Transcript of A Private Matter, Episode 4

So it's just you two today?

It is.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. How would you like to get started?

Uh, just so you know, I mean, I appreciated your email and stuff, but we've kind of figured for quite a while now that he's probably not with us anymore.

Okay.

Um, there's just it's a very long story, but there is, um, my grandmother used to do astrology.

Okay.

And she had a friend.

That's the voice of Rob Hickey, Jay Hickey's youngest brother. Rob is a retired ATM repairman. He lives in Massachusetts. It's easy to tell that Rob and Jay are brothers. Rob has a similar presence: gentle, deliberate, thoughtful. And while Rob wasn't quite as close with their grandmother, Izzy, she also shaped his worldview. Which helps explain why Rob and his wife, Sandra, are on this Zoom call discussing Jay's disappearance with a medium.

Intuitively, I kept trying to place him somewhere safe, and I just couldn't do it.

Right.

So the energy just isn't there. That's what it means in, in my terms.

Right.

I'm going to be speaking in medium terms, so.

That's fine.

Try to bear with me.

By this point, more than a year had passed since Jay was reported missing. It wasn't clear where the police investigation was going, if anywhere. I got the sense that Rob and Sandra felt this call was their next best chance at getting some kind of closure. Rob and Sandra lay out the whole saga for the medium: Patty's stories about Jay visiting a brother, Emily calling the police, the sale of the Christmas tree farm. Rob had been talking with the private investigator, Joe Murphy, and he and Sandra shared some of Joe's suspicions.

I, I feel like we're, we're, we're hoping to find Jay's remains and some information, um, about what happened. Um, there's some speculation on whether there was foul play or not. He definitely was neglected.

Paid by whom?

His wife.

By his wife.

In the video, I can see Rob and Sandra sitting by a window in their home. The medium sits on a couch, seemingly taking notes and occasionally looking off into the distance to receive a message.

He is there somewhere. He is on if he's not on their land, he's close to it, okay? His remains. Pardon me for just speaking very frankly.

Please. That's.

Yeah.

That's okay.

I get a yes on the foul play too. Okay. So let me see if I can dissect this.

The medium confirms Rob's suspicions. There was foul play, she declares. Money was the motive. And then suddenly, she claims to receive an even more important message. It's from Jay. The medium sits up a little straighter. She looks like she's listening hard.

Oh, oh, this is him. Okay. Okay. He says, "Thank you." He says, "Be patient with me, please." And he says, "Hear me out." He says he went along with it. He says that he is at rest where he is and that he isn't waiting to be found necessarily for not for his sake.

The medium seemed to be saying that there was foul play in Jay's disappearance, but that Jay wasn't too mad about it. I talked with Rob after this call, and he told me it's exactly the sort of thing Jay would say. Jay always wanted everybody to get along, Rob says. Rob says the call with the medium did bring him some peace. It lifted a sense of responsibility, that he needed to be out there looking for his brother's remains.

Despite months of investigating, the Epson PD's case seemed to be going nowhere. No sign of Jay and no sign that Patty would be facing consequences. It was frustrating, and not only for Jay's family or people in town. It was also getting to the person in charge of the investigating: Epson Police Chief Brian Michael.

You know, I, I, I've never seen anything like it in my career. I don't understand how your husband can go missing for a significant amount of time, and how you do not report your husband missing is absolutely beyond anything ethically or morally that I can comprehend.

Chief Michael, he's the one who plopped the investigative file on the desk for dramatic effect when interrogating Patty. The one who tried to warn her that Channel 9 was calling. Chief Michael has been a police officer in Epson since 2001, steadily climbing the ranks until he made chief of police in 2022, just two years before Jay was reported missing. And over the years, he got to know Jay a bit. When Chief Michael built his house in Epson, Jay was the zoning officer who approved the construction.

He was just a nice guy that was lost in the '60s.

What do you mean lost in the '60s?

Just the long hair, you know, the big mustache, and loved his Christmas trees.

More than anyone else, Chief Michael had confronted Patty about her explanations for Jay's disappearance. With mounting frustration, he had meticulously dissected for her the many ways her story just didn't add up.

You, you pushed her pretty hard in that second interrogation, and she kept returning to that notion that he was just very private and, and wouldn't have wanted the police involved.

Yeah, I don't believe that. That simple.

