Jody Roberts' Two Lives Come Together -- Details Emerge About Her In Colorado And Alaska

SITKA, Alaska - You can lose yourself in a place like this.

On one side, awesome mountains; on the other, spruce and hemlock-covered islands like jigsaw puzzle pieces floating in an endless ocean.

Here, in a pale-yellow trailer that overlooks the water and a rocky beach, Jane Dee raises two sets of twins with her fisherman husband and crafts impeccable pages on the Internet. She claims to bear not a shred of recognition for her former life as Jody Roberts, a Tacoma reporter who vanished inexplicably in 1985.

Today, in a handwritten note given to reporters outside her home, Dee said, "I will not be talking to any members of the media at this time. My only interest is speaking to members of my own family." The statement was handed out by one of her neighbors.

From this placid fishing town in Southeast Alaska to the Denver fast-food restaurant near the university where she started a new life 12 years ago, those who knew Jane Dee during her odyssey sketch a portrait of an intelligent, gregarious woman reticent about her past.

"I could see there was a barrier," said Shelly Panter, Dee's boss during her days as a manager of a hot-dog and hamburger restaurant near the University of Denver. "I couldn't get through to her."

The subject of a renewed search by King County Police, Dee was located in Sitka this week, ending long-held suspicions that her disappearance was the result of foul play, possibly as a result of working on several sensitive stories.

It was in suburban Denver that Dee turned up in a mall parking lot in May 1985 five days after Roberts disappeared from her job at the Tacoma News Tribune. Since that day, Dee claims to remember nothing of her former life - which she reiterated this week to King County detectives and family members.

After surfacing at the mall, Dee spent four months in a Denver-area hospital. She eventually started a new life, enrolling as an "adult learner" at the University of Denver, which she told her mother this week was the only school out of 30 to accept the application of an amnesiac with virtually no money to her name.

During the latter part of her stint studying Russian and history at the university, Dee worked for Mustard's Last Stand. Panter, then the fast-food restaurant's owner, remembers her as a bright, energetic worker who quickly moved through the ranks and became a manager.

"She was a great employee," said Panter, who said he hired her around 1988. "All I knew about her is that she was an `A' student and worked her way through college."

But Panter said there was always a mystery about Dee, something in her past she wouldn't talk about. When he asked about her family, she told him she had none, that her parents were dead.

"I knew this was a fragile little psyche here," Panter said. "Once she told me (her parents were dead), I never pressed her about her past again."

Another employee of the hot-dog stand, John Dee, said she told him the same thing she told police, that she had no memory of anything before 1985.

"I sort of pried on her because she had my same last name and it's not a real common name," John Dee said. "Because she studied Russian, I kidded her that it was an assumed identity and she was a Russian spy."

Dee said that, as the two became friends, he offered to help her look for connections to her past, but she showed little interest. She declined his offers to ask newspapers to run her picture a second time and to visit area high schools to look at yearbook photos.

"It was my feeling that, clearly, she had some curiosity, but I think at that point she had resigned herself to move forward and not obsess on it," said Dee, now vice president of an energy-services company in the Denver area.

After working at Mustard's for a year, Dee announced she was moving to Alaska, Panter said.

"I tried to bribe her into staying, but she said she was done with school," he said. "She was too bright to stay in the fast-food restaurant business, unless she owned the place. So she up and left."

He said he later provided references for a job in Alaska.

Panter, who learned yesterday about Dee's former life, said Dee sent him postcards from Alaska, told him about her husband and even sent pictures of her first twins.

"I was like her big brother or dad," he said. "This is a shock."

Sitka, home to Dee the past eight years, has as a landmark, an onion-domed, pale-blue Russian orthodox cathedral in the middle of town.

Dee lives on a busy two-lane thoroughfare called Halibut Point Road, where retirees have built big houses with telescopes on the decks to take in the ocean view.

She met her husband, commercial fisherman Dan Williams, in 1989 while working as a waitress at the Westmark Shee-Atika, the biggest hotel in town, where locals like to eat and out-of-town sales reps stay.

Since she and Williams married in 1990, Dee has worked various jobs, including at the local post office, while raising her two sets of twin daughters. She now runs her own Web-page design business.

Her Internet site, entitled "MissNikita's Parlor," boasts an array of information on topics from computer hardware to kiddie entertainment.

"I live on a beautiful rain-swept island in Alaska with my fisherman husband and our two sets of twins," Dee wrote in an open letter encouraging visitors to become pen pals.

"I ran away from college halfway through my senior year, looking for adventure, but now have settled into a comfy, lazy life in a beachfront trailer where we are broke as could be," Dee wrote. "I would never consider going back."

