Chapter 12

Transcript of “The Farley Files Podcast Season Two:

Dead Man’s Hollow—The Disappearance of Heather Ryan”

Episode 1: Who Was Heather Ryan?

Late on the evening of May 27th, 1994, a group of high schoolers gathered in what is now known as Dead Man’s Hollow, but was then abandoned woodlands. It was a muggy, humid night, but they didn’t mind the oppressive weather. They were there to celebrate the start of the Memorial Day weekend and the fast-approaching end of the academic year. They danced, drank, and hooked up—blowing off steam.

Most, but not all, of the assembled teenagers attended the nearby high school, which was just twenty minutes down the road. One of the partygoers was Heather Ryan, then age sixteen and a high school sophomore. Her older sister Amy, eighteen and a graduating senior, was also there. The sisters had arrived together but eventually went their separate ways in the woods.

Shortly after midnight, the police arrived to break up the party, and the students scattered. Amy searched the woods for Heather, so they could leave together, but she couldn’t find her younger sister that night. In fact, as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of Heather Ryan’s disappearance, she’s still missing.

What happened to Heather Ryan that night in Dead Man’s Hollow?

Someone knows and isn’t saying.

I’m Maisy Farley, former investigative reporter and host of The Farley Files, and this season on the podcast we’ll be looking for answers to the disappearance of Heather Ryan.

Today I’m talking to Diana Ryan, one of Heather’s sisters. At the time of Heather’s disappearance, Diana was a twenty-year-old business administration student finishing up her sophomore year of college. Today, she still lives in the Pittsburgh area where she provides human resources consulting services nationwide for a large manufacturing company. She’s the divorced mother of two young adult children, and she’s never stopped wondering what happened to her sister.

DIANA: We were a typical middle-class family. Our mom worked at the dentist’s office as a receptionist. Dad was a carpet installer. We went to church, took a vacation to the Jersey Shore every summer, and lived an ordinary, maybe even boring, suburban life.

That all changed when Heather Ryan disappeared.

MAISY: There were four of you? Four girls?

DIANA: Right. Dad was completely outnumbered (laughs). I’m the oldest. Amy is two years younger than me. Heather was two years?—

MAISY: Was?

DIANA: Oh. Yeah. I guess accepted, well, I’ve accepted that no matter what we learn now, there’s no chance Heather’s coming back.

MAISY: No chance? Do you really believe that?

DIANA: It’s exceedingly unlikely.

MAISY: You were telling me about the birth order.

DIANA: Heather’s two years younger than Amy. So the three of us are all spaced two years apart. Good, Catholic spacing Mom used to call it. And then there’s eight years between Heather and Kristy, the youngest. Kristy was what they used to call a change-of-life baby. I mean, I was twelve when she was born.

MAISY: Were you girls close?

DIANA: Amy and I were. Still are. And Heather and Amy were. Amy was close in age to both of us, you know? It was easy for her to relate to me and to Heather.

MAISY: But you and Heather weren’t as close?

DIANA: When we were little, sure. But we kind of grew apart as we got older. Four years isn’t that big of a gap, but when you reach the teenage years, it feels like it is. You know?

MAISY: Sure.

DIANA: And then Kristy was sort of separate. She was so much younger. We all viewed her almost like an only child, not the baby.

MAISY: Does that mean you considered Heather the baby?

DIANA: Yeah, I did. For a long time, she was the baby. And she had that youngest child personality.

MAISY: What personality is that? Spoiled?

DIANA: I wouldn’t say that. But she was indulged, and she tested the boundaries. She pushed back against our parents in ways that Amy and I never did.

MAISY: Pushed back how? Can you give an example?

DIANA: Just typical teenage stuff. That night in the woods, for instance. Underage drinking, trespassing.

MAISY: Okay, but Amy was there, too. So she was also testing the limits, right?

