BILLERICA — In one 1987 photo, Amy Sher’s smile practically jumps off the paper. Her face is beaming. There’s life and beauty in those eyes. In another photo, Sher’s face is…
www.lowellsun.com
Very long, but informative article on Amy's disappearance.
Search for Billerica woman appears to have gone cold
By
Evan Lips |
PUBLISHED: November 20, 2011 at 12:00 a.m. | UPDATED: July 12, 2019 at 12:00 a.m.
BILLERICA — In one 1987 photo, Amy Sher’s smile practically jumps off the paper. Her face is beaming. There’s life and beauty in those eyes.
In another photo, Sher’s face is sullen, as if the vibrant soul lingering behind those brown eyes had died a long time ago. That photo hangs on the wall of the Billerica Police Department. It’s her work ID, the last known photo of Sher, who vanished in October 2002.
“Everything about her final pictures looked broken, numb, beaten down,” her sister, Joani McCullough, said last week. “The Amy I remember was not in that picture.”
Her disappearance wasn’t noticed immediately. And if her bosses at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington hadn’t called police after she stopped showing up for work, it’s possible no one would have ever known.
McCullough is convinced Amy met death at the hands of a man Billerica police Sgt. Roy Frost would describe as “a monster.”
Sher was raised in a wealthy Boston suburb and would have turned 47 this past April. McCullough said it’s easy to see what happened to Amy Sher by looking at photos taken of her sister before and after she met Robert Desmond. Sher met Desmond in the early 1990s while she was still married to a man named Paul Pomerantz. Sher and Desmond married in New Hampshire in 1992, but none of Amy’s family members was invited. McCullough said her sister was working at Massachusetts General Hospital as a systems analyst when she met Desmond.
Boston attorney Wendy Murphy, who helped the Sher family win visitation rights to see Amy’s son, said Desmond was an office temp. “He must have really swept her off her feet,” Murphy said last week.
In 2007, Murphy scored a landmark victory when an appellate court determined that Sher’s family had the right to visit Amy’s son, Michael, born in July 1996. The Shers were so detached from their daughter that they did not know about Michael until they hired a private investigator to reconnect with her in 2002.
The investigator, Joel Picchi, said last month he managed to find Amy on Oct. 9, 2002, at the Lahey Clinic parking lot. Picchi said he showed her photos of the nieces she had once doted upon. Picchi said Amy started to cry.
Hours later, Amy would call Picchi from her desk and tell him she did not want to reconcile with her family.
Five days later, Amy would tell her boss, Chris Lucchesi, she felt sick and needed to go home. She called in sick the next two days to Lucchesi’s direct line. On the next day, the receptionist transferred a call from Desmond, who said his wife was still sick. On Oct. 18, Desmond called Lucchesi again to ask for his email address.
Desmond told Lucchesi that Amy wanted to send an email but “was unable to do it herself.” Lucchesi received an email from
rdesmond@att.net minutes later that contained a resignation letter, signed in Amy’s name but in handwriting Lucchesi did not recognize.
Lucchesi would later tell police about the times Amy showed up to work limping. About the clumps of hair missing. Co-workers told Lucchesi about the tearful conversations Amy had over the phone with her husband. The calls were such a distraction that Amy had to be moved to an isolated area.
Lucchesi told The Sun he’s still haunted by what likely happened to Amy.
“We were at the point before she disappeared where we were willing to relocate her and Michael out of state,” he said. “And I fail to believe for one moment Amy would have left that boy. The kid was her world.”
Lucchesi said he contacted police after receiving Amy’s resignation.