DNA Tests At UF Resolve Family Questions About Missing Daughter's Fate

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — DNA tests on female skeletal bones at a University of Florida laboratory have ended a Central Florida family’s traumatic 19-year search to find a loved one and launched them on a new mission to apprehend her killer.

Ever since 14-year-old Vickey Wills mysteriously disappeared from a school bus stop in East Orlando the morning of April 25, 1983, her relatives have driven thousands of miles to find her, even starting a missing children’s agency in the process.

The discovery of skeletal remains about 10 miles from the bus stop six months after Vickey’s disappearance never satisfied them. A forensic expert at the time said the chances the remains were Vickey’s were 90 percent, based on dental records.

“We could not give up because we still had that 10 percent hope she was still alive,” said Judy Wills, Vickey’s mother.

The family wanted DNA testing done when it became available in the ‘90s but could not afford the $8,000 to $10,000 fee at a private lab. About six months ago, the family turned to UF for help. Tony Falsetti, director of UF’s C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, which examined the skeletal remains shortly after they were found, asked UF scientist Ginger Clark if she would do DNA tests.

Clark normally sequences DNA on wildlife, primarily to nab deer poachers, as scientific research manager at Biotechnologies for Ecological, Evolutionary and Conservation Sciences Genetic Analysis Laboratory, part of UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research. Although the technique is similar, she had never performed the test on a human.

Because the case involved a child, though, Clark said she felt a special obligation.

“When it’s your child, you want to be absolutely positive,” said Clark, the mother of two grown children. “This family had been through so much, never knowing what happened to the girl. They didn’t even have a cause of death.”

With Vickey’s two sisters, her mother and her two aunts still living, Clark could do a test involving mitachondrial DNA, present in the egg and therefore maternally passed along. She compared DNA from the remains’ leg bone tissue with DNA from hair samples provided by Vickey’s female family members. The test showed them to be immediate blood relatives.

The family hopes Vickey’s case will trigger the memory of someone who saw something at the bus stop that morning, said Joan Thompson, Vickey’s aunt and executive director of Missing Children Center in Winter Springs, Fla. Her classmates now have children of their own, and since so much time has passed they might be willing to come forward if they know anything, she said.

Vickey was always conscientious about safety and would never have gotten into a car with a stranger, yet there was no sign of a struggle at the bus stop, Thompson said. Her books, purse, clothing and shoes were never found.

But she might have accepted a ride from someone she knew, Thompson believes.

Vickey did not want to go to school that morning, Thompson said. Her sister was home sick and relatives were visiting from Ohio. Still, she would not have run away, she said.

Her father just had gotten out of the hospital the week before from open-heart surgery. “Vickey was daddy’s little girl, and she always made sure he got his medication,” she said.

The next morning, Vickey’s relatives stopped cars at the bus stop asking drivers if they had seen Vickey the day before. They received eyewitness reports of her sitting alone reading a book up until 7:25 a.m., Thompson said, and the bus arrived at 7:30 a.m.

With Vickey’s picture in hand, her aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers and parents searched the state, once thinking they found her in 1988 in Daytona Beach, Fla., Thompson said. The girl looked so much like Vickey that her sister Chris chased her and sat on top of her, but it turned out to be a 14-year-old Washington runaway, she said.

Cmdr. Angelo Nieves, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, said the case has never been closed since it involves an unsolved death investigation. “It was inactive, but the sheriff’s office will always follow up on any case that is unsolved,” he said.

The year after Vickey disappeared, her relatives started Missing Children Center, a service that provides emotional support to families of missing children throughout the United States and Canada, in addition to making about 4,000 posters a month, distributing them in restaurants, day-care centers and other places where the child might be seen, she said.

“The DNA testing was very important to us because now instead of continuing to look for Vickey, we can start trying to find out what happened to her and who killed her,” Wills said.