon. They asked some questions. The girl could only speak German, so her father translated it.
Her parents will spend the rest of her life searching, Bella, who now lives with her youngest daughter, Christa Hasty and her family. Told.
The family moved regularly, "we walked and walked, but at that point my parents still didn't tell me what had happened," she recalled. rice field. "I couldn't understand why we were always walking. They were looking for shoes, jackets, gloves, whatever. I found out later. My mother emphasized me to look into the window.
"One of the problems is that I came from a family that didn't involve the child because of an adult, a family that speaks only when the child was spoken to. And later I asked. "When I wanted to, my mother would just crumble."
Even after Vera left town, "Rose Marie was always behind my heart," she said. rice field. "I have her little red purse I brought from Germany and costume jewelry I've been playing for hours. I have her prayer book, and wherever I go, it's Go with me — just in case we face it. You can say, "I haven't forgotten you."
Details are ambiguous. For example, Bella does not know the exact date that Rosemary disappeared. It was only during her 14th birthday on November 17th and Christmas when her family did not celebrate that year or any subsequent year. She Bella attends Merton and she remembers her uniform (tunic), but she doesn't remember that Rosemary had it. She wasn't even at school with Rosemary.
Today, using available tools such as DNA testing, social media, online newspaper archives, and other databases, Crysta is a mystery of her aunt's disappearance and closure. He said he wanted a solution. my mom. "
They recently posted the story of Rosemarie on the pages of severalFacebook community groups and created their own Facebook group.
After seeing her post, "hundreds of strangers" offered help, Bella said. Researchers, historians, podcasters, genealogists, missing person networks, and more have been enhanced to provide advice and suggestions and share her posts.
Newspaper clippings from the 1950s opened up many possibilities. Rosemary has been kidnapped. She was sold to another family. She was forced into prostitution. Maybe she ran away with the boy. She may have left Montreal. In particular, Bella and Crysta learned about the considerable black market for infants and children at the time and the scandal of Dupresis orphans who were misidentified as mentally ill by the Quebec government in the 1940s and 1950s and were trapped in mental hospitals.
"We weren't very sophisticated when my sister and I came," Bella said. They lived in a small village and had no facilities such as a telephone or refrigerator. "At that time, I didn't know that people would disappear and be killed."
Crysta contacted the Montreal police. The disappeared cases remain open until resolved, a SPVM spokesman said this week, and there is a team of investigators assigned to those cases.
DNA testing revealed a close match that could be the grandson of Bella, who could be the grandson of Rosemary. However, since the matching person knows nothing about that side of the family, Crysta and Bella reach out to those who can interpret the genetic information.
Montreal-based nonprofit founder Jan Guppy Unidentified Human Remains Canada,linked Vera with Miami-Dade Police forensic artist Samantha Steinberg. About what rosemary looks like today. If she is alive, she is 81 years old. Guppy is also working to get the Rosemarie case on popular networks such as theAWARE Foundation andDoe Network.
"It's not easy to wonder what happened, but someone knows something," Bella said. "Someone has heard something."
Overview
If you have information about Rosemarie Doederlein, Cold Case Coordinator Linda Bonin, a Montreal police officer ( Please contact 514-280-8707 or 514-546-2587).
sschwartz@postmedia.com
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