318: What if your daughter went missing?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.

Today, we bring you the first of two episodes featuring Misty Watterson and Billy Macy, two sisters who both had life-altering experiences that stem from a shared childhood and weave together in parallel storylines. Today, we'll hear from Misty and the story of her missing daughter. Throughout the story, you'll hear Misty speak about her sister Billy, and we'll dive deeper into the details of what happened to Billy next week. But first, we begin with Misty Watterson for today's episode...

What if your daughter went missing? Just this blanket of darkness completely wrapped itself around me and this feeling of utter dread and panic just completely swished through my body. It's like the world has just opened up and just swallowed you in, in this big black hole of the unknown. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 318. What if your daughter went missing?

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My biological father actually do not know him.

He was very young, along with my mother, when she became pregnant with me. And he wanted to go into the military, so he signed his rights over to have somebody else be able to adopt me. I do have kind of a unique situation where I have a couple of fathers. I have the father that my biological mother married and who adopted me.

His name was Earl, and he was quite a bit older than my mother. She was, I think, 16 when she had me, and he was in his 50s. But he took really good care of her and I, and adopted me, and was willing to play that part. But while she was pregnant with my sister, Billy, he had a heart attack and passed away. My biological mother, her name is Deborah.

I was born in Montana. She was very young. This is the 70s. So she was very young and she tried to care for us as best as she could and was really having a hard time. She's young, trying to have fun and have her life. And here she is with two kids with no way to care for them. So she ended up leaving us at our babysitter's house and our babysitter's neighbors ended up adopting my sister and I.

So the father that raised me, his name is Terry, and he was an Army veteran, spent a couple of tours in the Vietnam War, and he was always very proud of that. I was probably about three or four years old, and I remember my father, Terry, would leave all week long to go off and do jobs for the Union, so he left us in the care of Cheryl, our adoptive mother.

And Cheryl was a very bad alcoholic. She would not care for us. She would like lock us in our rooms. My room was in the basement. My sister had her own room upstairs and she would lock us in there and like not feed us and not care for us the entire time.

My father didn't catch on for a while, but when he finally did, he left her. He took us and he divorced her and he ended up meeting our stepmom, Trina. They got married and they took us from Montana to Oregon for us to get away from her. I almost feel like I was too young to really experience any trauma from that.

I do know that my biological mother raised me until I was about two and a half. And I do know that I experienced a lot of trauma from her just going away. I lived my whole life, you know, just wondering about her and dreaming about her and like just feeling this huge void in my life.

The first couple of years that you're growing up are the most important. That's when you're learning how to be a person and bonding with these people, your family, your parents, your siblings. And to just have them be gone, you know, I really felt that. It really affected me my whole life. After he met Trina, my stepmom, they were both really great to us. She was very young. He was like 30. I think she was like 19.

She was so good with my sister and I. She would take us shopping. We'd go to the mall. She taught us how to put lipstick on. All the fun, girly things that we were kind of missing without a mom being around. I remember a lot of fun times with her and my dad and my sister until she started having her own children after my father and her got married. I remember the day she brought home her first child.

She just turned awful to me and my sister. Just was not nice to us from that day forward ever again, really. I don't know if she felt a sense of, I have, you know, now I have my own children. Like, we don't really need you anymore, you know. That's kind of what I felt like growing up. Throughout my younger years, she had four more children up until I was about 14 years old.

So during the time of between 8 and 14, we basically raised her children for her. Postpartum had completely riddled her, and she just became a very angry, mean person to my sister and I, and frankly to her own kids and her husband too. As they started having more kids, he became complicit in the abuse. He stood by and watched it, and at times himself was abusive physically.

I think of him just as guilty of the abuse. And he started sexually abusing me when I was in fourth grade. I tried to tell people and nobody ever believed me. Until this day, everyone still thinks I'm lying. During that time, I felt scared a lot.

She would freak out and yell and scream and like throw things and call us horrible names. And so I spent most of my years just feeling really scared and panicked and not knowing what was going to happen next. We moved around a lot. So making friends in school was a little difficult. I would make friends and then a few months later we would move again. So I just kind of learned to not really get close to anybody.

When I was 16, my family had moved us to Ocean Shores, Washington. And I had met a woman at work. She was a cook and I was a dishwasher. It was my very first job. She was a lesbian and she started to come on to me.

