Seventeen years after 10-year-old Lindsey Baum vanished in the town of McCleary in Grays Harbor County, her mother, Melissa Baum, is still living the aftermath of that night and is still pleading for answers.
It began as an ordinary summer day in 2009. Lindsey spent the day with friends, in and out of the house, doing what kids do in a small town. Her mother believed she was safe.
“Well, she’d been swimming with several of her friends all day, and coming in and out of the house random times, and she had come in to take a shower and get dressed, and she left to go to Michaela’s house,” Melissa said.
Lindsey and a friend went to see if she could spend the night again and grab some clothes. She was supposed to come back, but she never did. At first, Melissa tried to believe there was a harmless explanation.
“Surreal, it was a … it was a couple hours before it really dawned on me what was going on. I just kept thinking she was going to show up, that she stopped at another friend’s house and got sidetracked, or something,” she said.
As the night dragged on, that hope gave way to a devastating realization.
“It was probably going on 11:30 p.m. to 12 a.m. before I knew somebody took her,” Melissa said. “It just kind of hit me in an instant. I was standing at the end of my driveway, and I had my cordless home phone in one hand and mine and Lindsey’s cell phones in the other hand, and it just slapped me in the face that somebody took my daughter.”
Lindsey Baum’s family moved to McCleary because they thought it would be safer
Melissa moved to McCleary because she thought it would be safer.
“That was just the beginning. You don’t think it can happen to you, and you’ve seen McCleary; you saw it then, 1,400 people, everybody knew what everybody was doing,” she said. “I actually moved to McCleary because I thought it would be safer than Lacey and Olympia for my kids.”
Nearly nine years passed between Lindsey’s disappearance and the identification of her remains on the other side of the mountains. Melissa describes that span as an entirely separate existence.
“That almost nine years in between her disappearing and when she was identified, it was a whole nother lifetime. I think I’m on my third lifetime now, the before and then the missing and since,” she said.
During those years, she refused to give up hope.
“Oh, I was just gonna say it’s.. it was rough. But I held my breath, and I had hope, like I believed she’d come home. I was wrong.”
Even now, investigators tell her they still see a path to answers.
“They’ve always, to this day, believe it’s a solvable case,” Melissa said. “Not exactly sure what that means at this point anymore, but I have more faith now than I’ve in quite a few years.”
Investigators cultivated persons of interest but no arrests after 17 years
Over the years, investigators cultivated several persons of interest, most of them locals, but no one has been arrested.
“I think, in my opinion, a predator was in that small town when she left her friend’s house to walk a short distance home, and was never seen again,” Jim Fuda, Executive Director of Crimestoppers of Puget Sound, said. “Was it some rogue guy coming through the area? I mean, her remains were found 120 miles away. So, was this somebody on the move, or somebody that maybe stopped into the town? If it was a local person who took her and then drove 120 miles away, and either kept going, or came back. Those are things that need to be sorted out, and hopefully get this solved.”
Melissa’s message, to the person responsible, or to anyone who might know the truth, is direct and unflinching.
“I’d like to ask him to come forward and confess,” she said. “They took Lindsey’s life, but they took my life too, and they destroyed our entire family completely. And we deserve answers. I deserve justice. I deserve to know what happened to my daughter. I had a beautiful 10-year-old little girl one day, and then she was just gone, and here we are 17 years later.”
“And I spent the Fourth of July with my nieces, who are the same age as Lindsey, and the one that is the same age, the 28-year-old, has two children now,” she continued. “How many grandchildren would I have? Would my daughter be married now? Those are things I have to live with, and that’s not something you just move on from. You don’t just forget it. It’s there always in the back of your mind. It never goes away. My daughter didn’t die from cancer. She didn’t get hit by a car. It wasn’t some tragic event. It was pure evil.”
Seventeen years on, the milestones Lindsey never reached weigh on her mother as heavily as the night she disappeared. For Melissa, this isn’t just a cold case — it is her life, divided into the before, the missing, and the since.
If you know anything about what happened to Lindsey Baum, no matter how small, please contact Crime Stoppers at 802-222-TIPS. You can remain anonymous. There is a cash reward for information that leads to an arrest and charges. If you know something, say something.
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