DIANA (sighing): Amy didn’t even want to go. My semester had ended, and I was already home for the summer. Amy and I were planning to go see Four Weddings and a Funeral. She thought Hugh Grant was so cute. But Heather begged her to go to Dead Man’s Hollow instead. She wanted Amy to drive so she could drink, and she knew if Amy drove, she’d stay sober. That’s the sort of thing Heather did. She was on the wild side, but she wasn’t reckless. I mean, she lined up a designated driver for crying out loud.

MAISY: What happened when Amy came home without Heather?

DIANA: I’d gone out with some friends, so I wasn’t there.

But I guess Amy went to bed. She didn’t tell our parents right away.

MAISY: Why not?

DIANA: For one thing, our parents and Kristy were asleep. For another, at that point, she assumed Heather had taken off when the police showed up. She figured Heather ran and would get a ride home from a friend or something. So why wake up our mom and dad and get Heather in trouble over nothing?

Only it wasn’t nothing. The next morning, Amy woke up and checked Heather’s room. It was empty, and the bed hadn’t been slept in. She woke her older sister and told her Heather never came home.

DIANA: Amy and I shared a bedroom when I was home from school. She came back in, shook me awake, and told me what happened. But, that morning, I remember thinking she’d turn up.

MAISY: So you weren’t worried?

DIANA: Not really. I figured she’d had too much to drink and was sleeping it off somewhere or that she’d spent the night at a friend’s house. But we knew she was going to be in trouble with our parents for not at least calling. They were still asleep, so Amy started calling Heather’s friends, looking for her. Nobody knew where she was. Then our parents woke up.

MAISY: And you told them?

DIANA: No. Mom made a big breakfast, French toast, sausage patties, orange juice. When the food was ready, she sent Kristy upstairs to tell Heather to get out of bed already. Kristy came back down and said Heather wasn’t in her room. Before Amy could explain, the doorbell rang. I remember thinking it must be Heather, thinking maybe she’d lost her keys in the hollow. But it was Rich.

Rich Marino and Amy are now married and have been for over twenty years. At the time of Heather’s disappearance, Amy and Rich were just friends, classmates. Rich was also at the party in Dead Man’s Hollow. You’ll hear from Amy and Rich Marino later this season.

MAISY: Why did Rich come to your house?

DIANA: When Amy was looking for Heather, after the police showed up, she ran into Rich. His older brother was on the force, so I guess he knew he wouldn’t get picked up or arrested if he was still in the woods. So he told her to go home and promised to look for Heather. He came over on Saturday morning to tell Amy he hadn’t been able to find her and to see if she’d come home.

MAISY: Why not just call?

DIANA: I don’t know. You’d have to ask Rich. If I had to guess, it was an excuse to see Amy. He had a girlfriend, but everybody knew that relationship had just about run its course. I guess he saw an in with Amy. (Pause.) I don’t mean that the way it sounded. I don’t think it was calculated like that.

MAISY: Of course not. So, he wasn’t worried about Heather either?

DIANA: You have to understand, things were different then.

Diana’s right. It may be hard for younger listeners to imagine now, but in the mid-90s, children weren’t supervised the way they are today. That goes double for teenagers. A sixteen-year-old staying out all night after a party, would certainly be in trouble when she returned home, would probably get grounded. But her absence would be unlikely to cause a panic the way it would now.

MAISY: Did Rich have any information?

DIANA: No. He did say Jimmy would put the word out on the police force and ask everyone to keep an eye out for her—unofficially.

MAISY: But your parents didn’t file a police report, and there was no missing child alert sent out, right?

DIANA: Right. Not then. But that afternoon, our whole family drove over to Dead Man’s Hollow to look for Heather. I don’t know why, to be honest. It was obvious she wouldn’t still be there. I guess we just wanted to do something.

MAISY: Did you find anything?

DIANA: What you’d expect. The fire circles, lots of empty bottles and cans, cigarette butts, junk food wrappers. It was clear there’d been a party, but none of the litter suggested anything bad had happened in the woods (voice breaking).