Of course, I was 16 and wanting to have fun and experiment. So, you know, I went along with it. And she had actually left hickeys on my neck one time. And when my mother saw those, she literally physically threw me out of the house by the hair and was like, we don't want any lesbians living here. And like, we don't get social security money for you anymore. Like, you're gone.

So I left and I never went back. I went and found that lady and she let me stay with her. Her and I had a relationship for about two or three years, unfortunately, which was very drug fueled and filled with abuse because that's all I was used to. My sister and I, we always have been very close.

I feel like because we were adopted and we actually got to stay together, we had a sort of bond that a lot of siblings don't have. We were just best friends and I always wanted the best for her and she always wanted the best for me. So, you know, when I moved out of the house, my first thought was, how do I get my sister out of there? What do I do to get her out of there? When she was very young, she became pregnant and she was also thrown out of the house as well when she was 16.

with a baby in a stroller walking down the street with nowhere to go. So I worked really hard to get out of that abusive relationship and put myself through a vocational training school, did really well, graduated. And as soon as I got out, I went and got my sister and had her come live with me. She was young. I taught her how to drive. I taught her how to be a woman and how to start her life doing things on her own.

I was 20 when I met my husband. He was the funniest person I'd ever met in my whole life. And I just knew that night, I was like, I'm going to marry this guy. And he felt the same way. So we started a relationship and him and I moved in together in Portland. And very soon I was pregnant with my son and him and I got married.

Blake was born and he was the cutest little baby. He had like full head of hair and I was so in love with him. I still remember that feeling of when you first lay your eyes on your child. There's this feeling that I wish I could bottle because if I sold that, I'd be rich. What I didn't realize is that my husband had a really bad drug problem.

He was an incredibly bad alcoholic and he was really into crack cocaine and he spent a lot of time doing that and we would end up fighting. Things got physically abusive between both of us.

It wasn't just him. Sometimes I would get physical with him too because I would just get so tired of the drinking and just living our lives like that. Like I just wanted to be normal. I want us to be a normal family. And you know, that's all I ever wanted in my whole life was just a normal life. And again, failed in this marriage of trying to find that normal life.

I think Blake was about a year old when we started talking about divorce and separating. And so we spent the next year kind of sleeping in separate bedrooms and not being intimate with each other. And I remember one time we were intimate together after like a year and I got pregnant with Allison. I ended up leaving him and I took Blake with me while I was pregnant with Allison and ended up having her not being in a relationship.

He did, however, helped out a lot. But when she was really little, she cried a lot. She was very colicky. And my body was going through postpartum and I was really depressed. She was crying all the time and I still had Blake to take care of. And I was really close to Blake and he was really close to Allison. Like he was a lot closer to her than I was. I think postpartum kind of got to me. And I started going out with friends and drinking a lot and falling back into my old patterns.

After her colicky years, her and I became very close. She's definitely a mama's girl. Always wanted to be around her mama. And I always wanted to be around her too. Unfortunately, during the time of my kids growing up, I got into drugs pretty heavily. I had that in their life for many years.

I always took care of them financially, you know, they had food to eat and clothes and they had everything they needed. But I found that I was not emotionally available for them for many years because of drugs. I was addicted to meth, amphetamines and opiates and drinking, of course. You know, there was many times I wanted to quit, but you know, I was always having to work two jobs sometimes to take care of my kids.

So I couldn't afford to take the time off to go through any type of detox. I guess that was kind of my excuse at the time. Now I think about it and I'm like, I should have just done it. It was tough on them. They experienced the awful people I would bring around. And that's my biggest regret in life is having them ever around that situation.

It wasn't until Allison was 14, Blake was 16, that I finally hit rock bottom and completely got clean and sober and got drugs out of my life. One of the reasons was because they were done with me. They were completely done and they both said, if you don't change, if you don't stop doing this, we're not going to be a part of your lives anymore. That was all I needed.

They're my everything. Like I could not imagine living my life without them. So I gave up that lifestyle to be a mom to them. As they got older and I was learning this new lifestyle of clean and sober, Allison would go to meetings with me. She basically grew up in the Narcotics Anonymous world and she loved those people and she loved that program. And she would beg, mom, can I go to a meeting with you, please? And she was just all about it.

