Missing Molly Bish | Yankee Classic

Hear how the June 2002 Yankee Magazine story, “Missing Molly,” happened from editor and author Mel Allen.

MISSING MOLLY BISH

The mother of Molly Bish holds her daughter’s senior jacket by the sleeves and spreads it wide against her chest. The jacket is garnet and white, the colors of Quaboag Regional Middle High School. Her name is Magdalen Bish. Magi. Facing her, 52 police cadets sit in a classroom at South Weymouth Police Training Academy in Massachusetts. They have seen Molly’s picture staring from posters placed at every tollbooth on the Mass Pike, on storefronts, in newspapers. They know numbers and statistics—nearly 5,000 missing children and bodies of unidentified children in North America, 40 children missing and believed abducted by strangers in Massachusetts. Magi is here to talk about only one. She wants them to feel what it might mean when they get a call that a child is missing. This is the jacket Molly never got to wear.

“I want you to know Molly, the person,” she says. “Today we come before you, not as experts, only parents. Now it’s 538 days since we last saw Molly. Molly is missing and we miss her.”

She teaches first grade and is accustomed to speaking in front of an audience, but her voice trembles. While she speaks, her husband, John, a trim man in a dark suit, keeps his hand against her back, a sturdy railing for her shaky voice to hold onto. “She loved life,” Magi says. “She played three sports. She wasn’t an angel—sometimes she had to run more laps than the others. We called her ‘Tigger girl’ because she was always getting into everything. She had just gotten her driver’s license. She was so proud she had made honor roll every term her junior year. She had just gone to the prom. She was 16.”

Snow spits against the windows. But Magi takes these young, spit-and-polish cadets to a summer morning, to Comins Pond, what she calls a “mothers’ beach” located atthe end of a dead-end road, where the children of Warren, Massachusetts, learned to swim, where her husband fished and swam as a boy, where Molly was in her eighth day as lifeguard.

“That morning of June 27 I drove her to work. At the beach she hopped out of the car and said, ‘I love you, Mom.’ And that was the last time I saw her.” Police say Molly was at the beach alone for no more than 10 minutes before the first moms and their children arrived at 10:15 for swimming lessons. The day before, Magi had stared at a strange man parked near the beach, sitting alone in a white car, smoking. She had felt uneasy and had stayed at the beach until the man drove off. A sketch of the man had been circulated around the country. Molly’s missing-person photo had arrived in 79 million mailboxes. Her disappearance had made national news. Television craves mystery and emotion, and Magi cannot hide her heartbreak from a camera. A $100,000 reward helped bring endless tips to the police. Detectives working around the clock, following over 6,000 leads, had failed to find the man. Or any trace of Molly.

John Bish, a probation officer at East Brookfield District Court, uses vacation days to make these talks. Magi goes to school sick because she needs her sick days to go with John. They say they “must be Molly’s voice” and protect children everywhere. John and Magi have helped fingerprint over 16,000 children. You’ll find them in Springfield, Holyoke, Needham, at country fairs, at skateboard parks, at school assemblies, at a national convention of police search and rescue. They organized the first annual observance of Missing Children’s Day in Massachusetts. “It is up to us to make sure that there are no new names added to this list,” Magi told a State House crowd. They deliver a powerful and poignant message: the need to fingerprint, toothprint, and videotape every child—and never assume a missing teenager has run away or wandered off with friends.

John speaks in a louder, controlled voice. “I’ve learned things,” he says. “You don’t let teens open or close a business. That’s when they are most vulnerable. I didn’t know teens have the highest risk of abduction,” he continues. “Ninety-one percent of the children abducted and killed by strangers are killed within the first 24 hours. We can’t lose a child because we didn’t go on the highest alert right away. We’re here in hopes no other family will have this sadness. We want you to know how important you are. Missing teenage girls are notalways taken seriously.”

Magi tells the cadets she will never give up hope. “When you go home today,” she says and cannot say anything more. John reaches his arm across her shoulders. Magi breathes. “We need your help.” One by one, each cadet shakes John’s hand. They embrace Magi. She holds them tight, whispers, “Thank you.” Magi looks at the line of handsome young men waiting to hug her. For the first time she smiles. “Oh, Molly would have loved this,” she says.

* * *

John and Magi moved to Warren, John’s hometown, from Detroit in 1979, shortly after a neighbor’s teenage daughter was assaulted and killed. John had studied to be a priest but had left the Michigan seminary to be with Magi, a student at Wayne State. Warren, a textile-mill town of 5,000 midway between Springfield and Worcester, would be a cocoon where their family could grow. They found a snug ranch house built on a rise surrounded by woods. They had Heather, John Jr., then Molly, who was born in the back bedroom. John Jr. brought Jake, their boxer, into the house. Nearly three years ago Heather gave birth to Mikaela, a blond, blue-eyed baby who could have stepped right out of Molly’s baby album, and moved into her father’s boyhood home just down the road. “We had us,” says Magi. “That’s who we were. All I wanted was my children. We’re not whole now.”

