July 27, 2006 MADISON, Ind. (Crime Library) — It's been more than two years now since she vanished, this fresh-scrubbed young woman who by all accounts excelled at almost everything she tried and who, according to those who knew her, tried her hardest to help others excel as well. And yet, despite all the disappointments, all the false sightings and bum leads, neither the authorities nor her family are willing to give up hope that someday they will find out what became of Molly Datillo.
There is of course, no longer any real hope that Datillo, who was just 23 when she disappeared after leaving her brother's Indianapolis apartment on a warm July night in 2004, will come home alive. Her family knows it. And even though her disappearance officially remains a missing person case, the cops say they know it too. Nor is there any question in her relatives' minds that the young woman, who just a few months before her death told her mother that she "really didn't think there were evil people in the world," found out that she was wrong.
All are convinced that Molly was the victim of foul play. But there is the hope that, even now, years after she vanished, there will come a day when the family can at least have the cold comfort of knowing how she met her end and with whom. From the beginning family members feared the worst Today, little more is known about Molly Dattilo's disappearance than was known when she first vanished, said Capt. Randal Taylor of the Marion County Sheriff's Department, the agency charged with investigating the case. And that is precious little.
Authorities say the young woman, generally regarded as a gifted athlete and an aspiring singer, had completed her term at Eastern Kentucky University a few weeks earlier and had decided to move in with her brother and attend summer school at Indiana State University. Among other things, she was taking voice classes as part of her dream to one day break into show business.
On July 6, 2004, after spending the day in classes, the young woman, known as much for her down-to-earth determination as for her sunny disposition, told her brother she planned to head out to a local Wendy's restaurant to fill out an application. That was hardly surprising for a young woman who had grown up with a sense of responsibility and purpose, her family members say, that can only be learned in a household with nine children that always seemed to be trying to make frayed ends meet.
It was 7:30 p.m. when she walked out of her brother's apartment, authorities have said, leaving her cell phone and her bank card behind. That was the last time anyone saw her. Family members have complained that authorities in Indianapolis were at first slow to respond to the reports of her disappearance.
Law enforcement has limited options and authority in the hours immediately after an adult vanishes. Experience also teaches police that people who go missing often turn up on their own. And if they don't, it's often because they don't want to be found. In all likelihood, authorities in Indianapolis did not immediately sense the urgency in Molly Dattilo's case.
But family members, who knew full well of Molly's open, accommodating and naïve manner, and who also knew of her firm devotion to her siblings, her mother, and her aging father, knew that Molly would never simply walk away. Almost immediately, family members say, they sensed that something horrible had happened to the baby of the family.
A girl who never ran away from anything
From her earliest years, Molly was a "mommy's girl," her older sister, Celestra Hoffman, told Crime Library. And in her entire life, she never ran away from anything. On the contrary, if there was a challenge in her life, Hoffman said, Molly ran straight toward it. The youngest of the nine children, she was always surrounded by a protective cordon of loving relatives. And yet, despite her status as the baby of the close-knit brood, Molly never took anything for granted, and was forever challenging herself.
That became evident when she was in high school. A gifted runner who excelled in track and field— she would later go on to win an athletic scholarship to Eastern Kentucky — Datillo wanted to keep in shape during the off season by swimming. But the school's swim coach tried to dissuade the diminutive Molly, telling her that she lacked the stamina and physique to compete. "What they told her is that she didn't have the body type for doing the butterfly stroke," Hoffman said. Molly made it her mission to prove the coach wrong. "She wanted to defy all the negatives," Hoffman said. And in the end, she did, winning the admiration of her coach and a spot on the team swimming the butterfly stroke.
A few years later, Molly, a naturally pretty girl who always favored moisturizers and skin cleansers over makeup and thought other girls' preoccupation with such things as hair and clothes was frivolous, a young woman whose notion of a perfect hair-do was one that kept her hair out of her eyes while she was on the track, disregarded Hoffman's admonitions and entered a couple of beauty pageants. "I think she did it for fun," said Tara Warner, another of Molly's sisters.
