When Carey Mae Parker didn’t show up for her son’s sixth birthday party in Hunt County, Texas, in 1991, her family was puzzled but not entirely surprised. Parker was young and had a turbulent life, and they assumed she’d appear eventually. But she never did. Parker’s daughter, Brandy Hathcock, was five at the time. She and her two siblings had spent time in foster care; later, they moved in with their grandfather. The household was chaotic, fractured by abuse. “I hadn’t heard the term ‘intergenerational trauma’ until pretty recently, but as soon as I heard it I knew, O.K., that’s exactly what I’ve experienced,” Brandy told me.
Brandy was initially led to believe that her mother had abandoned the family, but as she got older she began to reconsider. Maybe Parker hadn’t left her children; maybe something had happened to her. Her relatives shared their own ideas: cinematic theories involving drug deals gone wrong, Mexican cartels, crooked cops, and a vast, countywide conspiracy. The uncertainty was “like living with a ghost,” Brandy said. “I wanted to give up hope, because that kind of hope is so heavy. I didn’t want to carry it anymore, but I couldn’t put it down.” When Brandy was in her early twenties, she and her aunt, Patricia Gager, tried to fill in the gaps left by local law enforcement, which they said had done little to find Parker. (Gager had informed police in a neighboring county of Parker’s disappearance in 1991, but Hunt County had no record of it until 2010, when Brandy filed a missing person’s report. The local sheriff’s office then began investigating the case.)
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