DOREEN VINCENT - 12 yo (1988) - Wallingford CT

Doreen Vincent disappeared from her father’s house in Wallingford June 15, 1988, never to be seen or heard from again.

With no body and no evidence, police can’t say for certain who may have been responsible for the 12-year-old’s disappearance.

On the night she disappeared, Doreen had a disagreement with her father, Mark Vincent. He told police she left through the front door of the house he had recently moved into on Whirlwind Hill Road, a rural section of Wallingford.

His wife at the time, the late Sharon Vincent Hutchins, told police it would have been impossible for Doreen to leave through the front door because it was locked with a deadbolt that required a key.


Police have never been satisfied with Mark Vincent’s account. “All we can say is his explanation of the circumstances surrounding her disappearance is suspect,” said Wallingford Detective Lt. Robert Flis.

Vincent, 55, a contractor from Milford who is remarried and has a teenage son, is aware that police think he had something to do with Doreen’s disappearance. He told the Register what he’s told police time and time again:

“If you’re looking to me, you’ll never find Doreen.” Meaning, he said, that she’s “somewhere else other than here.”

He believes his daughter left the house and hitchhiked somewhere. “She did it before,” he said, recalling that when they lived in Bridgeport, Doreen hitchhiked to her mother’s house in Waterbury.

Doreen’s mother, Donna Lee, doesn’t believe his theory at all.

June 15, 1988, was a Wednesday. Lee says she called her ex-husband’s house, and got directions to Wallingford from his wife, Sharon. Lee had not been to Whirlwind Hill. Mark and Sharon Vincent had moved there less than two weeks before.

“I said I would pick up Doreen on Friday if I was not doing overtime,” Lee recalls saying.

When she called the home several times Friday, there was no answer. (Police say Mark Vincent had removed the phone from the wall.)

The next day, June 18, “We just went there, and he was outside, sunning himself,” Lee said.

Lee said that he acted like she had taken their daughter again. “He insisted I sent her to my mother’s house,” said Lee.

She had married Vincent when she was 16; they had a rocky marriage. He said the two disagreed on child-rearing. Lee recalls that Mark didn’t want to call the police. “I insisted he call the police,” she said. “The police only accepted his statement as a runaway because they didn’t want conflicting stories.”

Wallingford Detective Sgt. Anthony DeMaio said the case is periodically reviewed to see if there’s anything police may have overlooked or to seek new leads.

“Within the past year, we restructured the whole file. We wanted to make sure (Doreen) was listed” on databases for missing and exploited children and on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System,” DeMaio said. Partial dental X-rays of Doreen were entered into national databases last Nov. 15.

On the evening of June 15, 1988, Sharon Vincent cooked dinner for her family, including two younger children, then left for a church service in West Haven, DeMaio said.

Mark Vincent told police he was in his workshop after dinner and, at about 8 p.m., saw Doreen in the kitchen. At about 9, he said, he went to her bedroom and she wasn’t there. When his wife returned at 11:30, he told her that Doreen was missing and he was going to Waterbury, DeMaio said.

Police question why Mark Vincent didn’t tell his mother when he was visiting her later that week that her granddaughter was missing. He said it was because his mother wasn’t a part of the child’s life.

DeMaio said Lee’s family hired private investigators and psychics,but couldn’t find Doreen. “This case was investigated ad nauseam,” he said.

Initially handled as a runaway case, red flags started to develop, DeMaio said.

Later in summer 1988, Mark and Sharon Vincent split up, and he moved out. “He doesn’t give us a forwarding address and police don’t know where he is for quite some time,” DeMaio said.

Vincent said that is a persistent police falsehood. “I didn’t hide. I lived and worked in Wallingford. I noticed them noticing me,” he said last week.

After about a year, police developed information that led them to get search warrants for several locations, including Vincent’s mother’s house, in Bethel. “Some of the items the father reported Doreen took with her were found. Obviously, a red flag developed,” DeMaio said.

Police searched the Whirlwind Hill Road home; “nothing led us to a smoking gun,” Flis said.

There was a gun in a bag in the garage of the Bethel home of Lorraine Vincent, where her son was living then. Though the gun belonged to Sharon Vincent, Mark Vincent was charged with possession of a firearm, and served time. A convicted felon, it was against the law for him to possess a gun.

In 1992, Vincent appealed the conviction to the state Appellate Court, arguing that Superior Court should have suppressed the revolver and ammunition seized because there was no probable cause to believe the items police were looking for were in his mother’s house, and that the gun case should have been excluded as evidence in the investigation into the disappearance of his daughter.

According to a summary of the State v. Vincent, he told officers they could not take the gun because it was not listed on the search warrant. The trial court, Appellate Court and, in 1994, the state Supreme Court all concluded that the seizure of the revolver was proper, and probable cause supported the search.

Asked about the situation, Vincent said, “The whole thing was hyped up, fueled by the fact that (police) had their eyes on me.”

The parents said they searched for Doreen in Bridgeport, New Haven and New York. Police said they searched, with dogs, a large park in Bethel near the Huntington State Forest. Flis said Vincent was seen in the park soon after Doreen’s disappearance; Vincent said he can prove he was not there.

“I’ve come to accept the fact we may never know what happened to her,” Lee said.

“If she were alive, I’m sure she would have contacted us, some way, somehow,” said Doreen’s grandmother, Josephine Murad.

Vincent said he misses his daughter and hopes she’s alive: “I’d like to think she’s alive. It’s like a dream to see my baby.”

With tears in his eyes, he said he misses his daughter, especially at times like Christmas.

“You could go on imagining all kinds of things. She could have been a doctor,” he said. “She cared about people. But there was always this turmoil, pulled between two parents. It was like she had two lives.”

Lee said that if her daughter had continued to be in her life, “there wouldn’t have been such a void. She might have had children, been married. I think about her every day and certain dates bring back memories. I miss her terribly.”

Said Flis, “Twelve-year-old girls don’t go missing forever. The majority come home within a few hours or days. It’s rare for people to run away and never be heard from again. Gone without a trace is very hard to do, unless something bad happened.

“There is no evidence to say she’s dead, and I certainly hope she’s alive, but it’s hard for me to feel she is,” Flis added.

DeMaio said police hope for a miracle, that “a shred of evidence as to her whereabouts will be developed. You hope that technology can help you in some way, shape or form.”

http://www.ctpostchronicle.com/articles/2012/01/17/news/doc4f15eb3a1c005932828885.txt