Still aching for answers

Tiajuana Cochnauer stood at the starting line for Bloomsday in May 1986 and scanned the crowd for her friend, Debora Swanson.

More than a month had passed since the bubbly Coeur d’Alene teacher disappeared, but Cochnauer went to the race like the two of them planned. Maybe Swanson had amnesia, she thought, and maybe – just maybe – something would pull her to Bloomsday.

“I just felt like I had to do it,” Cochnauer said, “in case she was there. I could see her and jog her memory.”

She went back to Bloomsday the next year. And for many years after.

“I can’t remember what year I finally quit running and quit going to Bloomsday,” said Cochnauer, who now lives in South Carolina. “I guess by then I said I’m not going to see Debbie.”

Lewis Stone avoids crowds. Anytime he’s in one, he says, he sees his daughter, Sally Anne Stone.

The 21-year-old exotic dancer from Coeur d’Alene went missing just two months after Swanson disappeared.

“You raise a kid and she becomes a part of you,” Lewis Stone said Thursday from his home in California. “For the first few years it was impossible to go anywhere without seeing her. I still see her.”

March 29 marks the 20th anniversary of Swanson’s disappearance. Stone went missing on May 16.

Those who knew the women say they ache for answers today just as much as they did two decades ago.

“Even after 20 years, it’s hard,” said Sandy Medved, a fourth-grade teacher who worked with Swanson at Sorensen Elementary School. “Part of what is difficult is not knowing.”

Something was wrong

School was out for spring break when the 31-year-old single woman disappeared. She was born in Minnesota and moved to the area 10 years before she went missing to take a teaching job in Riverside, Wash.

Eventually, she moved to Coeur d’Alene and took a teaching job at Sorensen Elementary.

She was supposed to meet up with Cochnauer that week to go to a shower. Some other friends were expecting her for Easter dinner. She missed church. She missed volleyball practice.

To not show up and not call was out of character for Swanson. Her friends realized something was terribly wrong.Swanson’s car was discovered in the parking lot near Tubbs Hill in downtown Coeur d’Alene. Her purse was locked inside, along with a purchase she’d made that day – flower bulbs for her garden.

Students who knew Swanson from Sorensen Elementary said they saw her hiking Tubbs Hill that day. Authorities did a grid search of the heavily wooded city park that protrudes into Lake Coeur d’Alene. They flew over the hill with infrared equipment. Divers searched the waters surrounding the hill.

Medved and others who worked at Sorensen Elementary with Swanson raised money for a reward fund and even enlisted the help of a psychic to find the missing special education teacher.

Fifth-grade teacher David Groth was in his first year of teaching then, and his classroom was next door to the special education room.

“I said goodbye right before (spring) break and never saw her again,” Groth said.

He said it’s hard to believe 20 years has passed.

Retired Coeur d’Alene police detective Carl Bergh said he hopes maybe the somber anniversary prompts someone to come forward with information in the case. Bergh spent years investigating Swanson’s disappearance. Each year on the anniversary of her disappearance, for many years, he asked newspapers to run articles with her picture, hoping someone would remember seeing her.

“Missing persons are probably the hardest case for a law enforcement officer to work,” Bergh said. “Every other case gives you a scene where something happened. When someone disappears, you don’t know where they disappeared from.”

The former investigator said he believes at least one person knows what happened to Swanson.

Coeur d’Alene police Sgt. Christie Wood said the department tries to review the Swanson and Stone cases once a year.

Retired police detectives who volunteer their services with Coeur d’Alene police plan to take a fresh look at Swanson’s case, Wood said.

They recently reviewed the Stone file but came up empty.

Would have called

Lewis Stone said his daughter ran with a rough crowd. He’s heard rumors that she was involved in a drug deal gone bad.

After all this time, he said he’s pretty confident she was the victim of foul play.

“I always got along with Sally really well, and she called me quite often,” Lewis Stone said. “If there was any way she possibly could have called me, I’m confident she would have.”

The Spokesman-Review reported Stone was last seen leaving an appointment with a physical therapist where she was being treated for a knee injury. Her husband, who was in jail at the time, told the newspaper that he knew something was wrong when he received a letter from Sally on May 22.

Joseph Clyde Ries said his wife wrote in the letter that she was enclosing a money order and some pictures of herself, but the letter included neither. Though Stone typically kissed the envelopes of letters she sent to her husband in jail, he said the letter wasn’t sealed with her trademark lipstick kiss.

He said he believed Stone didn’t send the letter herself.

Police later found Stone’s unlocked car in the yard at her Coeur d’Alene rental home. There was no sign of a struggle in the house, which was locked.

Ries said he suspected his wife may have been the victim of a drug-related homicide.

By the end of June, police told the newspaper they felt they’d exhausted all leads in the Stone case.

Cochnauer said she’s become resigned to the possibility her friend is no longer alive. One of the scenarios she thinks is “most tolerable” is that Swanson, being helpful as she was, was in that parking lot and someone asked for help.

Maybe she got in their car, Cochnauer said, and willingly went somewhere. Maybe something happened.

Some suggested Swanson was jogging or hiking on Tubbs Hill and tripped, hit her head on a rock and fell into the lake. Cochnauer keeps a folder full of information on her missing friend and a letter she wrote but never sent. In her mind she keeps memories of ski trips they went on and memories they shared.

In her heart, she still has a little bit of hope.

She recalled a road trip they took to Big Mountain in Montana. Swanson drove.

“When she drives, she steps on the gas and steps on the brake,” Cochnauer said, laughing and crying at the same time. “If there were a way … if someone would wonder, is that person Debbie, they might check to see if she drives that way.”