Family, Police Won't Give Up on Mom Missing for 36 Years
David Lohr
Sphere (Jan. 22) -- Annita Maria Price disappeared from Moundsville, W.Va., on a spring evening back in 1974. Thirty-six years later, her family clings to hope that she is alive, and police keep trying to find clues.
Annita Maria Price, here in an undated photo, disappeared in May 1974.
"I was too young to do anything as a child, and as an adult I keep running into brick walls," Price's daughter, Madonna Layne, said in an interview with Sphere.com. "I have tried to get interest and information circulating in the media, but most agencies are not interested because the case is so old. She just doesn't seem to be important enough to anyone but her immediate family."
West Virginia State Police
Annita Maria Price, here in an undated photo, disappeared in May 1974.The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Price, aka Annita Maria Musto, began on the night of May 28, 1974, when the then 27-year-old reportedly dropped off her boyfriend at his place of work in Moundsville. From there, she was supposed to travel to her job at the Flamingo Club in Benwood, but for reasons unknown she never made it.
"The car she was driving was found parked along Route 2, in a small area between Wheeling and Moundsville," West Virginia State Police Sgt. Danny Swiger told Sphere.com. "The only thing suggestive of a struggle is that her cosmetics were found spread out on the seat of her car."
A missing persons report was not filed until two days after Price's disappearance. At the time, she was involved in a divorce and custody battle with her estranged husband. Police took a close look at the couple's relationship but found no evidence suggesting it had any connection to her disappearance.
"In any situation that there is a possibility of a messy divorce, the [spouse] would be a person of interest, but we've taken a look at that and investigated it quite a bit," Swiger said, adding that investigators have found no indication that Price's husband "had anything to do with her disappearance."
According to Swiger, the investigation into Price's disappearance has been difficult because of the multitude of possibilities. Over the years, he has had to explore each one of them.
"Around that time frame, there was a lot of so-called 'criminal activity' happening at different bars and establishments in that area," he said. "So when you do victimology, she becomes a higher-risk victim because of the circumstances and situations she put herself in. It opens up the suspect pool a little more when you have that type of victim."
Courtesy of Madonna Layne
This is another undated photo of Price. Although her body has not been found, a police investigator said he believes she is dead.
Despite the fact that police have not found a body or evidence of a homicide, Swiger says he does not believe that Price is still alive.
"I would say that she is deceased just based on the fact that there's been no contact with her since 1974," Swiger said. "To spark this case forward, we would need a tip to locate her body."
Police thought they had received that tip in February 2004, when they received information suggesting Price might have been buried at a location south of Moundsville.
"Multiple searches were conducted, but we never found her body there," Swiger said. "There's no direct concrete evidence where it was. A lot of it was speculation on our part."
Swiger has devoted countless hours to the case and has traveled to Florida and Ohio to speak with Price's relatives.
"We came up with no other things," he said. "What we did do is collect DNA samples from her children and entered them into the CODIS database so if there is an unidentified [victim] that is found, they can cross-check it with that database." The FBI has CODIS, or Combined DNA Index System, for relatives of missing persons.
Todd Matthews, regional system administrator for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), has also been busy trying to find matches for Price in the database.
"The focus of my job is to enrich case files and seek bio data," Matthews told Sphere.com. "With this data, we are able to process the 'matches' suggested by the system itself. The more detailed information we have, the faster that process can occur. Not only is NamUs designed to enable a direct hit; we are also in a constant process of elimination."
Matthews said each new case is automatically compared to an electronic catalog of unidentified victims. He has yet to find a match for Price, but he says that could change at any time due to the constant flow of new "unidentified" entries into the system.
"It's much better than the file sitting in a drawer gathering dust," Matthews said.
Meanwhile, Madonna Layne and her family continue to hold out hope that someday they will learn what happened.
"I miss her and I want answers," Layne said. "She has nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild that she never got to see. Someone knows something."
Price is described as white, 6 feet tall, with brown hair and brown eyes. She has distinctive scars on her left arm and torso from severe burns she suffered as a child. She reportedly had been wearing yellow shorts and a blue top when she disappeared. Anyone with information is asked to contact Swiger at 304-329-1101.
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