New Sewickley woman was last heard from on Oct. 6

Sunday, November 09, 2003

By Lori Shontz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

From the beginning, the 911 call was peculiar. At 2:08 p.m. Sept. 18, a woman told the operator at the Beaver County 911 Center that she was lost in the park and needed help.

Which park?

"I'm not sure," the woman said.

The operator paused and said, "You don't know what park you're in?"

"I found this cell phone walking along the road," answered the woman, who didn't seem hysterical. She spoke slowly, softly, measuring each word.

The operator paused again. "And you have no idea what park you're in?"

"No, there's some garbage here that says Allegheny Forest. Tioga Park."

She couldn't have been in either place. Only 911 calls made in Beaver County are answered by the Beaver County 911 center, and Allegheny National Forest is not in Beaver County. Neither is there a Tioga Park. But the woman was never able to say where she was, and the operator had no way to trace the call because it was made from a cellular phone.

The call lasted 5 minutes, 10 seconds, and although two operators questioned the woman, neither was able to learn anything concrete about her or her situation, except that her head was apparently bleeding.

Weeks of investigation have only raised more questions.

Officials now know that Leslie Rivera-Hager, 37, of New Sewickley, made that phone call. And that Rivera-Hager, who may have a mental illness, was reported missing by her husband, Gary Hager, a day later.

But no one knows why she called herself Sheila Smith, the name of a childhood acquaintance; why she couldn't identify the cell phone as her own; why she gave her address as Steubenville, Ohio; or how she hit her head.

Or where, exactly, she was.

"We don't know where to begin," New Sewickley police Chief John Daley said. "It's like searching for a needle in a haystack, but we don't know which haystack."

At first, the police weren't particularly concerned about Rivera-Hager because they were told that on other occasions, she had left home for a while, then returned. Detectives for the Beaver County district attorney's office discovered that the Hagers had argued on the day before the 911 call, and that Rivera-Hager refused to let her husband into their home.

"Like all couples, they disagreed from time to time, and this was not long before she turned up missing," Daley said. "Are the two issues related? We don't know."

Many such cases are solved quickly when the "missing person" returns home. But when days turned into weeks with no word from Rivera-Hager, police issued a press release Oct. 1.

One of the operators at the 911 center thought back to the bizarre call. Although the woman had identified herself as Sheila Smith, of Steubenville, "Howard and Erma Smith's child," and said she was in town to visit "some old family homes where I grew up at Alexander Drive," the operator thought it could have been Rivera-Hager.

Several times during the conversation, the woman said she was attending the Big Knob Fair, which had actually ended three weeks before. Rivera-Hager and her husband live next to the fair site.

Armed with this information, the police obtained Rivera-Hager's cell phone records. The time, date and length of the call matched perfectly.

Police then discovered there was, in fact, a Howard Smith living at Alexander Manor in Steubenville. They called and spoke to Smith's daughter, who said Leslie Rivera had lived down the street from them 20 years ago. The family hadn't seen her since.

"Obviously, she had this knowledge," Daley said. "It had to be her."

Rivera-Hager made one more call immediately after the 911 call ended. She left a 10-second message for a friend, Deborah Bakowski, at 2:20 p.m., saying she was lost in a park with no food or water and needed help.

She didn't give her name. Bakowski recognized the voice.

"Was she delusional because of the head injury or is there some other force coming into play?" Daley wondered. "Maybe she's been without food or water for a while, and the delusions are because of that.

"Was she attacked by somebody? Hit by a car, and then she wandered off? Maybe knocked unconscious, took a lump on her head and the injury sustained caused her to not recall who she actually is?"

Operators at 911 centers are trained to elicit as much information as possible, and the two operators who spoke to Rivera-Hager tried about every trick in the book. Nothing worked.

Around and around they went, but Rivera-Hager provided no useful information. At one point, she went into greater detail about the cell phone, saying that she had found it -- in pieces -- along the road and had to reassemble it to make a call.

Asked Daley, "Why would she make that up?"

Finally, about four minutes into the call, Rivera-Hager asked plaintively, "Can you help me?"

"Sure."

"It's getting dark and I don't have any food or water."

This time, the operator's frustration showed. "You've got a couple hours. You've got a couple hours before it gets dark. It's only like a quarter after 2."

"Thank you, sir. I'm just scared," the woman said. Her voice sounded resigned, not panic-stricken or frantic. "There's blood on me. There's blood from my head."

Again, the operator tried to pinpoint the woman's location. Again, the woman was able to tell him only that she had hit her head and was bleeding.

"You don't have any Band-Aids in that purse?" the operator asked. "Did you look? Maybe there's a Band-Aid in that purse."

The woman said something unintelligible. She hung up or was cut off.

And that's the last anyone is known to have spoken with Rivera-Hager.

On Oct. 10, four days after cell phone records proved the call came from Rivera-Hager, the New Sewickley police coordinated a search of the woods in Beaver County with the assistance of a state police helicopter and a rescue team with dogs. Twenty-seven people searched all day without finding a trace of Rivera-Hager.

"We realized already on the sixth [that] if she was out in the woods, she was already deceased," Daley said. "We didn't need to hurry. We felt if we located anything it would be a dead body."

When a body was pulled from the Allegheny River in O'Hara at the end of October, police thought it might have been Rivera-Hager. While awaiting an identification, Gary Hager told the Beaver County Times, "I assume she left me."

On Oct. 30, the Allegheny County coroner's office determined it was not a match.

Equally frustrating for investigators have been circumstances not directly related to this case.

A 911 center can trace a call from a land line. With cell phones, however, that's impossible; the phones work from towers, not fixed sites, and operators are unable to tell where the call is coming from. Pennsylvania is one of 10 states without the capability, a problem that should be fixed with the Wireless 911 act, now in the legislative pipeline.

"It's a big concern to us," Wes Hill, the 911 center's deputy director, said, "because there's more and more users on cell phones."

Additionally, police have been unable to cold-call hospitals, asking if a Leslie Rivera-Hager or Sheila Smith is a patient there, because of the new law protecting patient confidentiality. This can make a missing-persons search more difficult.

Before the law was passed, Daley said: "We'd go through the phone book and call every hospital, asking if they had a patient by that name. Right now, we can't do that."

Police could get a search warrant if they had reason to believe that the person was in a certain hospital. But the uncertainties surrounding Rivera-Hager make that impossible.

So they released the 911 tapes this week, hoping that someone may come forward with a clue.

"It's a real puzzler," Daley said. "Even if we find Leslie, we may never know the answers. If she's alive somewhere, she may not have any recollection of this."

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