(Washington) Texas authorities announced on Thursday that they had found alive an American woman who went missing in 1981 as an infant, and called for help in unraveling the mystery that still surrounds the murder of her parents.
Posted at 6:10 p.m.
“Baby Holly has been located, is alive, 42 years old and doing well,” Texas Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster said at a press conference. “We welcome that,” he continued, “but we still have one crime to solve.”
This dates back to January 1981, when the bodies of a man and a woman, apparently victims of homicide, were found in a wooded area of Houston, Texas. For forty years they remained without an identity.
Advances in genetic genealogy made it possible, in 2021, to put a name to these victims: they are Tina and Harold Clouse, a couple from Florida who had a little girl, Holly.
It is the latter that has just been found. She “was told who her biological parents were and met her biological family members virtually for the first time on Tuesday,” Webster said.
According to him, she had been abandoned in a church in Arizona and raised in a family which is “not suspected in the investigation”.
On the other hand, the police are looking for “two women identifying themselves as members of a nomadic religious group” who dropped her off at this church.
“They wore long white dresses, walked barefoot and said their beliefs included separating men and women, being vegetarians and not using leather objects,” the prosecutor described.
However, the Clouse family had been contacted, in December 1980 or January 1981, by a woman introducing herself as “Sister Susan”.
She had assured that the couple had joined their sect, wanted to cut ties with the outside world and get rid of their material possessions. She had offered Harold Clouse’s parents to bring them their car, for a fee.
They had contacted the police. When two or three women in white dresses arrived with the vehicle, officers stopped them, but no record could be found, according to Mr Webster, calling on the public ‘for help’ to get back up the course Of the history.
In the meantime, the Clause family rejoiced to have reunited with Holly. “It is a real relief to know that she is well and has a good life,” commented her aunt Cheryl Clouse quoted in a press release.