It was Patricia Meehan, holding her camera just below neck level and staring into the mirror with wide eyes and a blank expression. The photograph she left in her camera had glaring similarities to how a witness described her on the day she disappeared.
“She just stared. She never said anything; she just stared at me. I will never forget her,” the driver whose car was hit by Patricia’s, said in a documentary. Before the accident, she was a girl who loved horses and wanted to care for children for a living.
Then how did she get to that state? The story begins in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A Girl That Seemed Hyper
Patricia Bernadette Meehan was born on 1st November, 1951 to Thomas and Delores “Dolly” Meehan. She was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
As a young adult, she moved 1,100 miles from home to Oklahoma City, where she studied early childhood development with the intention of working in childcare/day care.
But that intention didn’t last. At the age of 33-34, she left that career path and moved to another city. This time, it was Bozeman, Montana, where she found work as a ranch hand. She cited her love for animals as the reason.
She also did some odd jobs to make ends meet. But until a few days before her disappearance, she had started to feel the blues. She had been under severe psychological distress.
According to a reproduction of a November 14, 1994, Dallas Morning News article, her father described the last conversation he had with her on the phone.
“She asked if she could come home, and I said, ‘Sure.’ She didn’t like to fly, and I didn’t want her driving by herself in her condition. I told her to call after she saw the… (psychologist) that day. I wanted time to figure out how we could get her home.”
But that last call never came. Patricia’s landlord was one of the last people to see her. And his account corroborates her mental state. He told her father that she was really out of it, wasn’t making sense, and seemed really hyper.
The next known event in the timeline is the unsettling accident that would haunt the victims and Patricia’s parents for years to come.
A Spectator to Her Own Accident
8:15 pm on 20th April 1989. Peggy Bueller was driving with her mother and father to Great Falls, Montana, to visit her sister. Behind her, there was another car – driven by Carol Heitz, an off-duty police dispatcher.
It was a desolate stretch of hilly ranch country bisected by a big flat-bottom creek. And the sun was just setting. Both cars were near Circle, Montana, when the incident happened.
A car was headed straight toward them, in the opposite direction. Bueller narrowly avoided a head-on collision. Heitz saw what happened, but couldn’t get out of the way in time. The unknown car struck hers.
Heitz got out of the car, dazed but not seriously injured. The driver of the unknown car, later identified as Patricia Meehan, walked out of the car and stared at her.
Heitz asked if she was hurt, but Patricia never answered. Instead, she turned around and climbed over a fence.
When Bueller returned to help, she too found her reaction strange. “As I looked out across the accident, I noticed someone on the other side of the fence, standing there like a spectator, not like it had happened to her,” she recounted.
An archived article mentions that after her spectator-like behavior, she stepped into the prairie and just kept walking, never to be seen again.
What Happened To Patricia Meehan
Bueller’s father had gone to the town to call for help after the accident. The police arrived soon after and ran the license plates of the car through the Department of Motor Vehicles database. Patricia was identified within 30 minutes.
“We didn’t know what was out there. We didn’t know whether we were looking for a hurt person, a sick person or a fugitive.” Sheriff Robert A. Jensen disclosed in a documentary. He and four other officers, along with a dog, started searching for her.
3/4 of a mile from the crash scene, they stumbled upon some tennis shoe tracks. They were a size 6, and in the officers’ opinion, they belonged to either a young boy or a woman.
By 3 AM, Patricia’s tracks had disappeared, and the search was suspended. The following morning, a large-scale search commenced. The Montana Highway Patrol, the Circle Police Department, and ambulance crews searched land and air for five days.
They were also assisted by some local ranchers and area work crews, but the search turned up nothing. Authorities had two theories, though. The first was that she had hitchhiked a ride and left the area.
The other theory was that she hid in a hay-truck parked half a mile from the scene. Both possibilities meant Patricia had traversed well beyond the search area. Then sightings of her started coming in, confirming the belief.
Sightings Of Patricia Meehan
Two weeks after Patricia walked away unfazed from the car crash. More than 525 miles away from where she disappeared is a Hardee’s restaurant. A woman sits there alone for almost five hours.
