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1984 newspaper clip leads police to missing sisters

Posted at 5:15 PM, Mar 03, 2017
and last updated 2017-03-03 19:15:39-05

LETHBRIDGE, Alberta – Two sisters who “walked away” from their lives in Canada three decades ago have turned up in the US. Anna and Kym Hakze were last seen in the mid-1980s and eventually reported missing by their mother in 2003, the Calgary Sun reports.

When they disappeared, Anna Hakze had reportedly cut ties with her family and was in some financial turmoil. Kym had “some dreams to pursue” and followed her, brother Ken Hakze tells the Sun.

Police in Lethbridge said the sisters were “inseparable,” but several efforts through the years to find the pair, including private detectives hired by the family, came up short.

How police made their remarkable find is incredibly convoluted: It starts this January, with a file review that turned up a 1999 theft complaint made to the Vancouver PD by a woman whose unusual name matched an alias Anna Hakze used.

That woman was contacted; she wasn’t Anna, a Facebook post by Lethbridge police explains. But she did offer a clue: a newspaper clipping from 1984 for a book whose author shared her own uncommon name—a coincidence the woman found so unusual she saved that clipping all these years.

The name in that clipping synced with a 2012 tip police got that IDed one of the missing sisters as an author. It was a dead-end then, but this time started the process that led police to Kym Hakze’s door in February.

Now 53 and going by another name, Hakze told cops that she didn’t know she and her sister were considered missing. Authorities have not spoken to Anna, now 67, but she has been in touch with her sister.

The pair “were living their own life,” Sgt. Scott Woods tells CBC News. Police have refused to disclose their new names, locations, or any other information about them.

(These sisters were found 32 years after they went missing.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: 1984 Newspaper Clip Leads Police to Missing Sisters

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