The Disappearance of Anneliese Heinig (Maine)
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This episode deals with the topics of sexual assault and suicide and may be difficult for some listeners. Please know that help is available. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. If you are a victim of sexual assault, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673. I want people to keep looking for her.

I want to find her. She's a beautiful person. I want her back. I don't know what happened. The police think she committed suicide that day. But my first reaction when we got the call that she was missing, said she had been taken. That was my first thought. Somebody took my daughter. I don't know what happened that day. I don't understand any of it.

A passing driver caught only a glimpse as the woman, wearing all black from her shoes to her hat, walked away from a black SUV parked on the side of 295 in Falmouth, Maine. That was the final sighting of 37-year-old Annalise Hynek on November 26th, 2019.

Though her family is still waiting for her to return and her name is listed on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, you won't find Annalise's case on a main missing persons list. Annalise's disappearance has fallen into a category of missing persons cases with an unofficial conclusion that she is missing of her own accord. But that conclusion could be distracting from the truth.

A car on the side of the highway with a nearly empty gas tank. Pages from her personal journal. Divers searching the mouth of the presumptive Scott River. The investigation of the case points to anything but a concrete answer. Until she is found, no one can or should say for sure what happened to Annalise.

I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the disappearance of Annalise Heinig, told by her mother, Anne Heinig, on Dark Down East. She always described her childhood as being a perfect childhood. We are surrounded by several acres of woods, and then the neighbors have a great big field, so there's lots of wildlife. And we just did lots of typical, normal family things when she was little.

She went to the local schools and was in the scouts and, you know, did very typical activities that normal families do. She loved riding her bike through the woods. She made paths. We built ferry houses, things like that. We just, it was just lovely. Annalise Heinig was a typical little girl growing up in the quaint seaside fishing community of Harpswell, Maine.

She was really lively, I mean, and energetic. She had red hair and the personality to go along with that red hair. And we knew very early on that we were going to need to keep her feet busy because she stood up when she was six months old.

And she didn't start to walk. She ran. She literally ran across the room. And we were, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? Those busy feet of hers were made for sports. And it seemed no matter what sport Annalise tried, she excelled. She took an early interest in ice skating at just 10 years old. When she started ice

learning how to skate. My husband was so excited, he got some 2x4s and plastic and built a skating rink out in the front yard. I think she was 10 when she started, and it was just up at Bowdoin College and Brunswick Skating Club. And the first time she was on the ice, I was sitting there and I was marveling at her ability. I just...

I thought, how could my child be able to skate like that? And I noticed that she was watching all of the other kids and started to mimic them and started spinning, like at her second lesson, which floored me. And Linda Dupre, who runs the program, noticed her. Of course, she had bright lime green tights on.

So she had a very colorful jacket. So she stood out a little bit and she started testing her and she just became increasingly better and better at it. Skating taught Annalise some important lessons as a young kid. Her parents learned a lot too. She wanted to compete the first year. She took skating lessons and we were really reluctant.

to have her do that because we didn't think she was ready, but we went to a skating competition in Vermont and we had a wonderful time, but she came in dead last and she was devastated. But one of her little friends put her arm around her and said, "That's okay, I come in last too." And that was just a real precious moment of those two little redheads sitting next to one another.

and comforting her. She cried almost the whole way home. And we were saying, "Well, do you like to skate?" "Yes, I love skating!" I said, "Well, okay, we can do this again, but I don't want you to cry about losing." So there's that kind of balance. It was hard for her to, for kids to compete

and they want to succeed, and you as a parent want them to succeed, and the reality is you're going to come in last once in a while. You might not always come in first. So those were some life lessons that we learned as parents and she learned as a kid. But she really seemed to have a talent for skating. Ice skating continued to be a big part of Annalise's life.

But as the happy, energetic kid became a teenager, her parents noticed a personality shift. At the time, they didn't know what spurred the changes. They wouldn't find out until she was an adult. Up to the sixth grade, things seemed fine. But the year that she was a seventh grader, Mount Ararat had their middle school and high school together.

They've now separated it. And she was the last group of seventh graders that went into that situation. And they were also on the same bus with the high school students. And apparently, on the way home one time, she wrote about this a lot in a journal. A senior boy exposed himself to her on the bus. And she was mortified. She didn't know what to do. There were two other boys who protected her.

I got him away from her, but the shock of that stayed with her. She never told us about it. And I didn't find out about it until a year and a half before she disappeared. And I was heartbroken that she didn't tell us. But she couldn't tell us. She was afraid to tell us. She was shocked. And he may as well have raped her.