Magi sits on a living room couch. Molly is everywhere, in portraits and photos. Their driveway is marked by a bold sign: STILL MISSING MOLLY and the date she left home. Magi’s visitor asks how she holds onto hope.

“My hope has changed,” Magi says. “In the beginning I was just wishing and hoping to see Molly. Then my hope became intertwined with faith. As time moved on my hope changed. Now I hope she’s not scared. Some days my fear grabs hold. Some days I want her to be in heaven and not be hurt. Some days we’re hopeful we’ll find her. Some days I feel desperate.”

Mikaela scurries through the house. She doesn’t know it, but loving her—her need for them—is the glue that holds everything together. “When I hear Mikaela,” says Magi, “I hear Molly.” Jake jumps on John’s lap and he buries his head in the boxer’s fur, scratches his ears. Their son John Jr. dropped out of college when Molly disappeared. He builds houses now and lives at home. He was Molly’s hero. He played soccer and baseball; she did too. He had been head lifeguard at Comins Pond. She’d gotten her lifesaving certificates and had just started. Her brother’s only worry was that the boys wouldn’t listen to Molly when she told them to stop fooling around.

The phone rings so loudly it seems to shake the room. “I never can miss a call,” John says. “I jump up in the middle of the night just waiting for the phone to ring.” The night before Molly disappeared, Magi and Molly watched television in the living room. “I didn’t want to frighten Molly,” Magi says, “so I asked her casually if she had noticed a man in a white car just hanging around. ‘Oh, he’s probably just a fisherman,’ Molly said. That night John was teaching a criminal justice class at a nearby community college; Magi never had a chance to tell him how uneasy the man had made her.

After Magi dropped Molly off, she came home. A mother reported Molly missing at 10:15. Her water bottle, sandals, police radio, backpack were placed around and under her chair. A first-aid kit was opened. But Warren police and park personnel thought she had either gotten her schedule mixed up or had gone off with friends. When police finally called Magi, it was 1:30 p.m. “I knew it was bad,” Magi says. “Molly would not have left the beach. I go to the pond. Parents are upset when I get there. They think Molly abandoned her post. ‘Call the court,’ I said. ‘Get John right now.’” Magi and Heather drove to every friend’s house. John Jr. dove into the pond, though he knew Molly was a pool person and rarely went in.

John chooses his words carefully. “Molly needed three certificates to become a lifeguard. That speaks of commitment. To think anyone who went through that training would just walk away…” His voice trails off. “Molly never skipped school. She has no history of problems with police. The police knew us. They knew Molly. That should have set off alarms. But I have to be careful. I’m angry but I can’t afford the anger. I need everyone. I’m angry at myself,” he is quick to add. “I failed Molly. I didn’t know the peril of blond, blue-eyed girls. I didn’t check out the schedule at the pond, who wouldn’t be there.”

Magi says, “I should have stayed. How frightened she must have been. Did she call for me? We’re supposed to protect her.”

John says simply, “We failed to protect her.”

By late afternoon and into the dark over 200 searchers combed the woods, the water; helicopters flew overhead. The next day bloodhounds followed Molly’s scent from the back of the pond, up a path that led to a cemetery and onto Route 19, where they lost Molly.

“What we think happened,” John says, is someone had stalked her. He had a very short window of time to get to her. He knew what he was doing. He probably feigned injury, maybe a hook in his finger. While she opened the first-aid kit, he got her.”

“When they searched that first night,” Magi says, “we wanted Molly, but we were afraid they’d find her.” Police kept the Bishes secluded in their home. They investigated everyone. They looked through Molly’s notebooks, hercomputer. They gave her boyfriend a polygraph. “They grilled us pretty hard,” John says. “I can imagine how hard they were on him.” A cemetery worker and a man delivering sand to the beach told police they had seen a white car in the area that morning. Magi tried to remember what the man looked like. The computer-generated sketch of a middle-aged, heavyset, mustached man led police across the region, but nothing led to Molly.