Chief Michael does not believe Patty. And as you may remember, he told Patty that without some explanation about all this that made sense, he'd have to pursue the matter criminally. But pretty quickly, Chief Michael's threat to charge Patty with a crime encountered an interesting question: what crime exactly had been committed here?

Unfortunately, it is not illegal to not report your husband or your wife missing. Um, it's ethically immoral. Um, I have some serious moral issues with what went on in this case. Um, but we spoke to the Marion County Attorney's Office, and there is no criminal charge that we can charge anybody with if you just simply don't report somebody missing.

Was that a surprise to you?

Yes, it was. Yes, it was.

If your spouse disappears, New Hampshire law doesn't require you to report them missing. It does feel weird, doesn't it? I spent a good while trying to wrap my head around this. Here's what I can tell you. Most of the time, we define crimes by actions, not inactions. If you push a stranger into the river and they drown, obviously a crime. But if you see a stranger drowning in the river and you don't jump in to save them, not a crime.

Are we basically just stuck?

I don't know if we're stuck. The, the investigation is open, but it's currently suspended until there's more leads that come in.

What do you have plans for another search, or what do you do at this point?

Well, at this point, it remains an open investigation, and we, we don't have any plans for another search, but we will wait and see if anything else comes in. Um, we have, we have followed up on every lead, every phone call, every, every internet, every internet comment that we can find to see if we can find Jay. Um, obviously, it's personal to me as well as professional. I knew him on both levels, and, um, it's one of the ones that's going to haunt me for my career until we can find him.

Chief Michael is haunted by Jay's disappearance. And it was beginning to feel like everyone I talked to about this was. The frustration over the lack of answers had pushed people to elaborate conspiracy theories and supernatural explanations, anything to inject some logic and meaning into the situation. I felt this most strongly in a conversation I had with Patty and Jay's daughter, Kay Danko. Like her uncle Rob, Kay had turned to spiritual means to look for Jay.

I did start meditating because I'm determined whether it's physically, whether it's astral travel, or whatever, which my stepdad's grandmother was, Isabel Hickey. She was an astrologist.

Kay is Patty's daughter from her first marriage. She was raised by Patty and Jay, who eventually adopted her. Kay's description of childhood with Patty was similar to her sister Emily's. Kay left the house at 16. She struggled with alcohol, eventually going sober six years ago. And along the way, she fell out with both parents. She hasn't spoken with Jay or Patty in more than 10 years. In fact, Kay only found out her stepfather was missing after a friend sent her an article about it.

It did not surprise me one bit when I heard that my stepdad was missing. And my initial thought was she killed him because that was what I always thought would happen.

Kay says she actually tried to deliver this warning to Jay himself. It was around 2007, during a period when Kay told me that Jay and Patty were actually briefly separated.

She had moved out for a year, and I moved home for a few months while I was waiting for an apartment. And we were sitting across from the kitchen table, and I said, "If you take her back, she will kill you someday." I think at the time, I meant more like, "She'll scream at him to death or poison him." But I just figured one way or the other, she'd be the death of him.

Hmm.

But she would let him if, if she did let him wander off and die alone like that, that I can't even describe how that makes me feel. Which maybe that's why it's easier for me to believe that she killed him and she just won't admit it. Doesn't want to admit it.

Somehow, it was easier to imagine Jay was murdered. Maybe that's what Private Investigator Joe and the medium and the rumors swirling in town were all getting at too. That the most straightforward explanation, that Patty simply looked the other way when Jay wandered one day and that he died alone and confused in the woods, is just too bleak to accept. I thought about that call with Kay for a long time afterwards.

Uh, I was on the phone with Kathy O'Mara.

Kathy O'Mara was Kay's former babysitter of all people, and she had called Kay with a wild update. "You've already met Kathy. The day the news broke about Jay, Kathy was the one who went up to the farm to talk to Patty."

And I just stood outside and talked to her, and I really just wanted to look her in the face and say, "Pat, what happened? What's going on?"

Kathy babysat the Hickey kids from when she was 12 into her 20s. But by the time Jay went missing, Kathy was no longer regularly seeing the Hickey family. She and Patty exchanged Christmas cards, but not much more than that. So it was unusual when this February, almost two years since Jay was reported missing, that Kathy got a call from Patty out of the blue.

I just looked at the date. It was February 2, and I actually have the voicemail. "Hi, Kathy. This is Patty Hickey. I'm all, like, uh, messed up for many reasons. But anyway, the basic one being that my husband Jay is gone, and, um, it's been real hard for me to adjust to that. Um, dead or he's dead. So anyway, he's not gone like he left me. It's not like that.

