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http://www.projectjason.org/aan/AAN_PauletteJaster.pdfLong gone
Decades drag on for family, friends of missing womanDAVISON TOWNSHIP
THE FLINT JOURNAL FIRST EDITION
Sunday, April 30, 2006
By Ron Fonger
rfonger@flintjournal.com • 810.766.6317
DAVISON - Paulette Jaster was a homecoming queen candidate and one of the best female players ever to lace up a pair of Converse hightops for Davison High School.
She was smart - a National Honor Society member - and heartbreakingly attractive, with flowing dark hair and brown eyes.
And for nearly three decades, she has been missing - presumed neither dead nor alive - leaving her family to assume the worst even though they hope they are wrong.
"I think she's dead, ... a body that's been buried," said Paulette's father, Edwin, sipping a cup of coffee as he thumbed through old papers that remind him of his daughter's story.
There is a court petition to commit her to Ypsilanti State Hospital in 1977, an ad from a Florida newspaper offering a reward for information, letters to television shows desperately asking for help.
In May, it will be 27 years since Edwin Jaster, 85, last saw his daughter. His ex-wife, Caroline, died last year, still chasing rumors about Paulette sightings. His other children are scattered throughout the country, and he still hopes Paulette, who would be 52 now, is somewhere out there, too.
"Wouldn't it be nice if she was found someplace?" he asked.
Jaster's eyes brightened at the thought - the same possibility that drives Paulette's sisters to keep recalling the sometimes painful memories about their sibling who started showing signs of mental illness almost overnight and walked away from home early one morning, never to return.
Paulette faded away, never using her Social Security number after 1980, never contacting her family or her closest friends and still suffering from the schizophrenia that hit her hard at about the time she graduated from Davison High School.
Paulette was 25 when she left Davison on foot May 12, 1979, headed toward I-69, carrying an old Army backpack, wearing jeans and a favorite turquoise ring.
"She may be with the Lord by now," said Pam Atkinson, a younger sister who lives in the Bridgeport area. "I believe she was alive (as recently as) 1989. I believe (that) in my gut."
Popular girl
Paulette was popular at Davison High School, part of the same class of 1972 that produced filmmaker Michael Moore.
Boys were interested in her, but she wasn't just a pretty face. She was named to the All-Big Nine Conference basketball team two straight years and sang in the school choir. She could draw and played piano.
"She had a beautiful figure. She was just dramatic looking," said best friend Kathy Pagels, now of Scottsdale, Ariz. "She was beautiful, artistic, funny, adventurous, gifted - all those things."
Friends since they met at St. John Catholic Elementary School in Davison, Pagels still has photos of her and Paulette from her sixth birthday party.
And she keeps a children's book that she wrote and Paulette illustrated while the two were at college.
The colored-pencil drawings tell the story of a little boy who wanders away from home.
The two stayed best friends through high school, and Pagels said she tried to help her friend through a single semester at Central Michigan University.
But there already was a distant look in Paulette's eyes - something that wasn't right.
"The summer after high school, things really started to change for her. It was kind of a rigidity - almost more of a fearful look," Pagels said about her friend. "She kind of shunned attempts to talk to her.
"In my heart, I think she just had a dramatic onset of mental illness that nobody understood or treated properly. ... People were afraid of it, and she began to lose her connections."
Family
The Jaster family lived in a new ranch-style house on Gary Ray Street in Davison.
Edwin Jaster says he was busy with work as an appliance salesman, traveling to retail stores all over the region, which extended into Michigan's Thumb.
His daughters say he was strict with them and had a quick temper.
Paulette's sisters remember their mother as loving, taking care of their needs and getting them where they needed to go. The girls rode bicycles, played hopscotch and make-believe at home, and vacationed at a shared cabin at Oscoda.
Paulette "was just a normal kid," said older sister Peggy Sperlich of Hot Springs, S.D. "She was fun-loving, very physically active - kind of a tomboy."
Paulette shared a room with older sister Pat Miller, who now lives just south of St. Paul, Minn.
"We were typical sisters - half the time getting along (and) half the time fighting," Miller recalls.
Schizophrenia
As with other victims of schizophrenia, there was no way to tell Paulette would develop the disease and no early signs that it was starting to eat away at her as she grew into a woman.
There is no certain cause for the disease, which can be like a distortion of reality accompanied by delusions, hallucinations and bizarre behavior. It can develop with no loss of basic intellectual functions.
Two years before she disappeared, Paulette showed signs of her troubled mind. She walked into the Davison Police Department and told dispatcher Donna Granger that she was afraid that people - "even Henry in California" - were trying to kill her
In a Genesee County Probate Court petition, Granger wrote that Paulette said Henry was "trying to use her brain," and other men took her up north and shot her full of poison.