And that was the first episode of assault against her. Those were really difficult times when I started to see other children bully her and be really mean and hateful to her. And I remember her saying, you know, that her parents, Chris and I, had taught her to be nice to everybody.

And she never understood what to do when other kids were not nice to her. She didn't know how to handle that. And how do you teach a child to handle that? It used to break my heart when people were mean to her.

Her teenage years were not without challenges, but they had bright moments of pride and success too. One memory that Anne cherishes is the time her brother, Annalise's uncle, invited her to coach his hockey team on the art of figure skating. My younger brother had a peewee hockey team and

He invited her to come and help coach his little kids. And she was 15 at this time. And the parents kind of objected, like, why are you doing this? And he said they do this in Canada because they want their hockey players to be good skaters first and then learn stick handling after that. And he also told them that she skated faster backwards and

then the entire Mount Ararat team could skate frontwards. And of course, the little boys, it was all little boys, and they were like, "Oh, it's figure skating." And then they saw her and she was really pretty, so they were all like, "Wow, I think we're gonna like this." But they couldn't do it. They realized how hard it was because, you know, the blade on a figure skate is different and they use their edges.

And eventually she did teach them some tricks and a few of them, you know, realized that maybe they could benefit from it. My brother had a blast and the parents were happy too. And they gave her a stick at the end of the session. And I think I still have that hockey stick in my closet. Annalise wrote a lot and always carried a journal with her where she channeled her thoughts and documented her life.

Everything from her most painful life experiences down to her internet passwords. That journal was her life in ink. It was her trauma processed on paper. As an adult, Annalise was diagnosed with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. That's when her parents learned about the incident on the bus in 7th grade.

and that a man drugged and sexually assaulted Annalise in college. By the time Annalise had her diagnosis of PTSD, to try to help an adult child is very difficult for a parent. But Anne and her husband did whatever they could for their daughter.

When Annalise found out she was pregnant with her first child, they stepped in to help with their grandchild too. Anne told me that the father of Annalise's daughter did not stick around. And those feelings of abandonment, coupled with the mental health challenges of PTSD, put Annalise in a very difficult place. She really wanted to be a good mom. And...

We were always there on the sidelines for her, but it was difficult to see what she was going through financially, emotionally. That contributed to her PTSD as well. That man who basically didn't care about her or Lindsay. We knew she would struggle and she did.

Despite every single challenge, struggle, and dark place that Annalise walked through in her young life, it seemed that in the fall of 2019, she was really finding her footing. She was working a job that she enjoyed, that felt fulfilling. She was gaining confidence and making money again.

By that point, she was also a mother of two. She had her daughter as well as a young son. And though she wasn't together with his father, they seemed to have a system in place that gave her son stability and routine. But one conversation in late October 2019 made Annalise's mom wonder how her daughter was really doing. She had this pink or reddish pink notebook that she used to carry everywhere.

And I said, you carry that all over the place. You have it with you every time I see you. What's important in that notebook? And she said, oh, it's top secret. I can't tell you. And I did a mom thing that moms shouldn't do. But I kind of poked into the notebook and there were like these little notes. Goodbye or, you know, I love you. And it concerned me because...

It looked like she was saying goodbye to people she loved. So I actually point blank said, please tell me you're not, you know, I told her, I looked in the notebook and I said, please tell me that you're not thinking of suicide. And she started to cry.

Annalise told her mom and dad that life was heavy. The burden of medical bills, legal battles, coping with the symptoms of PTSD, a car accident that left her without a vehicle, and recent harassment at her new job. They listened as their daughter confided in them. And then, Anne wrapped her daughter in every ounce of love she had.

I told her how much she meant to me, how much I loved her, and how much I couldn't imagine my life without her in it. She did mean so much to me. I still thought of her as beautiful. I didn't think of her as a failure.

I thought about, told her that all her struggles had only made her stronger and that she had a lot more to do and that I wanted to be there with her. And I told her not to worry about the financial things and the legal things. Chris and I were going to help her. Anne, while comforting her daughter, cautioned Annalise too. And I had actually said to her, you know, Annalise,

you really should be careful about carrying this notebook with you because if somebody does find find this and you're not around they might get the wrong impression and that's exactly what happened it was the last week of november 2019. annalise's daughter was on school vacation spending time at a friend's house but they had a lot planned for the holiday week together

Of course, they'd have a big turkey dinner that Thursday, and then to celebrate her daughter's birthday, they planned a spa day for that upcoming weekend. Anne was texting with Annalise on Monday, November 25th. We were laughing and joking. We were talking about Thanksgiving and she was going to about what to bring to my brother's house. And then on Thursday morning, on Thanksgiving morning, she didn't come.

