Sharon M. emailed me and asked me to run Edyth Warner or her son Nicholas Smith for Select It Sunday. They both disappeared at the same time and since last week’s SIS was a male and I try to alternate genders each week, I’m going to do Edyth.
Edyth a student at New Mexico State University, studying art, when she and her son disappeared without a trace in 1991. (Sharon M. was also a student at NMSU at the same time, but didn’t personally know Edyth or her family.) Her focus was working with metal, in particular jewelry-making. She lived with Nicholas and her husband, Henry, and her other son in housing for married students. Nicholas was her son by a prior relationship; the younger boy was Henry and Edyth’s child.
Henry (more about him later) didn’t help by not reporting his wife and stepson’s disappearances for two weeks — he claims the NMSU police refused to accept a report sooner. Maybe they didn’t. That sounds depressingly believable to me. But if Edyth really did take $11,000 worth of cash and gold coins when she disappeared, the delay in reporting would be understandable.
That is, IF that’s what happened.
And there’s a lot of suspicion now about Edyth’s husband. They were in the process of a divorce in 1991, and after Edyth and Nicholas disappeared, Henry divorced Edyth in absentia and wouldn’t let Edyth’s parents have any contact with their other grandson. But there’s no hard evidence to implicate him that I know of.
Another indication that Edyth didn’t leave on her own: there were no requests for Nicholas’s school to forward his records on somewhere else. That’s pretty telling.
Edyth’s younger son would now be grown up. I hope he’s been in touch with his maternal grandparents by now.
The Charley Project Blog 