Patty goes on, rambling a bit. She seems confused about whether she's even leaving a message for the correct Kathy.

"So, um, if you're Kathy Kettman, then you know, you know my address because I got a Christmas card from you. A beautiful, beautiful card. Thank you. Okay. Bye." So I called her back, and then she was just talking, and then she starts saying about Jay that and I actually grabbed the piece of paper because I was I, I just started writing stuff down because I just realized, like, something's really off.

Kathy says it was as if, in Patty's mind, this was the first time the two had ever spoken about Jay going missing, which, of course, wasn't true at all.

Like, I don't really think she remembered, actually, that I had gone up to the house because she was like, "You know Jay's dead." And I was like, "Yeah, I, I know." She's like, um, you know, and I wrote down, she said, "You know, I, I found him. He was dead when I found him." And I said, "Well, what happened?" She said, "Well, he went off. He was wandering, and then he was down by the old foundation."

Wow. So she, she said, "I found him. He was dead"?

Yeah. She said, "I found him, but he was dead."

Whoa.

She kept concentrating, like, on, "There's a lot of rocks there. There's a lot of rocks on the bottom." And I was like, "Okay, but Pat, you know, do have you told anybody else this?" I said, and she's like, "No. It now you know, and I know. It's a private matter." And I said, "No, that's it's not a private matter, Pat, because you have kids, and those kids deserve to know what their father is. So if you know something, you need to, you need to say something.

Patty said she found Jay dead in the old foundation. It's the remnants of an old house just a few hundred feet from the Hickey house. Some stone walls in the earth marking what was maybe once a cellar. Kay had told me she used to play archaeologist there as a kid, trying to dig up artifacts. Kathy sent me a picture of the notes she took during the call with Patty. They're written on a stray piece of mail, like Kathy was looking for the nearest piece of paper, any paper, to capture what she was hearing.

When I got off the phone with her, I called my husband. I was just so shaken. I was just like, "I don't even know what to think of this." And he's like, "You it sounds like a confession to me. Like, you need to, to call the police and report it at least." And so I did.

Was it a confession? And if so, why? Why would Patty decide to call the family babysitter and tell her this? But then why had any of this happened the way it had so far? Kathy calls the police, and the next day, they obtain a search warrant for the area around the old foundation. State police arrive with two cadaver dogs, and they start looking. But it's February.

They went and they searched the area of the old foundation with a cadaver dog, and they didn't find anything.

Yeah. I, I am a little surprised that they didn't find anything. Um.

Yeah, I don't know what to make of it.

Because this was the closest this felt the closest we've come.

Police had confronted Patty about what she said to Kathy on the phone. But Patty told them the old foundation was one of the last places she saw Jay alive. She said he waved to her while standing near it. It was as if Patty was saying this whole thing was just a big misunderstanding, a game of telephone. None of it made sense to me or Kathy.

Yeah, it's disappointing, but I, I mean, we, we all kind of knew, like, it wouldn't be, uh it's, it's complicated, you know? It's Pat is complicated. I can only speak for myself, but I do feel she knows, obviously, where he is.

We were back to where we started. Another bizarre chapter of Patty behavior that left people confused, suspicious, or both.

The location of Jay's remains. It kept eating at me. It felt like the one thing in this whole bizarre story that we should be able to figure out. Patty might be a moving target, but Jay's resting point, that was a fixed spot somewhere in Epsom. So why couldn't we find Jay? Was there more the police could have done or could still do to search for him? I took these questions to a guy named Robert Kester.

Very few people will actually backtrack when they get lost, even though it's probably one of the more effective strategies. And instead, people will want to plow forward.

Wow. Well, note to self: backtrack next time I'm lost.

Or, or, or the best thing is not to get lost in the first place.

Touché, Robert. Touché. It turns out there is a lot to know about getting lost. Did you know that lost people traveling at night or in fog often end up walking in circles? Okay, but did you know that one hypothesis for why is that one of your legs is a little bit shorter than the other? Crazy, right? But the most important thing I learned from Robert is that different types of people behave differently when they don't know where they are.

But all we had in the literature, search literature at the time, was a category for people over the age of 65. So it could be a 65-year-old hunter, it could be a 65-year-old marathon runner, or it could be a 65-year-old who has dementia.