Annalise should have been there, with both of her kids in tow. But with three empty seats at the dinner table, Anne was concerned. Her first call was to Annalise's ex-boyfriend and son's father. That's when she learned Annalise hadn't shown up to get her son on the bus the day before. And he said, "I've been trying to get in touch with her." And I said, "When did you last see her?" And he said, "Monday night."

She had come over. She would help Ryan with Leo on a daily basis. She would get him on the bus. She would help get him home from school. And she frequently had dinner at Ryan's house and would help put Leo to bed to, you know, try to keep Leo's routine stable. And Ryan told me that she came over again later

And she wanted to see Leo and she said, he said she woke Leo up and gave him a big hug and told him she loved him. And she hugged him, Ryan, and then she left. As Anne was putting the pieces together, realizing that Annalise's whereabouts were unaccounted for since that Monday, then-Sergeant James Donnell, now police chief of the Richmond Police Department, dialed Anne's number.

When she answered, he gave her the news that no mother wants to hear: Annalise was missing. Annalise's own teenage daughter filed the missing persons report. So Chris and I, our daughter Grace and her now husband drove to Richmond. Annalise had told Chris about a few places that gave her a lot of comfort.

So we decided, well, we'll just look for her car. And we went to a couple of these places and there was no car. So then when we got to our apartment building, we called, let the police know that we were there. And then James Donnell met us at the apartment. He had talked to the landlord to get permission to go into the apartment. And he went in to the apartment first. There was nothing outstanding in the apartment.

Somebody had sent her flowers. We don't know who sent her the flowers. And there was a really strange note on her kitchen counter that said, Hope ends pain. It wasn't in her handwriting. I don't know who put it there or whether she put it there.

In addition to the strange note on her kitchen counter, its author unknown, they did find a note written by Annalise to her daughter. It was seemingly innocuous, a scribble on a paper napkin saying she was going into work early.

Her daughter had been asleep when Annalise left, and then at a friend's house. With no sign of her vehicle around town in the places she was known to spend time, Anne gave police a description of that car and a license plate number. The black Mercury Mariner SUV actually belonged to Anne and Chris. They loaned it to her after a car accident while she worked towards buying a new one.

It would take police five days to locate it, an aspect of the case that's now called into question. In the meantime, her family had Annalise's cell phone tracked, and they followed the pings.

We'd actually gone to the area of the Pings and were alarmed because it's an industrial area. There was a dumpster company in there. There were all these shipping containers stored. And, you know, I thought somebody had harmed her and that she was in a dumpster. It was just, my heart just sunk.

It wasn't until they located the car those five days later that they realized why her cell phone pinged in that industrial area. Her phone was in the car, and the car was in a tow lot where it had been since November 26th, two whole days before anyone realized Annalise was missing.

According to reporting in the Portland Press-Herald by Matt Byrne, Corporal Fern Cloutier first spotted the 2008 black Mercury Mariner SUV in the breakdown lane northbound on I-295 near the Presumptscott River around 8:30 in the morning of November 26th. He did a "quick check" of the vehicle and its surroundings, but took no further action. This wasn't altogether unusual.

Sometimes, a car owner might leave a disabled vehicle on the side of the highway and return to later retrieve it.

But after passing it several more times during his shift, Cloutier ordered a tow later that day. Now here's the unusual part. It would have been policy to survey the car's contents and make an attempt to contact the vehicle's registered owner before having it towed, but Cloutier did not follow this protocol. State Police spokesman Steve McCausland told the Press Herald that...

Due to the volume of cars left along roadways, sometimes this procedure to contact the registered owner is not followed. But if police had contacted Anne and Chris the very same day Annalise was last seen, they would have known something was wrong. The search could have started immediately. Instead, they lost days.

James Donnell called us when the car was found. He met us at the car, and I had the extra set of keys, and it was locked. Her purse was in the car. Her phone was in the car. And I wanted James Donnell to have a detective at the scene. I wanted the car processed as if it had been a crime scene. He didn't do that, and I had to tell him to put gloves on.

