April Green Thompson hasn’t had this particular nightmare for almost eight years now, and she knows matter-of-factly because it started right after her mother went missing and continued for a little more than a decade.
Nancy Lynn Green stood 5-feet-3 inches tall and weighed a mere 120 pounds when she vanished on Sept. 30, 2002, from the campus of the Ohio Valley Medical Center. Nancy was dropped off by her sister for an appointment at Northwood Health Services but never showed up and has not been seen since.
Because Nancy went missing a few months earlier in the wooded areas behind Wheeling Hospital, family members initially searched hillsides and creek banks near OVMC before the troupe of about 25 people walked the shores of the Ohio River. That area, in fact, is the setting for Thompson’s nightmare, a simple dream, really, that involves only Thompson standing on that portion of Heritage Trail watching an extended, disfigured arm glide by.
“I don’t know if she’s reaching for help or waving goodbye,” explained the Wheeling resident. “But I’m pretty sure it was her arm reaching out of the (Ohio) River behind Orrick and that it looked grotesque because it had been in the water for so long.
“A part of me thinks it was her reaching out to show me where she was,” Thompson said. “She wasn’t a happy person. She thought she was a burden, so I doubt she was reaching for help.”
Forever Searching
Thompson has participated in media interviews through the years, especially during the last several months as the 20th anniversary of Green’s disappearance approaches. She has been a guest a few times on River Talk 100.1/100.9 FM, has told her story to LEDE News, and now will be the featured guest on the podcast, “Locating the Lost – A True Crime Podcast” with hosts Travis Hartford and Jeff Atwood.
The show is set to broadcast tomorrow at 6 p.m. on the “Locating the Lost” YouTube channel.
“The way I look at it, the podcast was another opportunity to get my mom’s information out there because you never know,” Thompson said. “That show could have some fan somewhere that knows something. That’s how this works. Something from somewhere.
“At least that’s what I hope for, but there are no guarantees, of course. It was the same with radio and the internet articles,” she explained. “Businesses didn’t have cameras as they do now, so there wasn’t any of that to check, and no one would have noticed her walking anywhere. That’s just the way people are, and people were the same back then. My mom was a little lady. Unless she really wanted to, she didn’t attract much attention.”
The hosts of the podcast, Hartford and Atwood, had done their research but asked many of the same questions that had been posed to her in the past.
“What she was wearing, the fact she didn’t go inside for the appointment, she was missing a few months before this time and found, she was bipolar, and everything else. I’m really not sure if there’s anything new anyone could ask me at this point,” Thompson said. “Trust me; I’ve thought about it.”
“Again”
Aunt Darlene had left a cell phone message for her while she worked at a nursing home in the Blaine community of Belmont County.
“Your mother is missing again.”
That was it.
“Once I had taken a break, I got the message, and that’s when I left work so I could make sense of whatever,” Thompson remembered. “I didn’t know what to do, who to call, or where to look first because OVMC is pretty much in the middle of so much. The woods are up there, the creek down there, Centre Market was just down the street, and downtown was just across the bridge.
“For all I knew, she could have been walking the streets of downtown Wheeling for whatever reason. Maybe she was looking for a friend she had met in Hillcrest or where she lived. I had no idea,” she said in a frustrated voice. “That’s why we looked everywhere we could think of, and we did go up into the woods first because that’s where she hid the first time, but to this day I don’t know where she was that time when she went missing.”
After she was discovered in July by law enforcement, Nancy explained to her daughter her intent was to remain lost.
“She said she was trying to starve herself so she wouldn’t be a burden anymore, but she told me a raccoon scared her out of the woods,” Thompson said. “Who knows what really happened because she had left her medications and everything else behind. She could have been hallucinating; who knows?
“That’s why I don’t believe she’s with us anymore, but I would like to have something even if it’s just one of her bones. Is that what is in the river? Is that what my dream means? I really don’t know what could be left in there after all this time,” the daughter added. “Maybe, because of this podcast and the articles, someone will tell us something after the podcast is broadcasted on Sunday.”