When the restaurant closes, she’s asked to leave. She looks through the window, and then walks across to another diner across the road. That’s when a police officer notices her.
He asks for her name, but the woman refuses. She claims she’s from Colorado, then she switches it to Israel.
This was the very first sighting of a woman that matched Patricia’s description, according to an article in The Billings Gazette. The same account described two other sightings in South Dakota the next day.
A cashier and a waitress at a truck stop reported seeing a woman matching Patricia’s description. She was sitting in the cafe, drinking coffee for about 12 hours. Apparently, she appeared to be talking to herself.
There was another sighting the same evening. Another waitress saw a woman matching Patricia’s description sitting with a man in his thirties in Murdo – a city near the truck stop.
Over the next few days, there were a few other minor sightings. A truck driver noticed her walking along a frontage road. Another account put her at a horse auction in Billings, Montana on May 13, according to The Missoulian.
All of these sightings were in random locations, all far away. But there was one sighting which hit too close to home, literally. A few miles away from her home, there was a diner where a woman like her was spotted.
On May 19th, she walked into the diner and seemed to be in a hurry. Waitress Barb Ruff said she wanted to be served quickly and had somewhere to be at 9.00 am for shopping plans. The waitress couldn’t understand the hurry.
Another waitress, Brenda Clements, noticed that the woman was acting strangely, like a person who didn’t know who she was or where she was.
“She seemed really disoriented, and really spacey. I heard her talking to herself. She sat at that table for an hour and a half more just looking out the window, watching people walk by.” Clements said, according to Unsolved Mysteries
Following this sighting, Patricia’s family got involved in the search. Dolly and Thomas Meehan, and their son, Terry, arrived carrying photographs and videos of the girl to show witnesses.
They began searching major roads in Montana and leaving missing person posters at truck stops and rest stops. The effort mainly centred on interviewing witnesses and pursuing sightings across states.
The family believed Patricia had survived the crash and needed help finding her way home. “We think she has amnesia, that she is confused and scared.” her mother said, as per All That’s Interesting.
Many years later, in 2016, the Tromp family disappeared from the same psychological cause. Riana Tromp, the daughter of the family, was later discovered with no memory of her name, where she came from or even what year it was.
Eventually, all the Tromp family members were found safe and alive. But the same couldn’t be said for Patricia Meehan. Her family investigated a lot of scattered sightings, but couldn’t find any substantial clues.
On August 30, a transient woman was arrested for littering in Idaho. And the woman bore a striking resemblance to Patricia, according to the officers on duty.
“I really think it’s her. This woman is the spitting image of [Patricia] Meehan,” Lt. Greg Surplus told The Seattle Times. In an appearance before Magistrate Neil Walter, the woman claimed to be a missionary who’d stopped in town en route to Montana.
Fingerprint analysis later proved without a doubt that the woman wasn’t Patricia. There were many such dead ends in the coming months.
More than 5000 alleged sightings were reported, but none of them was confirmed. “Doing something like this is really hard. It’s like chasing the wind.” her father said in an interview.
The Search Ends, Only Hope Lives On
“More than anything else in the world, I want her back with us”, an emotional Thomas Meehan confesses in an interview on episode 6, season 6 of Unsolved Mysteries. The documentary features interviews from officers, witnesses and Patricia’s family.
The documentary mentions Patricia as a 5-foot-3-inch-tall woman with a slight build, strawberry blonde hair, freckles, fair skin and greenish-grey eyes. No woman of that description was sighted after 1990.
The trail went mostly cold within a year after her disappearance. Thomas would die soon after in 1991. Dolly met the same fate six years later. Both parents left this world without knowing what happened to their daughter.
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons Systems (NAMUS) database lists Patricia Meehan as still missing, with the McCone County Sheriff’s Office as the official case owner. The search for Patricia is still on.
Like Patricia, Rico Harris also disappeared on a drive. He was going back to his girlfriend, with doubts about taking the next step in his relationship. He disappeared, leaving behind his car, a backpack, a phone and some footage from the day.
Leonard Dirickson was on the road with an unidentified man driving a white Ford pickup truck when he disappeared. He had told his son they were going to look at a horse, but he was never seen again.
