Dana Becker would never just up and leave her children. Never. Ten years after her disappearance, the mystery remains and a family’s painful search goes on.

Dana Becker is small. That’s the first thing you learn, and you hear it repeatedly. Eighty-two, 90 pounds max. Five-foot-one. Small, and fragile.

The second thing you learn is that she is kind. And that she doesn’t always make the best decisions; self-destructive, for sure. But kind. And so, so proud to be a mother.

Dana, who has also used the last names Mays, Griffin, Harcourt and Thompson, loves her family, especially her three children. Loves them so much that there’s no way she would neglect to call them, visit them, keep in touch. No way she would just... vanish.

Dana Becker is missing. It will be ten years in July.

Dana is one of thousands who are reported missing in the Phoenix area each year. Some are kids. Some are adults. Many are runaways and don’t want to be found. A few cases become high-profile, but most don’t. Most people have never heard of Dana Elaine Becker.

Dana was last seen near 67th Avenue and Indian School Road in Phoenix. She told her grandmother she was going to the store, and she never came back. That was July 17, 2000.

“She didn’t know anybody,” recalls Dana’s sister Dawn Hudson. “My grandma called me, said she didn’t come home all night, and she didn’t know anybody, because she’d lived in Texas for—what? Like 18, I think?—for about 18 years, so I filed a missing-persons report and took her picture down there, and I made flyers. From day one I’ve been looking. That’s all I do.”

This is how Dawn talks about her big sister and about the past ten years she’s spent searching for her. Information comes in bursts. Seemingly unrelated bits are strung together in a curiously coherent fashion. Dawn’s story meanders and comes repeatedly back to certain points: her sister’s diminutive size, Dana’s children and the close relationship Dawn shared with Dana.

It came out, eventually, that Dana had been using crack. She’d been hanging out with drug users, and morphing into a person her family had trouble recognizing.

“I flew out to Texas the Christmas before she went missing, and that’s when I found out she was using crack. And then when she came to visit me (in July of 2000) she was just bad, bad, bad. I said I’d take her to rehab. I’d go with her,” Dawn said.

Dana, who lived in Texas, was visiting Dawn in Phoenix, after which she planned to drive to Nevada to pick up her daughters, who were visiting family.

Shortly before her disappearance, the sisters had a fight about Dana’s drug use, and Dana left Dawn’s apartment. Police found her on 32nd Street and McDowell, covered in ants and dirt, and picked her up. Dawn decided to let her stay in jail for four days before putting up the $500 to bail her out. She then had her maternal grandmother pick her up, the last person she would see before vanishing.

While all of the information surrounding her disappearance is crucial, none of it is as important as, well, Dana. Dawn says she wants people to care, and for that, they have to know Dana, at least a little.

“I’m all she has, all she knows out here,” Dawn says. “Basically, I look – like where all the people go to look for crack; I walk and look, and once a lady came out with a shotgun when I went to show her the flyer. I’ve been through a lot, and it’s like I’m the only one. I really don’t have anybody here.”

Anyone who has never lost a loved one in this way can’t possibly understand. Dana isn’t even “lost” in the usual terrible sense of the word. She may be lost for good. She may be out there still. Perhaps, however, the desperate stream-of-consciousness style of Dawn’s story gives a brief glimpse into what it must be like. What information is important, and what’s trivial? What do you share? What do you ask? Where do you start? When do you stop?

“Never. I’ll never stop,” Dawn says.

She spends a great deal of time taking information in. She spends hours online searching “Dana Elaine Becker,” commenting on missing-persons crime blogs and searching unknown-remains cases. She checks in with detectives, even when she must know they have nothing new to tell her. And she calls everyone.

“When Janet Napolitano was our governor, I called her several times, just to get something done about it. I called the Montel Williams Show. They seemed really surprised I knew the number. I called Internal Affairs, to try to get more attention on the case. I don’t think you’re supposed to do that. I wrote Unsolved Mysteries, and the lady hand-wrote me a letter back saying that all of the shows were reruns, and she wished me luck. I wrote another to America’s Most Wanted, but I haven’t mailed it off yet. It occupies my whole being.”

