Emma Tresp had always called her nine children on their birthdays. So on Sept. 5, 1998, her daughter Lisa was waiting for her birthday call. It never came.

A week earlier, Emma had left Lisa's house in Stillwater, Okla., on her way to a spiritual retreat at a monastery in Pecos.

Emma, then 71, was devoted to her family and her Catholic faith. She also loved to travel. Her children were used to their gray-haired, bespectacled mother's solitary driving excursions across the country. She threatened to disown any of her children who tried to take away her car keys.

"We didn't insist she call us every day," said Nancy Tresp, another of Emma's daughters. "Maybe we should have."

When she didn't hear from her mother, Lisa called her sister Rose, a nun. Rose called the monastery. Emma had never checked in.

A week later, her 1997 Honda Civic was found, stuck on a rough, rock-strewn dirt road near Glorieta Baldy peak, nine miles off the highway. But Emma had vanished.


Emma Tresp was born Nov. 25, 1926, in Dallas. She had traveling in her blood — before Emma's birth, her mother had immigrated to the U.S. from Germany.

In 1948, she "married adventure," when attorney Joseph Tresp became her husband, their son, Leo Tresp, said. The couple took their children on camping trips around the South, the large family crowding the tent so much that Emma sometimes slept in the car.

Once the children were grown, the couple traveled more — to Rome, Israel, elsewhere in the U.S. When Joseph died in 1985, Emma kept traveling. She took three of her unruly grandsons on a trip to Washington, D.C., camping in tents along the way; they still remember the trip now as adults. On a whim, she would call one of her daughters to see if they could drive together to visit family.

But she wouldn't caravan with family. She claimed everyone else drove too slowly.

Her family described her as small, but fierce.

After Emma retired as a nursing home inspector for the state of Arkansas, she studied German and took writing classes at a college in Little Rock, where she lived. She was active in the Daffodil Garden Club, loved to dance, campaigned for Mike Huckabee in his early political races in Arkansas. As her family grew larger with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she tried to make every birth, recital, graduation and marriage.

Emma kept traveling — to China, New Zealand, Egypt, Canada and Alaska. In 1998, the year she disappeared, she visited Ecuador and Machu Picchu in Peru. "She did more in a year then I've done in my life," said her grandson, John Robert McAnally III, a geneticist.

She was mentally sharp, but geographically challenged, her family said. "She'd get lost a lot," said daughter Suzy Tresp. "She said she'd drive around until she saw something familiar. Then she would be fine."


Emma's last road trip began in Little Rock in August. She visited with her daughter Lisa in Stillwater, then left the morning of Aug. 28, intending to drive all the way to Pecos that day. She reached Santa Rosa and bought gas there with a credit card at 3:01 p.m.

An open map lay on the passenger seat next to her, and she may have checked it, looking for N.M. 63, the paved road that passes through the tiny town of Pecos and heads north to the Pecos Benedictine Monastery along the Pecos River. She had not been there for a while.

Emma had two ways to reach the road off Interstate 25. On either route, she could have been easily confused by signs for County Road 63A, the dirt road she ended up on. Some members of her family speculate she might have visited the county road during an earlier trip, perhaps to watch a sunset from high in the mountains. But on this trip, Nancy said, she thinks her mother didn't intend to end up on that road.

County Road 63A veers north off the highway between Glorieta and Pecos. Emma likely turned onto it around 5 p.m., maybe a little later. She drove past a few scattered houses in an area called La Cueva, possibly thinking something familiar would appear. All signs of houses soon dropped away. The road became rougher, curving, dipping, climbing steeply and finally narrowing to one lane. The land on one side dropped away steeply into a canyon. Then the lane turned into Forest Road 375, but it might not have been marked.

After nine miles, Emma stopped the car and attempted to back up. The rear end lodged against a dirt embankment and got stuck on a large rock. She couldn't move the car.

Her cell phone didn't get reception in that remote location. So police believe Emma, practical minded, picked up her purse, locked the car and began walking back the way she had come.


Why Emma didn't turn around sooner still baffles her children. A decade ago, the road was so bad, the family had to rent four-wheel-drive, high-clearance vehicles to get into the place where Emma's car was found. They can't imagine how she drove her small Honda so far up the road.

When the family found out Emma had not checked into the monastery, they immediately flew to New Mexico from their homes in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Virginia. They alerted state police. They called hospitals in case their mom had been in an accident and suffered amnesia. They made flyers with a picture of their tough, green-eyed, 5-foot-6-inch mother on the front and handed them out to anyone who would take one. They drove up and down looking in ditches and arroyos along N.M. 63 and nearby roads, thinking she might have driven off the road. Local television and radio stations ran announcements of Emma's disappearance. The family filed a missing person report Sept. 8.

Nothing.