On-screen, she's MissNikita

Dee's on-screen alias, MissNikita, touches on a theme evident in her choice of cities (Sitka is a former Russian port) and college course selections (she took a variety of classes in Russian at the University of Denver).

And perhaps only coincidentally, it's quite similar to "La Femme Nikita," the popular 1990 foreign film in which a young woman assumes a new identity to become an undercover agent.

Williams said Dee is calm, fine, awestruck and overjoyed in the wake of this week's revelations.

"She's happy," he told a group of reporters who gathered outside their home yesterday. "She's got her connection with her family."

Present and past neighbors described Dee as an amiable conversationalist, but said she generally stays in her home, raising her daughters and working on computer projects. None, however, recalled Dee ever discussing her past, or were aware of her claim to have suffered amnesia.

Henry Burton, who lived across from Dee and her family for about a year at another trailer court in Sitka, said Dee is "a friendly lady - could strike up a conversation real quick with somebody. She wasn't shy."

But Dee "has not had a real high profile in the community," said David Pazar, owner of Media Rare Computers.

"When she advertises (for her computer business), she doesn't say she's Jane Dee, she just leaves a phone number," said Pazar, who has met Dee only over the phone and Internet.

Dee's biggest present concern, Williams said, is how to handle media eager to learn more about her story.

Indeed, Dee has come a long way since that May evening 12 years ago when she was wandering in the Aurora Mall parking lot near Denver.

Aurora police spokesman Mark Hellenschmidt said Dee's new life apparently dates to May 25, 1985, - five days after Roberts vanished.

Hellenschmidt, who dredged up the original police report via microfiche yesterday, gave this account:

At 6:15 p.m. on May 25, an officer responded to a call from security officers at the mall who said they had a possible mental patient in custody.

The woman at the mall, it turns out, was Dee, who told the officer she had no idea who or where she was. She was wearing a green coat and carrying a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a Toyota car key, two green pens and an empty note pad.

As the officer walked Dee outside to look for her car, they tried the key in every Toyota in the parking lot. None fit, and Dee began to realize she didn't recognize anything.

Police took Dee to a hospital, where doctors described her as alert and articulate. But she couldn't recall her past, and mental-health officials referred her to another hospital in the Denver area, where she spent the next four months.

Throughout her stay at the hospital, Dee and police approached local media with her story. The resulting reports garnered a few calls, but none panned out.

Finally, on Sept. 12, police decided to close the case. Dee was given a new identity - her mother said she chose "Dee" simply because she preferred it to "Doe" - and a fresh birthdate of Jan. 1, 1963.

"What a story, with all the twists and turns," Hellenschmidt said.

The first person to contact Dee about her past identity was King County Police Detective Tom Jensen, who did so this week.

"I asked her if she wanted to know who she was and she said, `Absolutely,' " Jensen said.

Jensen said the tip came from a former co-worker of Dee's in Alaska, who had seen news coverage from Seattle about the renewed search for the missing woman.

Dee's former employer gave police Jane Dee's Social Security number and birthdate, and although they did not match Roberts' - they had been created as part of her new identity - a driver's license photo and signature seemed similar to Roberts'.

Jensen said Dee had chosen Jan. 1, 1963, as her birthdate based on doctors' estimate of her age.

Jensen said he was reluctant to call Roberts' family until he was sure of the connection. "I didn't want to go to the family with a possibility. That could just be more traumatic for them."

Instead, he phoned her, and when she seemed interested in finding out about her past, she posted a photograph of herself and her new family on her Internet site.

Jensen said he contacted her father, who viewed the photo on his home computer and verified that it was Roberts. "He called back and said, `That's my daughter, but who are those other people in the picture?' " Jensen said another detective then told the father, "Congratulations, grandpa, you've got four granddaughters."

Roberts' case will now be transferred back to the Pierce County Sheriff's Office, which originally investigated the disappearance.

Newly appointed Pierce County Sheriff Mark French transferred the case to King County last week when conflict-of-interest concerns arose during his recent confirmation hearings. A former deputy had implicated French in Roberts' disappearance.

Since Roberts has been located, and no crime appears to have been committed, there is little left for the investigation, said Curt Benson, spokesman for the Pierce County sheriff.

Case closed

"For all intents and purposes, unless something comes up, the case is closed," Benson said.

But while crime-related questions have subsided, the need for answers is still foremost on the minds of family members and former News Tribune colleagues.

Even neurology experts have questioned whether someone could suffer from amnesia for 12 years. And some former colleagues, noting that she emptied her bank account and took several cats to the Humane Society before disappearing, have speculated that Roberts may have consciously decided to start a new life.

But Marilyn Roberts, her mother, said she and the family are convinced the amnesia claim is genuine.

"They wouldn't keep her in the hospital for four months if it wasn't," she said. "We're sure."