Her sister is worth it, of course, and Dawn wants everyone to know. Dana’s habits and actions in the weeks and days before she went missing have the highest possibility of being related to her disappearance, but that’s not who she is or was. Dana and Dawn were extremely close growing up. Their mother was in a car accident when the girls, and their other sister, Theresa, were teenagers. She died after spending months in a coma. They were raised by their father. After Theresa moved to California, it was just Dawn and Dana.

“And we always kept in touch, even when we didn’t live together,” Dawn said. “I’d go out there to see her and the girls and her son. And no matter where she was, we were always in contact. We talked to each other every week.”

Later, Dana graduated from college with a degree in administrative accounting. She had three children, a son and two daughters. Her children are now ages 26, 23 and 20, and each has children of their own.

“Dana was about to be a grandmother for the first time before she went missing,” Dawn says, holding back tears. “She was so excited.”

“It was like Timothy was her life, Denise was her soul and Ashley was her backbone,” she says of Dana’s three children.

Dawn knows it’s possible Dana just took off, and maybe doesn’t want to be found. Sometimes, when she searches the streets, she wears a disguise, just in case her sister is hiding from her.

“I was walking on Van Buren, you know, because of her crack. I had a bandana that I made, and I put my hair up in the bandana, so she wouldn’t recognize me and run, if she’s hiding. I got hustled out of $40 from the hookers down there. I paid one twenty bucks just so I could walk with her. It was pretty scary.”

Even if Dana didn’t want anything to do with her sister, Dawn said, the family should have heard something by now.

The sisters’ paternal grandmother, Jo Alice Mays, agrees, but says she understands that the police are doing everything they can.

“I’ve spoken to the police department in Phoenix a bunch of times,” she said. “I probably about drove them nuts, but I called constantly, and they did call back quite often, and they were very nice and listened to me.”

Mays’ love for Dana is evident.

“She has beautiful dark hair, but the last time I saw her she’d dyed it blonde, and it looked terrible,” Mays adds, with obvious affection. Hair is easy to discuss. Going further into Dana’s story and its effect on her family is more difficult for Mays.

“When their mother was gone, their father (Dana’s stepfather) was right there. Dana was very, very close to him. And he took care of the girls, and my mother and I helped out. Dana was very close to her family. “She was like a mother hen,” says Mays.

Mays describes an ambitious, conscientious young woman with a clear view of her future. Falling in with the wrong people turned her to drugs, Mays said.

There’s a reason Mays talks about her granddaughter in the past tense.

“I feel like she... like she’s not out there. I know you’re not supposed to think that, but I think it’s been too many years. Her children were so, so important to her. She would not have just gone away. No way,” she says.

“I do hold out hope. They do find people many years down the road, but you just don’t know. I pray every day that we’ll find closure of some sort.”

“I cry all the time,” Mays says through muffled sobs. “I do still worry about her. People die all kinds of horrible deaths.”

She’s concerned for Dawn, as well.

“I’m worried that Dawn might get herself in hot water too if she’s not careful. You just can’t accuse everybody of things. I don’t want her doing any of those things; I’d rather she let the police handle it.”

There have been very few leads in Dana’s case since her disappearance. Her information is posted online: Her height and weight, a picture (a smiling one provided by Dawn or a booking shot, depending on where you look), and identifying marks. She wore a silver pinky ring and glasses, had dyed her dark hair blonde, and has two scars, one under her chin and one on her right leg just below the knee. A few people have come forward, but the leads have all turned out to be mistakes or, worse, fabrications.

For a time, Dawn thought her sister might be the Desert Mystery Woman, an unidentified deceased woman found in Sahuarita, south of Tucson. Dawn and one of Dana’s daughters were tested, and the DNA was not a match. Shortly before that, a woman had told Dawn her sister had been murdered and stuffed in a garbage bag.

“That was one of the reasons I thought she might be the Desert Mystery Woman,” Dawn said. “But she failed a polygraph test. I don’t know why she said those things.”

Dawn wonders why some missing-persons cases get near-saturation coverage, and others get little to none.

“I don’t know. Maybe they just don’t care, because we don’t have a lot of money, or the circumstances. Maybe people see us as white trash, think we’re not worth it,” she says, breaking down.