When she was 17, Blake was 19, we all decided to get a place together, like our own apartment, because I'd been living in clean and sober living for about a year. And I felt comfortable enough in my sobriety that I thought, let's all move in together. Let's try our family again. It was awesome. It worked really well for a good while until my two children decided that they wanted to try this little party lifestyle themselves.

And, uh, that's kind of where everything started with Alison and with her addiction. In the beginning of her addiction, she was just kind of having like here and there parties with her friends, drinking, probably do a little bit of Molly. They might've done some cocaine here and there. It wasn't like an every night thing, but pretty soon after a few months, um,

I find out that she's completely 100% addicted to Xanax and she's needing it every single day. She started getting really skinny and I just noticed a big change in her personality. Her and I were arguing a lot more and it was really tough on our relationship because she knows the way of recovery. She grew up in it.

So it was frustrating for me to watch her, you know, go down this path of destruction as she saw me do for many years. Her addiction got worse and she met a guy that she had went to high school with. She reconnected with him and he was really into methamphetamine. They started dating. So she got into methamphetamines as well. It was a very rough, very awful time.

I wasn't allowing the guy in her home because I knew he had a warrant for his arrest. I knew he was on drugs. I knew he was bringing her down the wrong path. But I came home from work early one day and I found him there. And I was very upset with both of them. And I said to him, Ben, why are you doing this to her?

ruin your own life. Don't take my daughter with you. She's a good girl. She has a bright future. Please do not do this to my daughter. And I looked at her and I said, honey, I look around at all my friends and I see them planning graduations and weddings and births of children. And I said, it sounds like I need to start planning your funeral.

She knew she wasn't doing right. And I know that deeply bothered her. I knew she wanted to just be doing the right thing. There was always a big, deep struggle within her. You know, I think she was really torn with her own addiction and her love for him. So she gave him an ultimatum. He had some legal troubles. And apparently if he went to treatment, it would take care of those legal troubles.

So she had told him, we both deserve a good future and I want to be with you and I know you want to be with me, but I can't be with you while you're in your addiction. So after you go to treatment, look me up and I'll be here for you. She was just in a really bad place. She was in a really bad place.

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2018, my sister, who is my best friend in the whole entire world, she started all of a sudden just acting really strange. One day, her friend called me and was like, "Something's wrong with your sister."

You need to come here right now. And I actually was working just right down the road. So I left work and she was sitting in her friend's car and she was just rambling on about, I don't even know what. She wasn't making any sense whatsoever. I didn't even think mental illness. I just thought, God, did she hit her head or something? Or I had no idea. All of a sudden she just like got into a fight with her husband one day and left the house.

We're talking about a woman that is very well put together, keeps her home up very well, very involved in the community, everything to do with her kids. Her kids are literally everything to her. She does everything with them and for them. And like, that's her whole entire life is those children and her husband. And one day she just leaves.

We get reports that she is walking down the street a couple cities away, going into people's houses, eating their food, stealing someone's shoes. The cops ended up getting called on her and then, you know, she ends up having like a little scuffle with the police, goes to jail. And then when they let her out, she goes and lives homeless on the streets of Portland. Completely out of her mind.

I had never experienced or witnessed anything like this before. We had to start doing research and calling people and attorneys and judges. And one of her good friends and I went about five or six times to try and find her in downtown Portland to bring her to the hospital for mental health care.

We were successful a few times finding her and getting her there, but they would keep her for a few days, get her on some medicine, and then let her go. And she would just be right back out on the streets. During that time, I remember being just so lost and so confused and my heart ached for her. How do I help her? I can't have her here because she's so unpredictable and so manic.

I just felt really helpless and I felt awful. I felt like I wasn't doing enough as a sister. None of us knew anything. We didn't know about bipolar. We didn't know anything about mania. We'd never experienced anything like that in our lives. None of us. It wasn't until she was put into mental health court and they brought her to the state hospital and gave her the medicine she needed and she started to get better and started to become herself again.

So we spent the next week just being together and hanging out together. And, you know, I was helping her kind of detox and just being there for her. Friday, December 19th, Allison and I, we both were going to go out with some friends. We got ready. We had such a great time together. Like we got ready together, put on makeup, got dressed, laughed, listened to music. Then both went our separate ways.