And later I was told by the chief of police in Velma that they would not have released the car to us at that time. They would have frantically looked at the car to see if there was somebody in the car with her, to look at it as a crime scene. So when we went into the car, the only thing that appeared to be missing was her driver's license.

Her license was missing, but Annalise's car keys, purse, laptop, and cell phone were all inside the car, along with birthday gifts for her daughter. They noted, too, that the low fuel light was on. Anne wondered if Annalise pulled over to the side of the interstate because she thought she would soon run out of gas. Annalise's family was left with so many questions.

Why was Annalise in Portland so early that Tuesday morning? Did someone drive her there or did she drive herself? And the biggest and most crucial question of them all: Where was Annalise? A passing driver reported seeing a person matching Annalise's description around 6:30 that morning of November 26th, 2019.

The person, assumed to be Annalise, was walking away from the SUV along the bridge over the Przemska River. And it was in those waters that the search for Annalise continued on a massive scale. Because of the last known location of her personage, they arranged for divers to go into the Przemska River to look for her. And they had side-scanned sonar.

They had drones. They had cadaver dogs. They had planes. And Chris and I and Grace, I'm friends with Howard Rice, who was the fire chief in Falmouth. And Howard had some of his firefighters searching. And he told me recently that they still do search. So after the divers came out of the water,

We met with the Falmouth Police Department in a debriefing session. And all the individuals who had been in the water were there. They were all volunteers. Every single one of them. They were from different agencies. Some were from the state police. Some were from Fish and Wildlife, Department of Marine Resources. You know, they're divers. I gave every single one of those guys a big hug for trying to help us.

And they told us they were a results-driven group, and they did not find anything when they were in the water. Nothing. That's when Chief Kilbride said, you know, I'm so sorry for your loss. And I said, what? What are you talking about? And he showed me Xerox copies of the pages in that notebook book.

And that's, I mean, it's such, I knew, and I told him what I just told you about that notebook. I knew about it. I told him about the conversation I'd had with her. And I told them that we didn't think that she committed suicide. But, you know, when you're meeting with law enforcement who have a lot of experience in situations, they're just going based on their evidence. And to us, it's,

It wasn't definitive. Just two weeks into the investigation of Annalise Heinegg's disappearance, on December 9th, 2019, the Kennebec Journal published a piece by Jessica Lowell with the headline, Missing Woman Struggles with Mental Health, Medical Records Show.

That article, based on an interview with Annalise's father and public records requests made by the paper, disclosed many of the mental health and legal challenges Annalise had battled. But it didn't have the context that Anne was able to provide in her conversation with me. I know that the clickbait headline was just was substance abuse issues and

mental health issues. The substance was alcohol, and she had not had any alcohol for a year and a half prior to her disappearance. There was no alcohol in her apartment. The mental health issues, as I've stated, was PTSD from not just that assault that occurred when she was 12, but she had also been drugged and raped at a fraternity party in college. So she really, and then being abandoned when she was pregnant, was...

contributed utterly to PTSD. The classification of PTSD was first recognized in, of course, combat soldiers. And then they discovered that the second classification were sexual assault victims and abuse victims, that PTSD is one of their struggles.

Annalise's parents were heartbroken to see the words written about their daughter so soon after her disappearance, while the shock still lingered and the pain was raw. The article was the subject of much online debate. Was it appropriate? Was it necessary? Did it unfairly represent and taint the public perception of her disappearance?

In a letter to the editor, published three weeks later, Deborah O'Neill of Topsom, Maine wrote, We were in absolute shock.

And to try to speak to somebody in the press when you're in that state, you can't even think. You can't move. And I still feel sometimes that I'm paralyzed. And it's taken me a long time to talk to anyone about what happened to her. It's been a real struggle. You know, I still struggle thinking that she harmed herself.

and I still struggle with wondering if somebody took her. I just need the closure to find out where she is and what happened to her. And in these situations, it's really difficult. While they reserve an understandable frustration with the early missteps and inaction that cost them crucial time in the search for Annalise...

Ann says they remain grateful for the help they've received. I was grateful to John Kilbride for listening to us because he did tell us that at a certain point in time that they potentially would open a criminal investigation. And if they did so, we would not be given a lot of information. It's been a year and a half since Annalise disappeared.

and her family keeps searching. Ann and Chris don't discount any piece of information, any possibility, any chance that someone might know what happened to their daughter. Each time I see something or find something or hear something, I present it to, I go through the authority-having jurisdiction, which is the Richmond Police Department.