A probate judge found Paulette mentally ill on July 7, 1977, after she was arrested following an argument with a customer at a Davison restaurant for reasons no one can remember.
At Ypsilanti, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to the hospital.
"Mental illness can abruptly present itself, and I think Paulette was dealing with that longer than anyone probably knew. I think she tried very hard" to mask it, said Pagels, who visited her friend in Ypsilanti but remembers only a few details.
"There was almost a part of her that was missing. That part that you could really connect with was missing. It was almost like she was talking to someone through a fog.''
After less than two months at the former state mental hospital, Paulette signed herself out, and her sisters said her condition grew worse.
"She would sometimes take her medication and sometimes she wouldn't," Sperlich said.
And she self-medicated, friends and family said, using marijuana and other drugs.
She also came and went from Davison, traveling out West and to Florida, using her parents' house as a home base.
Dr. Robert A. Cuthbertson, vice president of medical affairs at Genesee County Community Mental Health, said schizophrenia can develop suddenly and its cause is unknown.
Sufferers become more withdrawn and have a harder time interacting. They can hear voices and struggle with decisions like whether to turn left or right.
And, importantly for Paulette, they can become reclusive, intentionally avoiding contact with others even when they need help.
"There are many of the street people who choose not to be in an apartment despite the fact that an apartment is available," Cuthbertson said.
Sometimes, perhaps most frustrating for Paulette's family and friends, people with schizophrenia change their identities to avoid being found.
Last seen
Just six years ago, Paulette's family got its last break in locating her when former state police Detective Sgt. Daniel Bohnett tracked Social Security records that put Paulette or someone using her identity in Arizona in 1980.
An e-mail from Bohnett to the family says Paulette earned $319 working in January and February 1980 at a Walgreens lunch counter and a family restaurant, both in Mesa, Ariz.
No other records have been found, and the leads were too old to help much, said Bohnett, who has since retired.
The investigator tried to shake the case up and generate new leads by sending out a nationwide bulletin and ordering computerized and hand-drawn age-progressions of Paulette some years ago.
The drawings assume Paulette has lived for decades as a transient.
"There's different possibilities," Bohnett said of the case. "There's times I think she may still be out there. She may (be in) Mexico or the Dominican Republic.
Atkinson said she believes Paulette, who lived with her briefly after college, tried to contact her on Dec. 23, 1989 - more than 10 years after she left Davison for the last time.
Another secretary at the church where she worked answered the telephone and heard an operator ask, "Is this the number you wanted?" Atkinson said. The female caller said yes, then, "Pam? Pam?" before becoming guarded, nervous and hanging up.
"I think she just panicked," Atkinson said.
Paulette's mother followed several tips that her daughter was alive, including one that she was in Florida and could be in trouble. In the Sarasota area, Caroline Jaster found several people who believed they had seen Paulette a few months before.
Never coming back
Paulette talked to Atkinson before she left Davison for the last time, telling her she was leaving town and never coming back. She may have feared her family wanted to institutionalize her.
"She knew her life was out of control," Atkinson said, and had already started using different names, including Paula Johnson.
Mark Higham, who dated and traveled with Paulette after she dropped out of college, said his ex-girlfriend just "wanted to disappear."
Higham said he didn't see the mental problems - just a desire to leave the Genesee County and get away from her family.
"We were pretty rebellious," said Higham, who lived for years in Arizona until recently moving back to the county. "Our families did everything to break us up.
"Everybody just wanted to be in control, and we were not controllable. ... If your parents told you to do something, you didn't listen."
Many missing
Paulette Jaster is one of two long-missing women from Genesee County listed on the Michigan Does - as in John or Jane Doe - Web site,
www.michigandoes.com.
The other -Linda S. Nickell - walked away from her sister's home on Davison Road in Flint 30 years ago and has been missing ever since. Michigan Does tries to find long-term missing persons and to identify human remains.
So far, the Web site lists the stories of about 200 missing Michigan residents.
The FBI's National Crime Information Center says almost 7,000 people from Michigan missing and unaccounted for, according to Michigan Does.
"Sometimes people are murdered, and their remains are never located. Sometimes they just take off and assume a new identity, some seem to vanish into thin air," said Elizabeth Sinor of Michigan Does.
"Sometimes people disappear, but no one reports them missing until years later, and others go about their lives and don't even realize they (themselves) are 'missing,' " Sinor said.
Paulette's dental records and personal information - date of birth, height, weight, scars and birthmarks - have been entered into a national database that police use when trying to identify unidentified bodies.
At the state police post in Flint Township, troopers keep an open file on the case, but there hasn't been activity since Bohnett retired, said Detective Sgt. Stephen Sipes.
Higham said he believes Paulette may still be alive.
"Just the other day I was thinking, 'I bet she's out there,' " he said. "She left and didn't really care about coming back.
"That was mine and her attitude at the time, and her attitude was stronger than mine."