She messaged me a couple times that night and I messaged her like, hey, you're having a good time and I love you. And, you know, just our regular like messaging back and forth. Saturday comes around, same thing. She's like, I'm going to stay out a little bit longer, mom. We're having such a good time. And I'm like, okay, no problem. You know, be good, have fun. And she said she was going to be home Sunday morning. But when I woke up, she wasn't there. I was a little upset and I messaged her and I said, hey, like what's going on?

It's been a few days now. It's time for you to come home. And she said, Hey, mom, I'm with Ben. He's doing really good. He's clean and he's going to be working. I'll be home later. I love you so much. Monday morning, the 21st, I woke up really, really early because I just had just a sick feeling.

She wasn't home yet, and on my iPhone, she had used it a few times, so she had her messenger stuff open in there. And so I went in there, and I started kind of snooping around in there, like trying to figure out what was going on. Where is she? Who's she with? Something's up. I find this name, and I thought it was Ben's sister. So I messaged her, and I said, Hey, have you seen Allison?

You know, she was supposed to be home all weekend and I haven't seen her. So she messaged back. She's like, yeah, I saw her yesterday. I picked her and Ben up. I drove them to North Plains. I bought them a pie and I dropped them off at the store. And then she tells me like, oh, this is actually Ben's mom. I said, well, you know, I need to get going to work here. If you hear anything, please let me know right away. And she's like, absolutely. And we'll do that.

So I went to work, heard nothing from her, from anybody else. Meanwhile, every chance I get, I'm messaging my daughter and I'm messaging any friend I can, like, "Allison, where are you?" And I actually had a second job to go to. I would cut hair at night. I went to that second job, I was in the middle of a haircut, it was like 7:30 at night, and I get a phone call, and it's Ben's mom, Molly, and she says to me, "Look, Allison is missing.

Nobody has seen her since yesterday. It's been about 19 hours, she said. And we have been out looking for her all day on our four-wheelers in the woods of North Plains. And we can't find her. So we've called the police. Of course, I'm like absolutely frantic. I leave work straight away. And just this blanket of darkness completely wrapped itself around me.

This feeling of utter dread and panic just completely swished through my body. It's like the world has just opened up and just swallowed you in, in this big black hole of the unknown. It's like, where is she? Where could she be? Does somebody have her? Is she hurt somewhere? Is she hiding somewhere? Is she just out partying with her friends? There's so many things just go through your mind.

And I called the police and we make a plan to meet up at this location in North Plains. I called my sister and I just said, "Ellison's missing. Can you please come here and be with me?" And she said, "Yeah." She came straight away. So it was December 20th, 2019. It was that evening that we all got together, you know, with the police and started figuring out a search and rescue plan.

I remember them saying it was too foggy that night and it was too dark for them to start searching for her. And it really bothered me because it's like, she's missing. How do you not look for her? My sister and I and her dad and my nephew all drove around some of those roads just kind of looking. And we found Ben's sister and she took us to the property where she was last seen on. And we were like searching around there.

And it was dark and it was cold and it was super foggy. So I understood what they meant. But I was like, you're supposed to be search and rescue. Like, it doesn't matter what time of day it is. Like, if somebody's missing out here, you try to find them. It was the hardest thing in the world for me to go home that night because I'm like, she's out here. How do I just leave her out here?

It was pretty late and the search and rescue said, you know, just go home and we're going to meet back here at 6 a.m. We have a command center set up at the elementary school. So just be here 6 a.m. sharp. We'll have everything ready and set to go to go look for her. There's no sleeping. There's no resting. Just panic and then anger. You're angry because it's like, why aren't we out there looking for her right now? You just lay there.

and cry and feel completely helpless. The police knew who Ben was. They knew him because he had a warrant out for his arrest. And part of their decision on whether or not they're going to send search and rescue out was we need to talk to Ben. Maybe he can tell us where she is. So they find him at a property that night and he runs from them.

The officer chased after him and was yelling to him like, dude, your girlfriend's missing. Like, help us. Help us find her. This is very serious. Be a man and tell us where she is. And apparently Ben stopped, turned around and walked back and said, I left her on this property. We got into a big fight and she just walked away. And at that point they arrested him and he went to jail.

I had a little bit of contact with Ben's father. And I said, can you please have him call me from jail? I really need to talk to him. Like I need to hear his side of the story. And so he did. The next day he called me from jail. And the first thing he said was he was crying and he was like, I'm so sorry. I'm so very sorry, Misty. I'm so sorry. He kind of repeated the same story to me. And that's basically all he would say.