And I, when we were cleaning out her apartment, I found a second notebook and it was blue. And I told Chief Kilbride about it. And I said, there was the passages in that talk about living and wanting to live. When she had the car accident, she felt like she'd had a near death experience.

And she imagined how it would affect Chris and I, parents and her sister and her children. She wanted to live. She talked a lot about love in that notebook. There were people who claimed that they had seen her, but they turned out to be false leads. And we were warned that that would happen. We were given...

videos that people had taken of people they thought might be her. And there was one video of a young woman, and I remember I had to kind of do a double take, but I showed it to my granddaughter and she said, that's not my mom. She wouldn't wear a hat like that. So,

You know, there's a little lightheartedness every once in a while. Anne's sense of humor, that ability to find the lightheartedness and all the heavy darkness around her, is a demonstration of her strength. It keeps her moving forward with a protected heart, continuing the search for her daughter. Anne shared the most recent developments in the search for Annalise just a few weeks prior to our conversation.

My recent contact with the police was a couple of weeks ago when my daughter's Facebook page had disappeared off of Facebook. My granddaughter had wanted to see, you know, look at the pictures on Mother's Day. And she got really angry at me and claimed that I had taken her page down and I had nothing to do with that. And so I contacted the police about it because we had asked to have her messages posted

We wanted to know who she might have been talking to, and they should have wanted to know that too, but I have had no response. Annalise had two Facebook accounts. On November 22nd, four days before she was last seen, she posted, quote, unquote.

In the days following, she changed her profile picture to a photo of her two children. Reporting by the Kennebic Journal called the post and the change in profile picture "cryptic." But was the use of that word editorializing? Maybe it was just a mother posting a photo of her kids.

Whatever the meaning behind that post and that photo change, that very Facebook page is the one that is now apparently deleted. Just gone. And Anne still doesn't know why it was removed or who might be responsible. I've always felt lucky to be her mom. Sorry, she was so beautiful.

From day one, I mean, she was just a beautiful child. She had big blue eyes and her red hair and just her energy. I always thought my energy was inversely proportional to hers. She was always full speed, fast forward, and I was trying my best to keep up with her.

And one of my favorite memories is watching her dance on stage for the first time. I can't remember. I think she was five. And she was so, you know, it was so hard for her to focus on stuff. But in that moment in time, she just kind of fell in with the whole dance routine. And she just had this smile on.

Just delightful smile. And she was so happy. And it made me so happy too. What is your heart telling you about your daughter right now? That she's listening to me. And I want her to come home. I want to be able to hug her and hold her. Ideally, I want to see her again. And if she's gone, I want to know. I want to know that she's really gone.

And then I'm not going to see her again. But I think I will see her someday. I will.

May is Maine Missing Persons Month, established in 2007 to raise awareness for the Mainers still missing and the families still waiting for their loved ones to come home. I've dedicated every episode of Dark Down East in the month of May to missing persons cases. The cases that leave family and friends behind with a feeling of ambiguous loss.

There's no closure. It's living in limbo, teetering between hope and hopelessness, guilt as life keeps moving, but moving forward with it in search of peace and answers, not sure which to prioritize at any given moment.

It's wondering if the conclusions drawn by those with a badge are the truth, questioning their official capacity to make such judgments when there's still nothing tangible to confirm their theory. Because that's what it is, a theory. Until Anneliese Heinig is found, we cannot know for sure.

As voting season begins here in Maine, keep your eyes on the water. A piece of clothing, a shred of fabric, a shoe, anything that might help the Heinigs find their daughter. And when you return to port, don't forget to look up for Annalise's face in the crowd. Keep a benevolent eye out for Annalise.

or anything, any sign, anything. And if she's not in the water, if people could just try to look at faces of people they pass by to see if they see her. Chief Kilbride said to me, are her eyes really that color? And I said, absolutely. They are glacier ice blue. If you looked in her eyes, you would never forget them.

She, her eyes are just beautiful. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. Sources and reference material for this episode, including pieces by the Kennebic Journal and Portland Press-Herald, are listed and linked in the show notes at darkdowneast.com so you can do some digging of your own. Thank you, Anne, for sharing Annalise's story with us.

If you have a personal connection to a case I should cover, I'd love to hear from you at hello at darkdowneast.com. Follow along on Instagram at darkdowneast and support this show and the stories I cover by subscribing, following, and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for supporting this show and allowing me to do what I do.

I'm honored to use this platform for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones. And for those who are still searching for answers in cold missing persons and murder cases, I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.