For every day that Pamela Hoy was missing, hope hung in the family like an ugly heirloom. No one dared lose it, but it would have been better never to have had it at all.
On Thursday, it vanished.Pamela Hoy was dead. Her body, wrapped in a pink blanket and bound at the ankles and wrists, was found discarded off Mt. Hope Church Road in Guilford County on Wednesday.
``We really just feel relieved to know we have found what happened to her,' Bill Mitchell, Hoy's father, said from his home in Sedgefield. ``Of course, they found her dead. But they found the body and now we can begin to cope.'
Hoy had been missing since July 25. Her skeletal remains were discovered about 500 yards from the decomposing body of another woman.
Authorities are investigating the two apparent murders and have not linked the crimes.
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Medical examiners have yet to determine what caused Hoy's death, but the other woman, Kathy Clark Fogleman, apparently died after being run over by a vehicle.
Hoy, a 42-year-old mother of two, was last seen 15 weeks before her body was found.
On that evening, she dined at a Burlington restaurant with her husband, Fred, from whom she had separated.
They saw each other frequently, and she still kept clothes and personal items at the one-story brick house they once shared in the village of Alamance, about five miles south of Burlington. After dinner, she returned with Fred Hoy to the house so she could pack some clothing and gear up for a dog show in South Carolina.
An expert at showing Italian greyhounds, Hoy was planning to attend the show the next day with her youngest daughter. Packed and ready to go, Hoy hopped in her gray van and drove off to her parents' house about 9:30 p.m.
Her family never saw her again.
Her van was found five days later backed into a parking space at a Days Inn motel in Greensboro, but it provided no clues to her whereabouts. Her purse was inside, untouched, her clothes and gear just as she had packed them.
``When she was first reported missing, our first concern was to find her, then to find the van so it could give us some evidence to lead to something,' said Richard Frye, Alamance County's sheriff.
Investigators were stumped. People called from all over the state claiming to have seen the van, made distinctive by the license plate ``AHOY.' The sightings only confused matters.
The FBI joined the case early on, since there was some indication Hoy might have been kidnapped and taken across state lines. Hoy's family, desperate for clues, hired psychics to lead them to her body.
Oddly, the psychics kept directing the family to sites near the Mt. Hope Church Road area where Hoy was found.
``They were real close,' Mitchell said. ``It was within miles.'
Yet nothing turned up at the time. They bulldozed, they dragged, they used metal detectors. All that was found was an old stolen car at the bottom of a farm pond.
Later this fall, the body of a woman was found at the base of a Blue Ridge Parkway overhang. It wasn't Hoy. The body of a woman was found in Rockingham County. It wasn't Hoy.
Then Wednesday, when a woman and her daughter stumbled across the decayed remains along the Guilford County roadside, investigators again turned to the Hoy file.
Frye said one of his deputies was in Chapel Hill on Thursday, armed with Hoy's dental records. Word came back early in the afternoon. Hoy was dead.
``We're not coping with it too damn well, really,' Fred Hoy said of his and his two daughter's reaction. ``I don't feel like talking about it right now.'
For Hoy's parents and brothers, the worst is over.
``It's just a great relief,' Mitchell said. ``It's a great relief knowing we've found her. We've finally found her.'