And it was very nice. And I said, I'm glad you're safe. We just want to make sure Allison's safe too. What kind of information can you give us? And he just said the same story.

We find out later that he came home Monday morning at 7 a.m. He came home to his parents' house without Allison. And his mother stated that he was like all muddy and kind of had some blood on him and beat up. And he had like wet himself. And it was in a really, just looked really horrible. And she said to him, where is Allison? And he's like, I don't know. I left her in the woods.

That's when his father came in and they all went out and started to search for her on their four wheelers. Unbeknownst to me, I had been talking to his mother all that day. She never told me anything about him coming home without her and that they went out and started searching for her. She didn't tell me that until later that evening. So she'd been missing for several hours before anybody ever contacted me.

So, you know, we met at the command center and they made it clear they wanted me to stay there at this command center. I was like, I want to go look for her. Like, I want to be out there. And, you know, they said it's not a good idea because they had to be frank with me. Like, if something nefarious has happened, that's not something that we would want you to find. So as hard as it was, I agreed. And I stayed back at the command center and they had a search and rescue team out there

And we had private people coming out there searching for five days. And mind you, this was Christmas Eve and Christmas and complete strangers from the community. And my friends from the recovery community all just showed up in droves, droves and droves of people to help look for her. To see the love of the community really just kept my spirits up over everything else.

They, you know, looked for her for five days and then they called the search off and said they couldn't find her. But we didn't give up. I had a couple of friends that have their huge campers and they like are total wilderness people. And they said, nope, we're going to keep searching for her. And we did for months.

We had like a whole system down. We get permission from property owners. We hung up missing posters everywhere. You know, we had the news doing stories on her constantly and Facebook, Instagram. We put rewards out, you know, for information. You know, we would have fundraisers to help be able to fund these searches. We were beginners at this. I'd never had to search for anybody before. We're just searching in the dark, just this whole new world of trying

trying to find a loved one in the wilderness. There was a part of me that almost knew something bad was happening. And there was this other part of me, my motherly side, that's like, nope, everything's going to be fine. We're going to find her. You're hoping for the best because that's all there is, is hope. But you also, as a mom, have to prepare yourself for the worst.

But not knowing where she was, not knowing any details, the not knowing and the panic absolutely destroyed me. It changes you as a person. It changed me as a person. I had this fight or flight feeling in my body constantly. It's absolutely exhausting because you don't know. You have no idea. I had no idea. Just the sheer panic. I could barely even speak.

My hair turned gray within days. I'm not even kidding you. Like, how do you sleep at night? How do you eat? How do you do anything? How do you even have a conversation? I had to literally teach myself how to do all that stuff during that time. I had to like relearn how to talk and have emotion and everything. I just felt so lost and so filled with fear. This is my baby. Her and I are so close and have such a good, strong bond.

I never thought that I would have to, like, wonder where she was. I took for granted that I would just always have my child there. You know, and now she's lost. It was tough. It was really tough. Because as the time went on, I would always wonder, like, does somebody have her? Is she being hurt? Is she being tortured?

I would have these dreams, these awful dreams, and I'd have psychics message me and say all these awful things like she's in a dungeon and someone's got her, you know, they're torturing her. And, you know, I even had somebody try and call and scam me for money saying that they had her and tried to show pictures of her being tortured, you know, like they'd Photoshop pictures and, you know, just everything awful that you can think of people did to us while we're trying to find my daughter.

It just gets you as a person. Everything changed. Every single thing changed about me. I didn't trust anybody. I couldn't feel anything. All I could feel was fear and anger and just sadness. I couldn't feel anything good. I could just feel hope that I would see my daughter again. And as the days go by and nothing happens and you don't find her, it's like this feeling of dread completely overtakes your life.

And at the same time, you still have to work and you still have to take care of your family members and a household, you know. And how do you do that? How do you do that when you're completely, utterly, totally traumatized by this event? Then month three comes around and we get the COVID situation. Searching for somebody who's missing during COVID was the most challenging thing I've ever experienced besides my daughter going missing.

