RICHMOND, Va (WTVR)- Doris Ann Brown of Richmond, a mother of five, has been missing for six years – vanished without a trace.
Her file is one of the thickest in the Richmond police division that looks for about 1,000 missing persons every year.
And yet, most of you have never heard her name.
She went missing after VCU co-ed Taylor Behl disappeared, her remains later found in rural Virginia. Behl’s case made the national news from the very start. Brown’s barely made the local news.
“I think her past has a lot of do with it,” says her sister, Yvonne Brown
That past included drugs, streets, hotels. Doris Brown’s life took at tumble after their mother died, Yvonne said, still angry over some of the early assumptions she heard.
“They said, ‘oh, she just left.’ The only way they let me make a police report was, I had to call Governor Wilder’s office.”
Doris Brown is believed to have last been seen at an eastern Henrico hotel. Not far from the airport.
“This case was very difficult,” said Sgt. Michael Mocello, head of RPD’s Youth and Family Crimes division. “We’re dealing with someone who had no cell phone, no bank account, no way to really track her movements from one point or another. No fixed address, no vehicle, a large group of friends and associates that they would move around with between the city and out in the county.”
The department’s file includes a lot of behind the scenes legwork by detectives, running down second-hand reports of shadowy foul play. Mocello said they were able to run down every single one of those stories, find the people involved and eliminate them. At this point, there’s no evidence that Doris Brown has been killed. They’ve disseminated her fingerprints and other telltale information around the country.
There hasn’t been a whisper of her.
Friday night, we visited with Doris Brown’s sisters, aunts, children and even a young granddaughter that Doris has never met – a little girl who dreams of becoming a police officer.
Yvonne Brown said Doris would never, ever, allow them to suffer like they have been because they don’t know where she is.
And that doesn’t mean she no longer mattered.
Doris has a sweet granddaughter she’s never met. And five children, mostly grown, raised by relatives.
