Eight-year-old Janice Pockett of Tolland rode her bike to find a butterfly on July 26, 1973. She was never seen again.
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A little girl went missing in CT 50 years ago. Her sister hasn’t given up hope.
Fifty years on, hope remains for Mary Engelbrecht.
It’s not that she believes her sister,
Janice Pockett, who disappeared at 7½ years old on July 26, 1973, is still alive. But Engelbrecht, two years younger than Janice, does hope her sister’s remains will be found so she can give her a decent burial.
“I don’t feel as though I’ve ever really felt she was still alive,” she said. “I’ve never had that kind of feeling. I don’t think she is. Of course, I could be wrong. You never know what can happen, but just my gut is no, she isn’t.”
Still, she put her DNA on ancestry.com just in case someone responded. No one has.
“In my sister’s case, we don’t have any DNA. We don’t have a body. We don’t have DNA. Nothing really,” Engelbrecht said.
“In meeting with the police so many times and just knowing what my parents believed and everything, there’s always that slight amount of hope, but I don’t hold on to that,” she said.
“I’m more where I just would like to find her and bring her home for a proper burial and that’s my number one hope at this point,” she said.
Engelbrecht is planning a 50th anniversary memorial this summer at Janice’s bench at the Cross Farms Recreation Complex in Tolland, but hasn’t firmed up a date yet.
“It’s actually literally very close to where she was last, where her bike was found, where she disappeared from, literally right around the corner from that location,” Engelbrecht, 56, of Manchester, said.
The bench, dedicated 10 years ago, features a butterfly, which Janice was looking for when she went missing. She had hidden the dead butterfly off Rhodes Road a couple of days before while on a bike ride with her mother.
“It was two days later that she had asked my mom if she could quickly ride up the road and go get the butterfly,” Engelbrecht said. “She had tucked it behind a rock to hide it, to keep it there until she could get back for it. And that was the last time that we saw her.”
It was the first time Janice had been allowed to go out alone. The girls weren’t even allowed to play with friends in the neighborhood.
“My mom always went everywhere with us,” Engelbrecht said. “She never let us do anything on our own like that. … We had just gotten home from grocery shopping and my sister and I had been arguing and it was kind of tense, and I think my sister asked and I think my mom just said, Go, go. Hurry up, come right back.”
Engelbrecht and her mother, Kathryn Pockett, went to look for Janice but just found her bike by the side of the road near a wooded area.
“My mom, I know she always carried such guilt for the rest of her life, saying, I should not have let her do that. It was really hard on her, I know that,” Engelbrecht said.
Her parents have died, but Engelbrecht lives with the memory as well. “A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about it, honestly,” she said. “As much as I’m busy living my life and doing everything, it’s still always in the back of my mind.”
Engelbrecht said her family was typical for the 1970s. “My dad worked. My mom stayed at home,” she said. “It was Janice and I and we were very close, spent a lot of time with our grandparents on both sides of the family, very family oriented.”
Janice was definitely the big sister. “She was in charge. She was bossy. I pretty much did whatever she told me,” Engelbrecht said.
When Engelbrecht entered kindergarten, she was excited to ride the bus with Janice. “I thought it was like the best thing ever,” she said.
“I remember after she disappeared that summer, I didn’t want to go back to school,” she said. “I was like, I can’t go without her. I just remember that fear. And I didn’t even really understand why she wasn’t there.”
Janice’s disappearance was frightening to her 6-year-old sister.
“I always just thought, Oh, she’s going to come back,” Engelbrecht said. “I just remember just feeling so lost without having her. She was there and then she wasn’t and I was just really scared. I just remember being scared that something was going to happen to me.
When Engelbrecht had her own children, the memories hit her hard, she said. “I kind of took over dealing with the police detectives and stuff and talking with them and trying to keep up with what was going on,” she said.
“My mom had told me … I had to just accept that I probably was never going to know what happened in my lifetime. … I’m not ready to do that yet. I still think there’s hope out there,” she said.
There have been two suspects in the case, but neither proved to be credible. According to the Charley Project an alleged pedophile confessed to Janice’s abduction and killing, saying he buried her next to a boy near Lawrence, Mass., but the graves were never found.
Engelbrecht said the man who confessed, “could give some information but never accurate where he had buried her, and I think most detectives felt he just was making up stuff. However, they never could officially rule him out.”
Another man had bone fragments in his garage and had served time for the abduction and attempted murder of two boys in 1977. He would have been just six years older than Janice at the time of her disappearance.
The Charley Project page notes that there were five people who disappeared in a 10-year period in the Tolland area. Two were found after their deaths.
Janice Pockett was one of the five girls and young women who went missing from the Vernon/Tolland area from 1969-78. In her case and two others – Debra Spickler, 13, who disappeared in 1968 while visiting relatives in Vernon, and Lisa White, also 13, who was last seen in the Rockville section of Vernon on Nov. 1, 1974 and no trace has been found. None of the cases has been solved, the Courant has reported.
“I’ve talked to several retired detectives,” Engelbrecht said. “I’ve talked to the current detectives that are assigned to the case. And I know there were several suspects. Some they did rule out and others they were never able to rule out.”
Engelbrecht said she believes someone the state police interviewed could have abducted Janice. “I think it’s possible,” she said. “I’ve done plenty of my own research, just through talking to people and reading every old newspaper article that there is out there, and talking with different detectives.”
In 2019, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children posted a photo that shows how Pockett may look at age 53.
Engelbrecht believes someone may know something that could help solve the case.
“I also think there’s just somebody out there who knows something that could kind of pull the pieces together, whether they know it or not,” Engelbrecht said.
“I always hold on to that hope that there’s one piece of information out there that if someone just could report it to the police, they could make the connection, whether or not they know that it’s an important thing,” Engelbrecht said.
“That’s why I always just urge people to please come forward with any information they have, any memory they have that could tie something to something that’s already in the case files,” she said.
Engelbrecht said the trooper assigned to the case at Troop C in Tolland is relatively new. “Hey, fresh eyes can sometimes be quite helpful,” she said. “I’ve also met more than once with the sergeant over there and I know they’re very dedicated to solving the case. Unfortunately, they don’t always have the time to put in because they have to work on current cases as well.”
Engelbrecht said she checks in with the state police regularly. “It’s fairly recent that they’ve looked into things,” she said. “I don’t know if they felt it was promising, but I feel like they do feel like they need to follow up on everything, just in case.”
She also gets tips through her Facebook page that she passes on to Troop C.
A spokeswoman for the state police did not respond to a request for comment.
Anyone with information about the case is asked to call the state police Eastern District Major Crime Squad at 860-896-3230 during business hours or 860-685-8190, 24 hours a day.
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