Now, people aren't letting us on their property. When we're out doing search parties, we're getting hate mail and hate messages of why we're out in big groups and, you know, we should be wearing masks. And so I had to adapt our search parties to be COVID-friendly.

During that time, there were several conspiracies that went around. People accused us of hiding her. People accused us of hiding her for money, so we can get money from the community. There were a few conspiracies that she was being held in a dungeon. There were a few conspiracies that she ran away and that she willingly wanted to go into the sex trade or sex slave business.

You know, there was a few stories out there like that and, you know, it was really hard to hear those things. My sister's breakdown happened about a year before Allison went missing. But I remember the six months before her going missing, her and I were really working on our relationship and trying to reconnect and just be there for each other and talk about her life and the things that had happened.

I remember that when I called her that night, she was there as quick as she could be. And her and I were inseparable from that point on for months and months and months.

She's still reeling from this very traumatic mental breakdown and trying to get her own mind right and get things right with her own family and heal the traumas of her marriage and her children. And here she is having to rescue me and save me and be there for me. And she was, even though some days it was so mentally hard for her, she still showed up and was there.

So, her and I became a lot more close during that time and we really just needed each other because Allison was her baby too. She was right there as Allison grew up and they were extremely close. She was just as close to my sister as she was to me. It was June 20th. I had just been at my nephew's wedding, my sister's son, Billy's son. Got married that day.

My son and I just got home and we had a really wonderful day with our family. And I get a message from somebody who lives up in North Plains. And they said, "Hey, there's a bunch of Washington County cops up here and a bunch of vans and stuff over on Quarry Road." And I was like, "Oh, okay. Well, that's kind of weird." But I didn't think too much about it. I thought, "Oh, maybe they found another piece of clothing."

And then just 20 minutes later, my sister FaceTimes me and says, "They found her." She was found on a woman's property. The woman had a worker out clearing a field, and he found her remains in some blackberry bushes. This sort of peace just rushed over my body. This feeling of like, "Now I know where she is."

I was just relieved that they found her because the not knowing was probably the hardest part. So I felt very peaceful along with very sad that I knew it wasn't going to end well. Something told me in my soul that it wasn't going to end well. I just felt peaceful because now I could lay her to rest and we knew where she was.

So, you know, everybody came to my house and the detectives and we had the chaplain come and then we went and as a family, we drove to the spot where she was found and brought flowers and we just prayed over the spot that she was found and just spent some time there just taking in like this is the last thing that she saw before she died. And it's really beautiful out there. So I'm happy she got to be somewhere beautiful.

After she was found, the only evidence that they found was her sweatshirt had been turned inside out. The medical examiner ruled her death an accident. They said it was hypothermia. That could be true. But I also believe that she was out there for so long that there's no way to tell how she really died. There wasn't any blunt force trauma. There wasn't any foul play in that instance.

But they also don't know if she overdosed and they also don't know if it was hyperthermia. The private investigator that I'd hired, he was there when she was found. He talked to the medical examiner, he was talking to the detective, and he told me that the detective was the one feeding in the medical examiner's ear like, "Oh yeah, she just got lost out here and it was cold that night and they were doing drugs and just was feeding her this information."

He said, "I know that's why she put hypothermia, because of what the detective was saying, not because of any other evidence that they found." I actually called the medical examiner and I said, "What evidence did you find that my daughter died from hypothermia?" She said that when you die from hypothermia, right before you die, you get really, really hot.

your body gets really hot." And she said that because her body got hot, she took her sweater off and it was turned inside out. That's how she knew she took it off. And I said, "Well, that's not true because my daughter wore her sweatshirt inside out all the time. You have no idea why she took her sweatshirt off." There's so many things that could have happened. If anything, I believe that they should have put "undetermined" because I just don't think there was enough evidence.

It comes down to the detectives. And I believe that because there was drugs involved, that they just kind of wrote her off from the beginning. He didn't fight. He didn't do things as if it was his child. And I asked him several times, if this was your child, would you have the search ended after five days? You're supposed to search out five miles out. That's like standard operating procedure. They only searched one mile out from where she was last seen.

And she was found within three miles of where she was last seen. So if they would have kept searching like it was their own daughter, then they would have found her. But no, they didn't. And she could have maybe still been alive that night. Who knows?

