Jean M. Jape was 38 when she vanished from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in the autumn of 1997. At the time she and her daughter were living with Jean’s parents; she dropped the children off with their grandmother before leaving and told her daughter she planned to spend a weekend at a friend’s house. Jean is described as a white female, 5 feet 2 inches, 165 pounds, with dark brown hair, blue eyes, three piercings in her right ear and two in her left, and she wore a gold opal necklace. She was believed to be driving a gray mid-1980s 4-door Dodge Omni with rust on the doors.

One to three months after she was last seen, the family received a handwritten letter, postmarked from Illinois and addressed to her daughter, saying that once Jean was settled her daughter could come to stay. The family treated that as contact and initially canceled the missing-person report; no further contact followed and Jean has not been seen or heard from since that early 1998 letter. Investigators later focused attention on Jean’s then-boyfriend, Robert Davidson, who was wanted on active warrants for two counts of sexual assault of a child and who also disappeared around the same time.

Did anyone in Manitowoc or northern Illinois have contact with Jean or recognize the description of the car in late 1997 to early 1998?