“I can’t tell you why some cases get media coverage and some don’t,” said Detective Jared D’Addabbo, a detective on the Phoenix police missing-persons unit. Factors from the extremity of the case, to other items on the news that day and whether someone connected to the missing person is media savvy can all affect the amount of coverage a case receives.

“Some of them are just, in the public’s eye, more concerning,” Detective D’Addabbo said.

He declined to comment as to whether it was about the nature of the missing person. Are innocent-seeming kids, for example, more apt to capture the public’s attention? Then again, D’Addabbo, while deeply concerned and absorbed in his work, is not effusive with very much of what he says on the matter. He’d rather just do his job.

It’s his department’s job to “take a report and follow up on that, but it’s non-criminal in nature. So typically, these reports are just information-only reports. Unfortunately, there’s not enough police. We try to inform the public about what they can do, but generally it falls to them. We assist them. We’re obviously going to investigate leads, but the responsibility falls on the person reporting. A lot of times they take the lead in investigating it.”

“They know the person a lot more than any officer would know them anyway, so they would know who they hang around, who they might call or e-mail or text,” he said.

The method is frustrating to Dawn, who finds it hard to believe that anyone is really on her side in the search.

“I just get so mad,” Dawn says. “I called the news station one of the last times. They’d had a story about a missing U-Haul, and I was like, ‘You can run stories about missing trucks, but not my sister?’ It doesn’t make any sense.”

Dawn is frustrated, she says, because hardly anyone seems to care.

“It’s kind of hard with missing adults,” says Detective D’Addabbo. “Unlike kids, adults aren’t mandated to report to anyone. They can leave if they want. It’s not a crime. Often they just wander off. When there’s nothing to indicate otherwise, that’s usually how it is.”

“We have anywhere from six to nine thousand missing children and adults each year that the public calls in,” Detective D’Addabbo said. Of those, a majority return soon after being reported missing, or may even be fraudulent uses of the system, such as someone reporting an ex missing to stalk him or her. The department has to take them all seriously, and sift through the cases to find the ones who really need help.

Even the terminology surrounding missing-persons cases can be confusing. Family members and sometimes detectives talk of “opening” or “reopening” cases, but in reality, according to Detective D’Addabbo, “Either they’re found or they’re not.” Anyone still missing is considered an open case.

The simplest of things can make a case difficult.

“Sometimes the family members can be difficult to get a hold of,” he said. “And that can be simply because the number was typed into the computer wrong, or the person reporting was shook up when they made the report and got some of the numbers mixed up. That happens to addresses and phone numbers.”

Confusion reigns. That seems to be the only constant theme in missing-persons cases. There are few others. Each person approaches it differently, from Dawn’s vigilante-style at one extreme to Mays’ attempted acceptance and faith in the system on the other.

One thing that may make some searches more productive is a measure approved by the House on Feb. 23. The Help Find the Missing Act, HR 3695, also known as Billy’s Law, would make it easier for those searching for someone to coordinate what they know with information gathered by other agencies. It would require agencies such as the FBI to share any relevant information and would set aside $50 million in grants over five years to encourage state and local officials to share information with one another on missing people and unidentified remains.

“Connectivity really is the key, sometimes,” Detective D’Addabbo said. “It helps people help each other.” The more connected, organized and accessible the information, the better, he says.

In the end, Dawn seems to understand everyone is doing their best.

“I know I must be aggravating. I’m hounding detectives. I can’t help it, you know? I don’t want her out there if she is alive – out there on the streets, cold. I don’t think she is. That’s just a gut feeling. But I’m not going to give up. Not until I know for sure.”

Feb. 11 was Dana’s 44th birthday. Dawn honors her mother by visiting her grave on her birthday, and since she has nowhere to commemorate her missing sister, dead or alive, she visits her mother’s grave on Dana’s birthday, too.

She laughs at herself, even while crying, and flashes a brief smile reminiscent of her sister’s wide grin.

“People think I’m crazy, probably. But you would be too if it was your sister.”

Resources:

National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs): http://www.namus.gov/

The National Center for Missing Adults: http://www.theyaremissed.org/ncma/

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: http://www.missingkids.com; 24-Hour Hotline: 1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678)