Linda Evans Finds Missing Mother, Lucy Johnson, Alive In Yukon 52 Years After Disappearance

When investigators in 1965 found out Lucy Johnson had been missing since 1961, they were convinced she'd been murdered. But Johnson's daughter, a Surrey, British Columbia, woman named Linda Evans, recently discovered that Johnson was alive and well in the Yukon, more than 52 years after her disappearance.

Evans says she was just 7 or 8 when her mother vanished from her Surrey home in 1961, NBC News reports. But her father, Marvin, didn’t report her disappearance until 1965, prompting an investigation into possible homicide and Marvin even being considered a suspect.

For the past 52 years, Evans had assumed that her mother was dead. “I’m still walking around in shock,” Evans told the Surrey Leader. “I thought she was dead because there’s been no contact. Nothing.” Evans has since learned that Johnson, now 77, is alive and living in the Yukon — and that she has four half siblings.

The search for Johnson reignited in June when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police featured her disappearance as one of its oldest unsolved missing persons cases, the Surrey Leader reports. After seeing an article on it, Evans decided to do some detective work of her own, taking out ads in a British Columbia newspaper and researching on the Internet.

“We received a phone call from a woman in the Yukon who claimed that she had seen the picture of the missing person in the free newspapers and said the missing person we were looking for was actually her mother,” Surrey RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Bert Paquet told the CBC. Soon after, police confirmed that Johnson had a second family in Yukon.

Despite her mother’s unexplained disappearance, Evans told the Surrey Leader that she isn't holding a grudge. “I just hope I can be part of her life,” Evans said. “I’ll just give her a big hug and hope the words come easy.”