She recognized her own photo, but can’t account for 42 years
MONTICELLO, N.Y. — The 78-year-old woman’s mind was clouded by dementia. But she recognized the brunette with a slight smile in the faded picture from the 1970s detectives showed her.
“Me,” the woman uttered in a voice barely above a whisper.
The picture helped investigators visiting an assisted-living facility near Boston last month verify they had finally found Flora Stevens. She had been a $2.25-an-hour chambermaid at the grandest hotel in upstate New York’s Catskills when she was dropped off at a hospital one summer night in 1975 and vanished.
The discovery of a woman missing for 42 years drew widespread attention and news coverage, accompanied by a police photo of the smiling woman in a wheelchair with a teddy bear in her lap and flanked by the beaming detectives.