Missing Girl's Kin Cling To Hope

SPOKANE - Rebecca West's father still searches the woods west of the city where a bloodhound lost his daughter's scent one year ago.

Her mother doesn't like to leave the house, in case Becky comes home while she's out.

Christmas gifts still sit wrapped. Last month, family members celebrated Becky West's 13th birthday with a barbecue and a cake. Everyone signed a card.

"She has to be alive or else her body would have turned up by now," said her father, Mike West. "With no trace whatsoever, she has to be alive. If they would have found a shoe or anything, then I might believe she is dead."

Investigators have no clues as to the girl's whereabouts.

Becky, then 12, and her friend, Nicki Wood, 11, were abducted Oct. 21, 1991, on their way to buy candy at a corner store in their west-central neighborhood.

Nicki Wood was found dead the same day, her body set on fire, apparently after she had been strangled, police said.

While Becky's parents, Mike West and Naomi Johnson, keep a vigil, Wood's parents, Dan Wood and Stacy Wood, grieve.

"I'm caught in this whirlwind and I don't know where the bottom is," Stacy Wood said.

Searchers covered hundreds of acres looking for Becky West. Their only clue was a scent picked up by a bloodhound near where Nicki Wood's body was found.

Spokane County Detective Jim Hansen still looks down West Boone Avenue at the Sure Save Grocery every day as he heads home from the Public Safety Building.

"I wonder where she is?" he said.

A man listed as a suspect by police is in the state penitentiary for an unrelated offense. He has not been charged in the abductions or Nicki Wood's death.

In the days after the tragedy, hundreds of neighbors banded together to drive out crack houses, clean up run-down properties and improve their community.

It helped Nicki Wood's father.

"Some of the comfort I do get is knowing that her death, as senseless as it was, brought about something that was needed for a long time and hadn't happened," Dan Wood said.

Detective Hansen said he believes Becky West also is dead and he has told her parents.

"I made sure they knew it was my opinion and my opinion only," he said. "They have the hope and they have to have something. I'm not going to be the one to give them no hope. It's always possible."

Naomi Johnson and Mike West can't believe anything else. Last week they joined students stringing ribbons along the playground fence at Holmes Elementary School - purple for Becky and pink for Nicki.

Then they went up to the Seven Mile area and did the same on tree branches, hoping Becky will see the ribbons and know they still care.

"You can't give up on your child, that's what being a mother is. You have to believe in them," Naomi Johnson said.