Reporter, Family Fill In 12 Lost Years Alaska Mother Of 2 Sets Of Twins Claims Amnesia

Twelve years after newspaper reporter Jody Roberts disappeared from Tacoma, she resurfaced in this Southeast Alaska community with a husband and two sets of twin girls.

Roberts, who moved to Alaska in 1989 under the name Jane Dee, told authorities and relatives she has no recollection of her life before she found herself in a Denver-area shopping mall shortly after her disappearance in May 1985.

Reporters calling at her home in a trailer park here Wednesday morning were told by her husband, Dan Williams, that she was not ready to speak with the media, that she was busy catching up with her family in Oregon and the first 27 years of her life.

A 12-year memory loss would be “highly unusual,” said Dr. Gary Tucker, chairman of the University of Washington’s psychiatry department.

But amnesia is one of the least understood neurological afflictions, said Michael Copass of the UW’s neurologuy department. Amnesia can be caused by the mind’s recoiling from “something terrible,” Copass said.

Amnesia lasting years likely would involve other symptoms, none of which appear to exist in this case, said Dr. Vernon Neppe, a UW colleague of Tucker’s, though he noted one should not reach conclusions “based on tiny amounts of fact.”

There is no test to confirm an amnesia claim, Tucker said.

Doctors who treated Roberts in Denver told her that “whatever happened to you was like a near-death experience. It was so dangerous you blocked out everything,” said Roberts’ sister, Anne Corning of Beaverton, Ore., after a telephone conversation with her long-lost sibling.

“She’s just overwhelmed with the fact that she’s just found her family. She doesn’t remember anybody. She doesn’t know us. She doesn’t realize who she was and what she did, and she’s just in shock,” Corning said.

Roberts’ family and colleagues are just relieved that she is alive. The unsolved missing-persons case had recently been reopened as a homicide investigation.

“This is the best news. This is just wonderful,” said her mother, Marilyn Roberts, from Lake Oswego, Ore., late Tuesday, still overwhelmed after she and her husband, Jim, had a two-hour phone conversation with their daughter, the second of five children.

“Everyone at the News Tribune feels a tremendous feeling of relief to know that Jody Roberts is alive. … We would love to know more, but we’re happy today just to know that Jody’s alive,” Tom Osborne, senior editor at the the News Tribune in Tacoma said Tuesday.

“She didn’t know she was a reporter. She didn’t know when her birthday was,” Mrs. Roberts told KSTW-TV.

Her daughter, who turned 39 on Monday, thought she was 35, she said.

In the years she had been missing, Roberts reportedly became a waitress and put herself through the University of Denver, where she studied Russian, among other things, Corning told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

She also apparently spent some time in Denver-area hospitals, where authorities were unable to confirm her identity.

Roberts was reported missing after she failed to appear for an assignment on May 20, 1985. Her car was found in a parking garage near the newspaper offices.

Some thought her tough reporting - including stories about corruption in government and the Green River serial killer - may have played a role in her disappearance.

Tacoma city spokesman Dan Voelpel, a former reporter who worked with Roberts for two years at the News Tribune, said Tuesday he had long suspected Roberts just wanted to start a new life.

She took some of her cats to the Humane Society a few days before she vanished and emptied her bank account as if in preparation for a trip, Voelpel said.

In Alaska, Roberts has set up her own Web page design company called Pongo Computer Works, Corning told the News Tribune.