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I think Ben knows how she died. I think he knows what happened to her. And I think Ben's family also knows what happened to her. And because of their actions and their inactions and their unwillingness to be a part of finding her after that first day and cooperating with the police, I absolutely believe that that family knows what happened to my daughter.

He just said that they were lost. They were just kind of running around in like a drug-fueled state of mind. And there's just all these stories that go around, like one of the friends that had been with them. He said that during the weekend, when they were all hanging out together, Ben was going to rob somebody of their drugs. And Allison was just going to be right along there with him. She was just so in love with him that she would just do whatever he wanted to do.

When they were out there in the woods, they were running from somebody, like as if they'd already robbed them or tried to rob them. You know, that's one of the stories. And the other story is that they got in a fight and just walked away from each other, and she wanted to go home. I do remember that Ben said when they walked away from each other, he went and found this truck on this man's property, and he went and fell asleep in the truck.

And the man found him in his truck and ended up giving him a ride home. And the story that Ben told him was that my girlfriend and my friends like left me out here.

We end up talking to the guy and he kind of tells us that exact same story. But the weird thing was, is that during the whole time she was missing and we were out doing our searches, we were hanging up missing posters everywhere, all over North Plains, constantly. And we'd go back the next day and they'd be taken down.

So we had hired a private investigator who was also doing an investigation because the police basically had stopped. And he caught that same man who gave Ben a ride home in the morning. He was the one taking down the missing posters. And so he confronted him. And the man was like, you know, I'm just tired of being reminded of all this crap. Let's just move on. I just always kind of found that weird and strange and odd.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about it is that I believe Ben knew where she was and he wouldn't tell us because either he did something to her or he knew what happened to her. He didn't want to get blamed for it. So he let her lay out there and let the animals get to her. And we only had her bones to bury. That's one of the most heartbreaking things that's in my soul today.

But she was just out there for six months by herself. After she was found, Ben's family never reached out for condolences. Nobody on him or his side of the family. I kept in contact with his mother throughout the time she was missing, just trying to get her to tell me things, give me information, like try to pull at her heartstrings, anything I could. I saw her and we were talking and she said to me,

The day after she was missing, I already lost a child to this. She was talking about overdose. And I'll never forget those words. So I've often wondered, like, why can't you guys just tell me that's what happened? Why can't you just tell me if she overdosed? Well, if she overdosed, he freaked out and left her and didn't try and get her any help or try to give her any aid. He could be held responsible for it legally.

I just never understood, like, if my girlfriend goes missing, even if we were in a fight, like, I'm sorry. I'm going to do everything I possibly can. I'm going to talk to detectives. I'm not going to lawyer up. I'm going to do everything I possibly can to find her because that's what you do as a human being if I'm completely innocent.

If I'm not innocent, then I'm going to hide and not give information and have my lawyers speak to you because I have something to hide.

He actually went to prison during the time for a completely different thing that happened during that weekend. He ended up stealing somebody's truck. He went to prison for that. And when they found her remains, I know that they went and moved him to a different area because, you know, a lot of people had thought that he had done something to her. So they moved him so nothing bad would happen to him.

She was found June 20th of 2020. We had her funeral July 20th of 2020. We buried her in this really beautiful place called Skyline, and it overlooks the city of Portland and Beaverton, and it's just the most beautiful spot ever. So after we had her funeral, you know, it was a time that we had to start putting our lives back together.

The whole experience of especially your child, like giving birth to them and raising them and having this bond with them. And then one day they're there and then the next they're just not. And you never see them again has really just gutted me as a person and my soul. I know she was really struggling the last year of her life.

I know she was in a lot of pain emotionally, and I know that the lifestyle she grew up in because of me, I know that that had a lot to do with her thinking it's okay to turn to drugs. And I know that if I would have never raised her in that lifestyle, I know she would probably be alive today. That's a lot to grapple with and take responsibility for, but I do take responsibility for that.

I forced my child to live in a world with drugs for many years, and it became normal to her. And so when I decided to get clean and sober, she made a different choice.

So I feel very responsible for how her life ended up and the path that she went down. You know, you never know. You can't predict the future. But, you know, I'm also not naive. And I do take responsibility for what, you know, my children's lives have gone through and what their childhood had to do with that. Because I have my own trauma and my own childhood that I know for a fact my upbringing had to do with it.

