According to police, a missing Wisconsin mother who had been missing for over 60 years was found alive and happily married.
Audrey Backeberg, 82, spent six decades living under a different name after fleeing the Reedsburg home she shared with her two children and allegedly abusive husband in 1962, according to the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office.
“She had her reasons for leaving the area,” said Detective Isaac Hanson, who found Backeberg “alive and well” in March after reopening her cold case missing person file.
“I told her I wouldn’t talk about her location because it is important to her. Based on what she told me, I believe she is confident in her decision. “She did what she needed to do,” he told the Chippewa Herald.
Backeberg, who was 20 years old when she went missing, remarried and moved out of state, though she refused to say whether she had children with her new husband when police found her in March.
She was declared missing 63 years ago after picking up a paycheck at work and never returning home, and family members began to fear the worst as the case went cold.
Within days of her disappearance, witnesses saw her at an Indianapolis bus station. A babysitter for the family reported that she had taken a bus to Indiana after swallowing a Coke can full of pills.
That was the last anyone saw of her, while her husband Ronald, whom Backeberg married when she was 15, insisted he had nothing to do with her disappearance, and family members were adamant that she would not abandon her children.
Backeberg filed a criminal complaint against Ronald just days before she vanished, alleging he battered her so badly that she suffered head injuries and even threatened to kill her.
“[She reported] her husband had loaded a couple of guns and put them into the trunk of his car and threatened to kill her,” former Sauk County Sheriff Randy Stammen told the Baraboo News Republic on the 40th anniversary of her disappearance in 2002.
Backeberg did not contact her family for decades. One of her children died in 2006, and Ronald died shortly afterwards.
Backeberg’s mother died in 2023, reportedly without knowing what happened to her daughter.
“She left things behind, did her own thing, and succeeded,” Hanson told the Chippewa Herald.
He was assigned the case in January, after the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office began reviewing its cold cases.
Backeberg’s case file hadn’t been opened since 2002, and many of the documents inside hadn’t been digitized, so Hanson had to sift through reams of paper and microfilm.
He also contacted about 20 family members and witnesses, as well as information from an Ancestry.com account associated with Backeberg’s sister, to help piece things together.
“It was just a bunch of puzzle pieces,” Hanson explained. “It was just digging and digging and digging and digging, and kind of putting it all together.”
The detective eventually found an address he thought might be Backeberg’s, and when he dialed the home’s landline, she answered.
“She was very cooperative, answered all my questions,” Hanson said, explaining that he spoke with her for about 45 minutes and that her story was consistent with everything in the case.
Her family was “elated” to learn that Backeberg was still alive and well, according to Hanson, but the discovery also brought up difficult emotions.
“It’s a lot,” he explained. “Sixty-two years, then, 10 minutes later, she’s talking to somebody, her locator, when she doesn’t want to be bothered or located.”
“I was happy that she talked with me and I was able to get as much as I did,” according to him.