So Robert started collecting data specifically from cases of lost people with dementia, and he started to see some patterns. Robert says, from a search and rescue perspective, there are two types of dementia wandering. The first kind is the type where the person is trying to get to some specific place, often from their past.

I, I've seen people trying to go, you know, go to somebody's funeral, but, you know, their friend actually died 15 years ago.

Remember when the landscaping worker found Jay wandering at the bottom of McCoy Mountain? Jay told the landscaper he needed to get to a meeting at the town offices, even though he had retired three years earlier. Robert says this kind of wandering is associated with milder dementia. But once it progresses, he says another, more unnerving kind of wandering can start.

They go until they get stuck. So whatever direction they were initially going, they're probably going to keep going that direction, guided by whatever is the path of least resistance that is directly in front of them. So what are things that get people stuck? If, if you go into thick vegetation, or you go into a, a stream or a water body, or you hit a fence and you, you're just stuck, stuck in the barbed wire.

I don't know of any barbed wire on or near the Christmas tree farm, but thick vegetation, streams and ponds, yeah, a million places for Jay to get stuck. So where to even begin looking? Well, this is where the data from previous search and rescue incidents really shines. Robert could tell me exactly how far out from the house Jay was likely to have traveled based on data from similar cases.

50% of subjects are found within a half mile. And for 75% of the subjects, I only have to go out to 1.2 miles.

And those numbers were for, uh, for dementia?

Dementia for a subject on foot, temperate, wilderness, mountainous.

75% of lost people with dementia in terrain like New Hampshire's are found within 1.2 miles of where they were last seen. It didn't seem that far to me. And compared to other types of lost people that Robert studies, it's not. Even children age 7 to 9 travel farther on average when they're lost. Robert says, in theory, a 1.2-mile radius could be searched within just a few days, assuming you had a team of at least 24 trained searchers and a few dogs.

It's a it's a sad thing. I mean, you find a guy who has dementia and he's been missing for 14 hours, and you finally find him and his pants are down around his ankles. He's laying on his stomach on the ground because he can't get up, and he's just covered in bug bites. You know, that's just and he's still alive. It's like, you know, you get sick of seeing that stuff.

So Lieutenant Cheney takes these cases seriously. But when the Epsom PD called him and told him what was going on, he told them another search just wouldn't be feasible. For one thing, state police had already searched the area with cadaver dogs, and fish and game would just do the same thing.

The other problem is, is when we do a search, it costs a lot of money.

Maybe you've been waiting for this to come up. Sending a bunch of trained searchers into the woods is not cheap. And like it or not, every search planner has to be prepared to make tough choices about how much time, effort, and taxpayer money is worth it. Decisions like these take us into murky waters. How many resources get devoted to finding someone can read like a judgment on the value of their life. And when the person is in their mid-70s, it's even more fraught.

I know I will probably get more resources for a missing 2-year-old search than a missing 72-year-old search. It's just kind of human nature.

Human nature is that we tend to see older people as less valuable. Not in every culture, but in ours, yes. It's ugly, but it's true. But Lieutenant Cheney said there was another, even bigger reason that a wider search for Jay just wasn't feasible. It had simply been too long. Usually, when fish and game is searching for someone, it's because someone called for help within hours or maybe a day or two.

When you have leaf cover and stuff like that, it the foliage falls and grows back and comes off, and it buries any kind of evidence like that. Um, you're looking for bones that are going to be underneath leaf cover.

Bones underneath leaf cover. Basically, he's saying to find Jay, they'd almost have to step on him out in the woods. And even then, Lieutenant Cheney says there may not actually be much left, thanks to rodents.

It's like a deer. You know how many deer have died in the woods? And you go for a walk in the woods, very rarely you find a bone. It's because he rodents to them all up.

It's not a pleasant image. But now that he mentions it, I have never seen a deer skull in the woods. So did the Epsom PD, the state police, and fish and game do enough to find Jay? The answer probably depends on who you are. Now that I'm invested in the situation, do I wish they had searched out to Robert's 1.2-mile radius with cadaver dogs? Yes. Can I understand why they didn't?

Oh, enormously. There's not even any word that I know of that would describe how much I miss him.

That's on the next and final episode of A Private Matter. A Private Matter is written and reported by me, Jason Moon. It's edited by Katie Cullinary. Additional editing and production by Lauren Schulgen.