“I knew if I gave up, everyone would,” Magi says. “My identity became, I’m the mother of Molly Bish, the missing lifeguard. John and I had to let her know we’d never stop looking.” Warren’s town common became a gathering place for candlelight vigils. A town that might have been torn apart with fear and recrimination found solace in each other’s presence. In August, on Molly’s 17th birthday, more than 300 people flowed through a function hall down the street from John and Magi’s house, sharing cake and memories and songs. People marveled at what seemed like the Bishes’ superhuman strength. Fundraisers brought in capital to start the Molly Bish Foundation. John and Magi found the most terrible kind of celebrity, but it seemed that wherever there were children, they’d be there with child identification kits. “Each day,” says John, “we make a daily decision to live. You want to crawl under a rock, but our personal histories are hard work, resolve, and struggle. We have to advocate for families and children. We don’t want any other family to experience this.”

Magi remembers coming from the mall after buying an outfit to wear for a national television show on missing children. “I was on the turnpike, and for the first time I saw Molly’s picture at the tollbooth. I knew I’d never be able to see the world the same, not ever. Later that day, Magi, sitting in her car, began weeping. A man came out of a store and saw her. He started to dance for her. “It’s not so bad, is it?” he asked. “There’s a guy in there who just walked five miles after he ran out of gas.” Magi pointed to the poster of Molly that had set off her crying. “That’s my daughter,” she said. “He felt so badly,” Magi says. “I said, no, you gave me a gift. You cared.”

Nine months after Molly’s disappearance, John and Magi hired America’s most famous police sketch artist, Jeanne Boylan, who flew from Arizona. For three days Magi and Boylan sequestered themselves in a small local bed-and-breakfast. Magi felt bringing Molly home rested on the moments when she’d stared at the man in the white car only four feet away. “A teacher’s stare,” she says. “He didn’t smile. He didn’t wave. Just stared back coldly. I said I’m not leaving Molly. I stayed with her for another ten minutes. I came back and he was still there, staring. Then he drove away. I didn’t notice the license plate. I was just looking at the man.” In the bed-and-breakfast room Magi played a song she would dance to with Molly—“Time to Say Goodbye.” Boylan concentrated on Magi’s memory of the man’s eyes. “He seemed so cocky,” Magi says. “Now I feel he was saying, ‘I’m going to get your daughter.’”

The hardest part was remembering his lips. “He’d been smoking, so I didn’t really see them,” Magi says. After many hours Boylan placed a cigarette in a man’s fingertips and put them to his lips. Magi saw the sketch and said, “That’s it.”

One month later police arrested a man named Timothy Gallant from nearby Ludlow. He had tried to grab a teenage girl as she walked to work. He had already been questioned about Molly Bish because he resembled the first sketch. The new sketch made for an even closer match. Galant was convicted and sentenced to six to eight years for attempted kidnapping and assault. But he denied any link to Molly, and police could not find a conclusive link. There have been two jailhouse confessions, one from Illinois, another from New Jersey. One confession led the FBI to search Mount Snow in Vermont. Both admissions proved false. Police found blood in a suspicious white car, but it turned out not to be human blood. “We’re on this river,” Magi says, “and the currents keep moving us. We just have to hold on.”

“Through everything, I try to be as controlled as I can be,” John says. “I have to. I worry so about my family. I feel if I let go, I’ll lose whatever control I have. I have to use my intellect. I have to think.”

Molly’s class graduated last June, and Magi handed out diplomas to Molly’s best friends. “I didn’t want that man to take everything from us. Molly had gone to school with these kids since they were in kindergarten.” A detective tried to have them accept the hardest truth—Molly would not be found alive. They might never find her or learn what happened to her.

“He knew the behavior of these guys,” John says. “He wanted to make it easier for us.”

“But how can I let go of hope?” Magi asks.

They know that marriages crack under such extraordinary strain—the mutual guilt, the simple fact that each mirrors the other’s unbearable sorrow. They are also missing. They once were a happy couple, with a solid family, whose life revolved around their children. They can never get away as long as they are together. “We made a promise to Molly,” says John: “We will stay together. We’ll never stop looking. The day there is closure for me is the day they close the lid on my casket. Just the other day I came home and I heard loud music coming from the house. For a moment, just a fleeting moment my heart stopped—I thought, ‘Molly’s home!’” It was a family friend cleaning the house.

Worcester County District Attorney John J. Conte tells them he and his investigators will start from the beginning. They will look over all the evidence, all the tips. “He thinks the answer is right under their noses,” John says. “They’re just overlooking something.”

Magi strokes her fingernails. “Sometimes, when I’m in the quiet at night and alone with my thoughts, I say, ‘Molly, come sit on my lap.’ And for me, it’s a lullaby.”

NOTE: On June 9, 2003, one year after this feature appeared in Yankee, Molly’s body was found five miles from her family home. Her abductor and/or killer remains at large.