A woman who disappeared nearly 32 years ago — when she was just 13 and living in Arizona — has told investigators she wasn’t abducted. She ran away.
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Christina Marie Plante, now 44 and living under a different name, told a cold case investigator from the Gila County Sheriff’s Office that family members helped her leave.
“This was information we had not been aware of before we located her,” Chief Deputy James Lahti told NBC News on Friday. “Up until then, we didn’t know where she was and we were under the impression she had been kidnapped.”
But Terry Hudgens, a former Gila County sheriff’s deputy who initially investigated the disappearance of the young teenager who went by “Tina,” said in an interview Thursday that he was mystified by all the sudden interest in this case — because, he said, it was resolved shortly after the girl was reported missing.
Hudgens said Plante’s father had custody of her but that she wanted to live with her mother. So they arranged to meet while Plante was walking to a nearby stable to tend to her horse, he said. The mother and daughter then drove to the airport in Phoenix and flew out of state — “and maybe out of the country,” he said.
Hudgens said they dropped their investigation after determining that Plante was safe. “It was a custody battle,” he said.
Lahti confirmed Hudgens led the initial search for Plante but said the case was never officially closed. He also confirmed that Plante told them certain family members helped her disappear, but offered no further details.
“We’re still in the process of looking into what happened and as new information develops we will be providing updates,” he said.
Gila County Sheriff Adam Shepherd drew national attention to the sparsely-populated county northeast of Phoenix with the announcement Wednesday that Plante had been found. Out of respect for her privacy, the sheriff’s office said it would not release any other details about her current whereabouts.
On Thursday, the sheriff’s deputy who located Plante revealed that she had left voluntarily with help from of family members with whom she had remained in touch.
“I was dumbfounded,” Capt. Jamie Garrett told NewsNation’s “Jesse Weber Live” show Thursday. “I guess she wasn’t happy with where she was living and who she was living with, and she ran away.”
Garrett said she told Plante that investigators had been “under the impression that somebody kidnapped you. It was deemed a criminal offense.’”
NBC News has not been able to contact Plante’s parents. Available records show that a woman with Plante’s name and date of birth lived in Portland, Oregon, from June 2004 through May 2006, but both the local police and sheriff’s office said they had no contact with this person.
Plante was living in the small town of Star Valley when she went missing May 16, 1994. She was last seen heading to the stable where her horse was kept, according to the sheriff’s office missing person poster.
The Payson Roundup, in a May 18, 1994 newspaper article, quoted Hudgens as saying that Plante “had commented to friends about running away. But everybody kind of treats it not too seriously because they don’t think she’d ever leave without her horse and her brother,” Hudgens reportedly said.
At the time, Plante was living with an aunt and uncle who put up a $10,000 reward for information on her whereabouts. Her name was entered into national databases for missing children and Lahti said investigators would revisit her case periodically as the years passed and the trail grew cold.
Garrett did not say during the interview how they finally located Plante, but she said she had not wanted to be found.
“She said that was a long time ago, that was an old life,” Garrett said. “She’s in her adult life. She has her family now. That’s not something she even thinks about.”