Frisco – At a certain point during her frantic, four-month search, Kathy McCormick had become resigned to never seeing her mother again and was just awaiting the news that her body had been found.
But when Frisco police Detective Julie Polly showed up at McCormick’s office last Thursday with tears in her eyes, she didn’t immediately understand that Patricia McCormick was, in all likelihood, dead.
“I’m just so used to the leads going nowhere that I wasn’t … I didn’t make the connection,” Kathy McCormick said Monday.
For 129 days, she had no clue what had happened to her 62-year-old mother, who disappeared Nov. 28 while returning to the NAPA store in Frisco from a delivery in Keystone.
“My first instinct was that she was involved in an accident. I was out looking, like, three hours after she didn’t return,” Kathy McCormick said. “Not knowing was the hardest thing. But I’ve been trying to prepare myself this entire time for any outcome.”
On Sunday, she visited the scene at the Dillon Reservoir where searchers found debris from a wreck that had been hidden by snow all winter – where divers had carved a hole in the three-foot-thick ice and spotted the crumpled pickup truck that had skidded off the road, tumbled down a 60-foot embankment and sunk to the bottom; and where the body of her mother still has not been recovered.
“I just really wish they’d find her,” she said. “It’s kind of disappointing because they didn’t. They just found the truck. They need to find the body. It’s not over. It’s always like some last snag.”
But at least now she has an answer, however unsatisfying.
“It’s been emotionally, physically, mentally draining. It’s been hell,” she said. “I was going insane, struggling with the idea that she could have been abducted and struggling with the fact that she could possibly be dead.”
The woman McCormick called her “best friend in the whole world” moved to Summit County seven years ago to be near her baby girl.
Patricia McCormick adored her job running auto parts because it kept her outside and let her be on her own, Kathy said.
When her mother didn’t return to work that November afternoon, Kathy McCormick knew immediately that something was terribly wrong.
A massive search in the days after McCormick vanished yielded few clues, and soon only Kathy McCormick held out any hope of finding her mother.
For more than four months, she passed out fliers and called friends and friends of friends to spread the word through e-mail and missing-person organizations.
One woman said she recalled following a slow-moving NAPA delivery truck over Hoosier Pass. An acquaintance claimed to have seen Patricia McCormick in a local convenience store. Reports that she had been spotted in Fort Collins and on the outskirts of the metro area each caused heart palpitations. But none turned out to be true.
“It just pulls you in so many directions, you don’t know which way to go,” McCormick said.
In her desperation, she engaged psychics, pestered detective Polly for word of any new tips and drove herself, literally and figuratively, to exhaustion.
One day, she even pulled over to take a short nap at an overlook less than a quarter-mile from where the NAPA truck was pulled from the icy water on Friday.
Thoughts of her mother gnawed at her constantly.
Let go from one job because of her demands for time off to search, Kathy McCormick found another working as a receptionist at a local real-estate office.
A local church, the Salvation Army and the landlord took care of Patricia McCormick’s condominium rent payments until late March, when Kathy McCormick made the painful decision to move her mother’s possessions into a storage unit.
On Sunday, after searchers had abandoned efforts to find Patricia McCormick until the reservoir ice melts, Kathy visited the crash site to leave flowers and a picture of the two women she signed: “I love you, mom.”
“I just wanted to say good-bye,” she said.
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or at slipsher@denverpost.com.
