Advertisement
The woman in the photo is Anna Vogel, who disappeared without a trace from her Hokah home Dec. 11, 1928.
The photo itself hangs on the wall in the tidy home of her granddaughter, Ardelle Schaffer.
With the discovery this past weekend of human bones under the foundation of a home just a block away from her house, it's only natural Schaffer's thoughts would turn to the grandmother she never got the chance to really know.
"Anna Vogel was my mother's mother," Schaffer said, digging out from a drawer a bright pink folder that holds the details of her family genealogy. "Anna was born in 1860, which would have made her 68 when she disappeared."
Schaffer said Anna married John Vogel and the couple had 10 children, including her mother, Helene.
John died Jan. 15, 1928, and was buried in a nearby Hokah cemetery.
"I was 7 years old when my grandmother disappeared," Schaffer said while looking at a photo of the house where the recently widowed Anna lived at the time — a house that once stood just a few blocks from where Schaffer's home stands.
The house has long since been torn down and a new home now stands in its place.
"I had a twin brother, and I remember the owner of the Hokah Hardware Store giving him some flowers and telling him to take them to grandma," Schaffer recalled of that day in December. "Grandma said ‘I'm going to talk to Pa.' "
Schaffer said Anna supposedly disappeared sometime that morning while walking to the cemetery to place the flowers on her husband's grave.
"I remember that they searched for her with bloodhounds," Schaffer said. "It must have been very hard on my mother, who was pregnant with my brother, Bill, who was born in March."
Schaffer said that through the years, she often wondered what had happened to her grandmother.
"She was a small lady, only about 5feet tall or so and she wouldn't have hurt a fly," Schaffer said, who, at 82, and 4-foot-11-inches with snowy white hair resembles her grandmother.
When asked if her family had developed any theories regarding possible foul play, she said they hadn't.
"We knew practically everybody in Hokah," she said. "It's just a real mystery.
Schaffer said she'd already heard the buzz about the bone discovery in town when Hokah Police Chief Rodney Blank called to tell her about it.
"He asked if I would give a DNA sample for comparison if it turns out to be a woman, and I said sure," Schaffer said.
"It would be a miracle if it was her. There would be closure, but then who did it?" she said. "Although with it having been 75 years, whoever it was probably wouldn't be alive, anyway."
Despite all the second guessing about the identity of the bones, information that, according to Blank, may take a state forensic team several weeks to determine, Schaffer has her own opinion.
"My gut feeling is that the bones aren't her," Schaffer said.
"It could be Evelyn Hartley," she said, referring to the 1953 unsolved abduction of a 15-year-old La Crosse girl. "Who knows?"
Linda McAlpine can be reached at (608) 791-8220 lmcalpine@lacrossetribune.com.