I think through the abuse, I have put up a shield of emotion my whole life. And I haven't always been a very emotional person because I'm afraid to be. I have a fear of being rejected because we weren't allowed to show fear or sadness or depression or anything like that in our household. You know, growing up in the world we did, it was easy to just keep going in that world and keep living that way.

The first couple of years, I had some very dark times. I shut everybody out. I have very few friends anymore. I'm very private. I entered into a relationship with somebody that I don't think he could ever understand my depression and what I was going through. So we still have issues in our relationship. He thinks he can make things better, but he doesn't understand that it'll never get better.

I am just now to the point where I'm starting to feel joy again. I'm starting to be strong enough to go out and do things that she would have wanted me to do.

I worked so much, she'd always be like, mom, we should go to the river or we should go to the lake or the beach. She always wanted to be out doing things with me. And because I worked so often, I was unable to. And she always just encouraged me to have more fun in life. And so I'm trying to now, since the darkness is starting to lift, honor those wishes of hers and do more fun things and go out more often, exercise and just try and live a happy life.

because she doesn't get to live her happy life. And so I'm going to try and live a happy life for her. I still have trouble sleeping. I'm still on the same medication. She was such a music girl and a lot of music, you know, we would listen to together or that I would like be blaring on the stereo as they grew up. I can't really listen to anymore because it's just gets me too emotional.

As far as going back to drugs, because she lost her life in that world, I absolutely would never, ever even think of wasting my life on that. I think she'd be really proud of my sobriety journey that I've been on. I have to keep living a life for my son, for myself, and I have to make her proud.

But after everything that happened with Alison and her addiction, I have a lot more compassion for people who are addicts. Every day I see people who are very deep in their addiction and I have a lot of compassion for them and I try to offer them support services. And I found out last May 2023 that Ben had actually succumbed to his addiction and died of an overdose.

I felt very sad for his family. I felt very sad for us because I often wondered over the years if I could ever get in contact with him and plead with him to tell me what happened to my daughter. I held onto the hope for that for a long time. And then when I found out he passed away, it really broke me even more. Now I'll never know.

It's something that I think of often and I find myself talking to myself sometimes or talking to her when I'm by myself and I'll just ask her, please just tell me what happened to you. Help me figure out what happened to you. What happened to you? How did you lose your life? Why are you not here anymore? Why don't I get to see your beautiful face? I don't want to go to my grave not knowing. I have to know what happened to my daughter. I brought her into this world and I need to know

why she isn't here anymore and how she isn't here anymore. I feel like I deserve that. I feel like as a mother, I have that right to know. That's all I want to know so I can finally have some true peace. You know, when Allison went missing, my sister was there from day one and showed up for me constantly. And over the years, we've been there for each other.

Her and I are still very close. We are working daily to keep our bond strong. We exercise together. We talk on the phone at least once a day because that commitment of our relationship and that bond is everything to me, and I know it's everything to her. Even through all the darkness and the grief, I have to work to keep that alive.

I just sometimes feel like the luckiest person in the world because I'm never alone. I always have her and she's never alone. She always has me. I drive a bus and I work in a restaurant. And so I get to hear a lot of people's complaints. And in a restaurant, when somebody complains about their eggs being too cold or, you know, it's challenging for me because it's like, you know, there's really worse things in life that could happen.

Nothing shocks me anymore. Nothing can really get to me anymore. I've already had the worst thing in the world happen to me. So now I'm just cool with everything. I'm just like, "Hey, got a flat tire? Who cares? Car breaks down? Cool. Let's just get it fixed. Whatever. Eggs are too cold. I don't care. Just remake them." The trivial things that people get upset over, it could be much worse. Count your blessings.

Enjoy your moments with your kids. Enjoy every single second you can with your children and just love everything about them, good and bad, and just revel in their personalities and spend as much time with them as you possibly can. I do appreciate my family more. I want to be a part of everything. And I just love deeper now because it could be gone tomorrow. And I don't want to have that regret that they didn't feel love enough for me.

Today's episode featured Misty Watterson. If you'd like to reach out to her, you can email at mwatterson34 at gmail.com. That's M-W-A-T-T-E-R-S-O-N, the number 34, at gmail.com. You can also find her on Instagram at Watterson Misty. That's W-A-T-T-E-R-S-O-N-M-I-S-T-Y.

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein.

Today's episode was co-produced by me and Andrew Waits, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.

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