Then a Ribera resident who had been camping in the area saw one of the flyers and reported finding a car stuck on Forest Road 375. It was Sept. 13, almost two weeks since Emma should have arrived at the monastery.

The family tried not to think the worst. "We knew the area had bears and drug dealers," said Emma's grandson, John.

State police found the car undamaged except for the dented bumper. No tracks were visible around the car. Nothing indicated she had been kidnapped, said Frank Jacoby, who at the time of Emma's disappearance was the state police investigator handling the case. In the car was a blanket, a metal thermos, books, a six-pack of unopened Diet Sprite, a hat, a cookie and about $2 in change. In the trunk was a travel bag with her clothes still neatly folded inside.

There was no sign anyone else had been in the car. It was in good shape, indicating the person driving it took great care going over the rough road. No one had used her credit card.

At one point, more than 200 searchers combed the steep, densely forested terrain on foot and on horseback searching for Emma, aided by cadaver-sniffing dogs and an Army National Guard helicopter.

Still no trace of Emma.

Her children made an appearance on The Today Show pleading for any information about their mother. America's Most Wanted featured a brief segment on her disappearance the following spring.

The family hired a Santa Fe private detective who scoured the area on horseback looking for clues. They consulted a map dowser, who used a stick to pinpoint a missing person's location, the way a water dowser uses it over ground to find water. They paid four psychics. Each told the family something different. But nothing led to Emma.

"I didn't accept for five years that she was dead," Suzy said recently as she sat on a couch in the darkened lobby of the Pecos Benedictine Monastery. "For four years, I couldn't even talk about it." She lifted her glasses, her face rounded like her mother's, and wiped away tears.


Frank Jacoby has searched for a number of missing people. They were usually found: a runaway teen or an adult who didn't want to be found. Sometimes, though, all that was left were remains. Emma's case was the first one he handled where all leads went nowhere.

When he met with the Tresp family, he was immediately struck by their unity, their determination and their graciousness. He looked at Emma's picture and understood their grief. "Everyone has a mother and a grandmother," said Jacoby, who now works for the Santa Fe District Attorney's Office.

Even on his days off, Jacoby and his wife, Sharon, would walk or drive the canyons near their Glorieta home looking for any sign of Emma. "It bothered me tremendously," he said. "When you are an investigator, you want to solve your cases. ... You want to find the truth."

He said he wasn't unique. A number of law enforcement officers continue to work on their cases on their days off.

Jacoby drove out recently to the spot where Emma's car was found and visited briefly with her family, who had flown out for a reunion to remember her. He holds out hope that woodcutters in the area might come across her remains. "Depending on how far she walked and which direction she took, Emma might still be out there."

He imagines her walking along the road among the dense trees. It would have been a rough road even for a healthy elderly lady in tennis shoes. As it became dark, he imagines, she might have turned around and headed back to the car, planning to spend the night. At that point, she could easily have taken a wrong turnoff, ending up deeper in the forest.

Jacoby retired from the state police last year. "The hardest thing for me to do was retire and not have solved this case," he said.

He has other reasons to empathize with the Tresps. Not long after Emma vanished, one of his sons died. Last year, his wife died from cancer. Both times, Nancy, the family's representative, sent condolences. In his own grief, Jacoby understands: "They need closure."


The Tresp family built a makeshift memorial to Emma at the spot where her Honda Civic was found. They hung the missing person poster with her picture there on a tree. Lisa made a wooden cross. A stone angel watches over the spot. Emma's only son, Leo, kept the car.

For a long time, they hoped that by some miracle she was still alive. "She was on prayer lists all over," Leo said.

The family tried to keep the case in the public eye. They posted her picture in local post offices and grocery stores almost every year, asking for information from anyone who might have seen her. In 2000, they bought space on a billboard requesting people keep looking for Emma. "It's painful not to know,'' Nancy said at the time.

They wavered between wanting desperately to find her and a deep fear of finding out how she died.

It was seven years before they held a public memorial for friends and family to celebrate her life. "It reopened the wound," Leo said.

They turned to spouses, friends and each other to get through the dark moments. "I don't know what I would have done without my brother and sisters," Lisa said.

On Aug. 1, almost a decade since she disappeared, most of Emma's children and a few of her 12 grandchildren, gathered to remember her at the memorial on Forest Road 375. Later, they sat in the lobby at the Pecos monastery and talked about life without her.

They miss talking to her on the phone about little everyday things. They miss her comforting words. "I missed being able to know her," said Joseph Tresp, 12, one of her grandchildren.

Like the families of soldiers missing in action or the parents of children who disappear without a trace, the Tresps are haunted by unanswered questions. They cannot bury Emma — physically or mentally. They hold onto hope that someday, somehow, they'll know what happened.

For now, the family takes comfort in believing she was granted a wish she wrote about in her diary — after she died, God would show her the universe.

Contact Staci Matlock at 470-9843 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.