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Surrey, B.C., woman reunites with her missing mother after 52 years

Surrey, B.C., woman reunites with her missing mother after 52 years

This summer, the RCMP solved a 52-year-old missing persons case.

Lucy Ann Johnson, who went missing from her Surrey, B.C., home in 1961, was found alive in the Yukon this summer.

Johnson, now 77, had a new family in Whitehorse.

Johnson's daughter, Linda Evans, recently flew to Whitehorse to be reunited with the mother she had long assumed was dead.

"I don't know how to describe it. We kept hugging each other, we kept crying and stuff like that. Emotional is what it is," Evans told CBC News.

Johnson disappeared from the home she shared with her husband, Marvin Johnson, and her daughter in 1961. Marvin didn't report her missing for three years.

The RCMP launched a homicide investigation, even digging up the family's yard in search of evidence, but found nothing.

The case was revived this June as part of the police's Missing of the Month series. Surrey RCMP asked the public for tips. Evans placed advertisements in northern British Columbia and Yukon newspapers, hoping to connect with someone who knew her mother.

She received a call from a woman named Rhonda who claimed to also be Johnson's daughter. Evans was soon on the phone with her long-lost mother.

Johnson was quick to invite Evans to visit her.

"I felt so much better," Evans told the Surrey Leader in July. "I thought she didn’t want to see me or anything. It turned out great."

Last month, Evans was met by her mother and two half-siblings at a Whitehorse airport.

"I went downstairs, my mom grabbed me, gave me a big hug and said, 'I love you,'" Evans told CBC News, adding that her mother recognized her immediately.

"It don't know how to describe it — it was, like, surreal because I could see my face in her face, and her eyes in my eyes," she said of their first meeting in over 50 years.

On the second day of her visit, Evans asked her mother why she left so abruptly without saying goodbye.

"She told me that my dad was really abusive to her, and that he was running around with other women," Evans said. "She said that he told her to get out, and she went back to get us, but my dad said, 'You're not taking the kids' and that was the end of that. She never tried again after that."

Evans, whose father passed away in the late '90s, said she didn't know how much of her mother's story was true, but didn't challenge her explanation.

"I just let it go. I didn't want to doubt anything she was telling me, but there was still a bit of doubt in my mind," she said.

"I think I believe her, just because of the way she would look at me. She wants me to believe her."

"She said she used to think of us, but didn’t know where to start. She said she put it in the back of her mind," Evans told the Surrey Leader.

Evans and Johnson are slowly building a relationship. They chat on the phone a couple of times a week. And Evans is planning another trip to Whitehorse soon, this time with her teenage grandson. She might even move there.

"It has changed my life, I want to go up there, like, really bad," she said. "I'd like to be with her."