Since the disappearance of her daughter more than 25 years ago, Mary Lyall has been dedicated to finding answers – for not only herself, but for the families of missing people across the country.
Lyall, along with her late husband Doug, is the co-founder of the Center for Hope, established following the 1998 disappearance of their daughter, Suzanne, a student last seen on the University at Albany campus.
On Saturday, Lyall will host the Center for Hope’s annual Missing Persons Day at the New York State Museum in Albany. It will be her last year hosting the event, but she does not plan to step away completely.
WAMC’s Lucas Willard spoke with Mary about the event and her nationally recognized advocacy.
When our daughter first went missing, and we, you know, seeked out the police. We seeked out the media. We tried everything. There weren't that many, now, this is 28 years ago, there weren't that many organizations that could help us to locate Suzy. And so, what we wound up doing in the interim, we said ‘We need to help other people, because they're going to have missing people also, and they're going to be looking for a organization or somebody that could help them.’
The National Center for Missing Children at the time, which was pretty much in its infancy, only took children up to the age of your 18th birthday. So, the day you turned 18, you were no longer considered a missing child. Suzy was 19. She is so there's that gray group between somebody who leaves high school and decides to venture out on their own, and, you know, they go missing. So, what we wound up doing is seeking out, actually Criminal Justice at the time, and we started talking to them about this and they thought that probably changing that rule with the National Center for Missing Children might be a way of doing something to help that 18-to-21 year old group that goes off to college, goes to services, whatever they do, and so that's how we started, really kind of began.
We needed to get the age changed, which we did. It was a New York State law for a few, about a year or so, but then it became a federal law. And once it became a federal law, the National Center had to start taking people who were who had gone missing in that age group, they had to be grandfathered into the system. So, that was really, quite a big star on our shoulders that we got that to happen. So, that was one of the things that we decided to do. The other thing that we also needed to do was to see why the campus was so hard to locate…Albany campus was so hard to help us out with a missing person.
They really…they only had one before that I know of. It was Karen Wilson, which they never found. And then they have Suzanne. And if you went around that campus at night, it was dark, people walking by themselves. We were really concerned about that, so we decided that the blue lights needed to be put in. And also, some kind of a, I think at the time, they did a bicycle, you know, security officers riding around on bikes, and tried to tell the students, ‘You can't walk alone.’ I mean, we tried all these different things to make it safer for other people. And about that time, we decided that we found out how many other people that were missing. It just, incredible amounts of people. We decided that we needed to bring these people together so that we could become a unit and help out other people.
When you started to get those responses, and other people that either you contacted or began reaching out, what was that feeling like? And did it feel a lot different all of a sudden?
In a way we were a little overwhelmed. We were getting telephone calls from all, you're right, all over the country, and it was very overwhelming, and we decided that, at that point, there needed to be a place where people could come together and talk with each other and find out we're not alone. We're not the only people that had a missing family member. And not only children, because children got more services at the time, the adult population. It's amazing how many adults go missing, and the response sometimes from the media was, ‘These people go missing because they want to go missing,’ not because they walked out one day and either were abducted or got lost because of, you know, different like dementia, or, you know, brain issues that you know they just didn't know how to get back home again, or they wound up going somewhere and then eventually dying, or there was an accident and sometimes, when a car in an accident goes over a bank, all you get is the underneath part of the car. It kind of blends in with, you know, the whatever.
And so here are all these people that had gone missing, and all these families are coming forward and saying, ‘I have a missing person in my family.’ And Doug, and I always felt like these people were not just, you know, adults or whatever. They were somebody's child. So, we refer to it as, you know, that's my child. No matter how old you are, you still were somebody's child. And so that's why we felt like we needed to start this Missing Persons Day, and it's just grown from there. We did have the two years or so when we couldn't do it because of the pandemic, all that sort of thing. But it's up to 25 years of running this organization. And 25 years is a lifetime for some people.
So, coming up on April 18 is Missing Persons Day. And can you tell me about your role? And obviously this is something that you created, but you've been doing this for 25 years, and what's the decision that you had to come to when looking at the future of the occasion?
Well, my decision now that my husband is deceased and not having the help that I was getting in the beginning. You know, everybody wanted to come forward and help, and that's great, but people are getting older. I'm getting older and I decided that I needed help, and seeked out some help through Russell Sage College, and also Russell Sage, in turn, seeks out help through the Division of Criminal Justice, who was always a part of it, but I never really, you know…they were helpful, but…that’s where we were, and they've always kind of wanted to take it over. But I'm not giving it up. I can't give it up because until I leave this earth, I want to find out what happened to my daughter.
So, I will keep doing this, and I will keep being part of it. I was the, my husband. I refer to each other as co-founders of the Center for Hope. We always had Missing Persons Day at around Suzanne's birthday, which was April the 6th. This year it had to get pushed a little further back, but I'm letting them do a little bit more than I could do for myself. And what I tell people when they say, ‘Why are you keep doing this?’ I said, ‘Well, you know, it's like planning a wedding every year,’ because you need all these different things to come together. You know, food, people, invitations, music, a place to have it. You know, just planning a wedding, and it's…who plans weddings every year?
Well, you pushed forward when your husband died a little more than 10 years ago, and kept the event going. So, I understand that you will be involved in some way for as long as you can. But what do you hope happens with the event in the future?
I hope that it'll keep going even after I'm not here, but I really want it to continue to educate people about how they can find or help to find their missing person. Over the years, there have been a number of people that have been located, unfortunately deceased, but you know, I just still need…that in my life. Because, you know, like I said, my husband was the one who really brought this up and said, ‘We really need to do something for people.’ He was a counselor, so it was easy for him to figure that all out, and it was good, because we've talked to people who really were so grateful to have something like this to look forward to, or grateful that they didn't know at the time what they could do to locate their missing person.
So, I really feel like having a non for profit, because I'm the non for profit. Division of Criminal Justice is not the not for profit, so they have to still rely on me a little bit in order to keep moving forward. I don't want to give it up completely. I can't, because it was our baby, basically. And the more that I continue to work on my Missing Persons Day issues, the more it keeps Suzanne's name out there in the public. And this is one of the things I've always impressed on people, ‘You can't give up.’ And a lot of people do after a while, they just say it's not going to happen, but it does happen. There was a girl just recently, 31 years missing, who comes forward after being missing for 31 years with couple of children and a family. She just took off one day, and you know, never made any contact with any of her family members. So, it happens. I'm not saying it's going to happen to me, but I'm hoping that it'll happen for other people.
Well, Mary, again, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Yes. Thank you for having me.