MAISY: Do you think something bad happened in the woods?

DIANA: Don’t you? It’s been thirty years and no one’s seen my sister. Something happened to her that night.

MAISY: At some point law enforcement was officially notified. Do you know when that happened?

DIANA: I think my dad called the police on Sunday morning when she still hadn’t turned up. I know they sent the dogs out into the woods on Memorial Day. And the FBI showed up at our house the day after that. By then, by Tuesday, she’d been missing for more than seventy-two hours.

MAISY: How did Heather’s disappearance affect your family?

DIANA: About how you’d expect. It destroyed my parents. The first weeks were sheer hell—waiting, holding our breath every time the phone rang, and plastering the telephone poles and bulletin boards all over town with her picture. Amy and Kristy couldn’t focus in school. But at least we had hope then. We still thought then she’d come back. She’d give some lame explanation, get grounded, and we’d all move on with our lives.

MAISY: But she didn’t. When did the reality set in that she wasn’t coming back?

DIANA: I’m not sure it ever really did, not fully. But by the end of July, when we still had no leads, no sighting, nothing, things got bad. Our dad withdrew, started working a lot of overtime and going to the bar with his friends most nights, and mom … today she’d be diagnosed as clinically depressed, but back then she just went into her bedroom and basically didn’t come back out. She quit her job and stopped taking care of Kristy. She didn’t cook. She didn’t clean. She just sat in her room, crying and smoking.

I was about to go back to school for my junior year and Amy was getting ready for her freshman year. Dad sat us down at the beginning of August and told us one of us needed to stay back to help mom. Amy offered to right away, but I said no. She had to go, and I’d stay. I was afraid if she didn’t start her freshman year she’d never go. But I could take a leave of absence for a year until things got back to normal (bitter laugh). So that’s what we did. Dad didn’t even go with me and Kristy to drop Amy off at college. He stayed home with Mom in case Heather showed up.

MAISY: And you lived at home that whole next year?

DIANA: Right. In the autumn of 1995, she’d been missing for fifteen months, and I did go back to school. By then Kristy was ten, and she was better able to take care of herself. Amy, Heather, and I, we all started staying home alone when we were ten. Besides, Mom still hadn’t gone back to work, so Kristy wasn’t going to be alone, anyway.

But I guess after I left Mom focused all her anxiety on Kristy. She was basically a prisoner in that house until she graduated and moved out of the house. They were paranoid because of what happened with Heather, and they smothered Kristy as a result. Not that I blame them. They lost their daughter. We lost our sister. It changed everything.

MAISY: Do you have a message for listeners who might know something about what happened that night in Dead Man’s Hollow?

DIANA (voice shaking): Our parents died last year. First Mom, and then two months later, Dad. Until the day they died, they never stopped waiting for Heather to walk through the door. They wouldn’t move to a smaller house because they were afraid she’d find her way home and they’d be gone. They never changed their phone number. They never took another vacation. I’m not sure if they even went out to dinner again or went to a movie theater. They just … waited. Their pain is in the past now, but Heather has sisters, nieces, and nephews. We still love her and care about her. So no matter what happened, we want to know. We need to know.

(Outro music.)

Okay, listeners. You heard Diana. Someone out there knows what happened that night in the woods. Maybe you think it’s an unimportant detail, maybe it’s even something you shared with the police thirty years ago, but nothing ever came of it. The police have given me access to the cold case file. We’re reopening it and want to hear any leads you can share. Anything at all. My producer Jordana and I promise to follow up on every tip and run down every piece of information to figure out what happened to Heather Ryan.

Next week on Dead Man’s Hollow, the disappearance of Heather Ryan, we’ll be talking to the youngest Ryan sister, Kristy Ryan Kaminski.

Until then, be good to each other and to yourselves. This is Maisy Farley for The Farley Files.