The eight of hearts

Listen to Dave Ross Commentary: The eight of hearts

On December 13, 1993, at 9:30 a.m. Judith Bello, age 28, left her job at the National Food Corporation in Silvana, Washington with a friend and just disappeared.

She never picked up her 3-year-old son from daycare. She never returned home. She just disappeared. Her gray Ford Tempo turned up the same day, abandoned, at the neighborhood post office.

The case went cold. But detectives in Washington’s Snohomish County kept it alive and three years ago included Judith Bello on a deck of cold case playing cards, which they sent to jail and prison inmates around the state, just in case someone might have heard something. She was the eight of hearts.

Because if there was ever a suspicious case, this was it. She was close to her family. She would never have abandoned her 3-year-old little boy — or missed her daughter’s 15th birthday.

But then, last week, detectives got a phone message from a woman who said she was Judith Bello, that she’d seen her profile on the Sheriff’s website, that she was living in California, and had no interest in returning to her family. They checked and confirmed that indeed, she is the same woman who’d mysteriously vanished 18 years ago, and that in fact there was nothing mysterious at all — she just wanted to be rid of her husband.

We think that when people disappear they must have been abducted by some monster because no one would voluntarily just up and leave their children.

But sometimes, that’s exactly what they do.

Subscribe to the Dave Ross Commentary podcast