But there is little question that she also entered the pageants because she had been told it was something she could not expect to succeed at. In fact, her open manner and easy-going charm made her a formidable competitor. In one of the pageants, Hoffman recalled, Molly wowed the judges, not with her poise and bearing but with her strikingly honest answer to a seemingly innocuous question. "She had not a lick of talent for beauty pageants whatsoever, "Hoffman recalled. "I mean she was who she was." Most of all, she was a child of tough times who had developed a Hoosier practicality. And so, when the contestants were asked what they would do with $20, Molly listened patiently as the other contenders explained how they would somehow use the price of a dinner for four at McDonald's to purchase world peace.
When it came time for Molly to respond to the question, she recalled how just before she left for the pageant, her mother had expressed concern that the household supply of paper products was running precariously low. So instead of promising to fund a college education for starving Third World children, Molly said "I'd buy my mom some toilet paper — she needed some," Hoffman recalled. "And the crowd was just roaring. "Some would say that she was making fun of us," Hoffman said. "No...unlike all those other girls, she was honestly telling them what she would be doing with that money. And she won Miss Congeniality."
Family fears her own kindness was her undoing
While she showed no sign of pretentiousness in her own life, she did love the idea of show business. She loved to sing, and dreamed that one day she might get a chance to appear on the hit television show "American Idol," Hoffman recalled. While that might be an idle daydream for most, Molly saw it as one more opportunity to once again prove herself, and as with everything else in her life, she threw herself into the pursuit of that dream with a passion. That was one of the things that brought her to Indianapolis that summer: the chance to study and work on her voice. There also was the fact that the young woman who was so attached to her family could spend the summer with one of her older brothers.
But her family now fears that her belief in the essential goodness of others, and her willingness to help others, the poor, the dejected, even sometimes the athletes she competed against — in short, her kindness and naivite — may have made her vulnerable in that city. The authorities have never found a real crime scene in the Molly Dattilo case, no pool of blood on a back stairway someplace, no errant hair in the trunk of some randomly stopped car, and in the absence of any hard evidence, authorities have no choice but to deal with the matter as a missing person case.
That doesn't mean that the police have not aggressively investigated it, Taylor told Crime Library. In the days after her disappearance, as they probed deeper into her background, police also came to suspect that the young woman would never have simply run away, and that something horrible had happened to her. They questioned former boyfriends and acquaintances, Taylor said, "but nothing tipped the scale" or led police to label any of them as a "person of interest."
They've tracked down an array of leads, possible sightings and tips, all with the same result: nothing. They've even met with psychics. Some four dozen of them have offered their services to the family, and several claimed to have been certain that Molly had been abducted, raped and murdered, most likely, at least some of the psychics believe, by a stranger, a predator who had stalked the young woman. But for all their certainty, none of the psychics yet interviewed by police has been able to provide enough specific detail to be of much help. "They're very general statements that don't point you to a specific area," Taylor said. "Most of what they say [refer to] any place in Indianapolis...It has turned up that we've found a few animal bones, but nothing else."
Family just wants to "give her...a big ol' funeral"
But at least one of the psychics has brought a measure of comfort to Molly's family, which was again shaken by loss late last year when Molly's father, Fred Dattilo, died after a long illness. "A psychic said that Molly and my father are having a good time together," said Tara Warner, another of Molly's sisters. And while a psychic's final prediction that Molly's body would be recovered by this September, remains as yet unproved, neither the police nor Molly's family are willing to give up.
A $100,000 reward for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for Molly's disappearance is still being offered by an anonymous donor, and the sheriff's department continues to solicit tips on the case through its tip line at (317) 231-8702. For their part, Molly's siblings and her mother are hoping for that elusive sense of closure. "It would be so nice to find her body and bury her properly, to give her a big ol' funeral," Warner said.
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