Stephanie Mailman doesn’t expect her mother-in-law, Linda Peterson, to knock on her front door, eager to explain where she’s been all these years, a story that would take at least two cups of coffee to get through.

Mailman is all but certain that Linda is dead.

Dead for almost six years.

Baker City Police have reached the same conclusion.

Linda’s disappearance in March 2019 from Baker City remains an active homicide investigation, Sgt. Wayne Chastain said.

There is no other logical explanation, other than foul play, for why Linda has been missing for so long, Chastain said.

She had no history of failing to speak with family and friends for extended periods.

The investigation continues.

“We are working the case,” Chastain said on Feb. 13.

District attorney Greg Baxter said local police have worked with the FBI and other agencies on Linda’s case.

“This has never been a cold case,” Baxter said. “It’s definitely being worked on.”

Mailman said she and Linda’s other relatives, which include her mother, Sarah Leffler, who lives in Baker City, were intrigued when human remains were found near La Grande on Oct. 20, 2024.

But recently police announced that the remains, though unidentified, were those of a male.

And so the questions continue.

And answers are elusive as a tendril of fog.

Mailman, who lives in La Grande and is married to Linda’s son, Anthony Mailman, occasionally posts on her Facebook page about the lingering mystery.

Mailman said she wants to ensure that people don’t forget about Linda.

The resolution that Linda’s loved ones have sought for almost six years could come from a source no one expected.

“I’d like to hope that somebody would come forward and say something,” Mailman said. “I think a lot of people know the truth.”

Two people, one man and one woman, seem to be mentioned in every rumor about Linda’s disappearance, Mailman said.

Linda’s mom, Sarah Leffler, said in 2022 that she believes Linda knew the people who killed her.

Baker City Police Chief Ty Duby said in 2022 that police agree with that theory.

“This is not the bushy-haired stranger kind of situation,” Duby said then. “The person or persons responsible were known to Linda, associated with her. We’re pretty focused on a very limited number of people, and kind of always have been.”

That list of people has not changed, Chastain said on Feb. 13.

“The same people are still people of interest,” he said.

But the lack of physical evidence has stymied police.

Duby said in 2022 that police had obtained warrants to search multiple buildings and properties and had employed dogs trained to find cadavers.

Police towed a van from one property that, according to rumors, might have been involved in Linda’s disappearance, and that she had been in the van, possibly after she died.

“We tore that thing apart,” Duby said. “There was not one iota of evidence.”

None of the other searches, including of Linda’s Baker City apartment, has turned up evidence about Linda’s whereabouts, either.

And so her family waits, mired in a purgatory of uncertainty.

The mystery begins

It seems to have started at 2450 Broadway St., although that, too, is supposition.

The apartment building is on the north side of the street, just west of Dairy Queen.

Linda, who had been homeless at times, struggling with drug addiction, had moved into the building earlier that winter.

She was 52. She grew up in Grants Pass and had lived in Baker City since 1989. She was a talented artist whose drawings and paintings grace her mother’s apartment.

In March 2019, Linda had recently finished a 90-day addiction treatment program in La Grande.

She was sober.

Linda was planning to attend a dance recital in Baker City for her granddaughter.

Linda didn’t arrive.

Her daughter, Alesia Lawrence, was worried.

Lawrence was certain her mother would have been at the recital unless something prevented her from attending.

Linda’s sister, Loretta Peterson, who’s about a year older, was frightened.

Loretta said in a 2022 interview that her sister was not prone to disappearing without telling relatives in advance.

But Loretta had another reason to fear for her sister.

The last time Loretta had driven Linda to her apartment on Broadway, Linda wasn’t acting normally.

She told her sister she was afraid to go to her apartment.

“I had a feeling about her that something was wrong,” Loretta said. “She was not herself. She hesitated to get out of the car. Then she stood there, not saying anything. I wish now that I would have went up there with her. I think there were people in her apartment that shouldn’t have been.”

Leffler, Linda’s mother, also recalls her daughter, in the few weeks before she disappeared, saying she was afraid of people who were living with her.

None of her family or friends ever saw Linda again.

She never called.

A few days later, Mailman and Lawrence cleaned out Linda’s apartment. Mailman said there was no evidence that a struggle had taken place in the apartment. No blood, no marks on the walls.

Mailman, like Linda’s other relatives, believes she was killed somewhere else.

“Whatever happened did not happen at that apartment,” Mailman said.

Stephanie says now that she wishes police had prevented her from entering Linda’s apartment before officers had searched.

Duby, the police chief, said in 2022 that officers in 2019 removed a variety of items from Linda’s apartment, including sections of carpet and furniture.

The items were tested but none yielded evidence that suggested any crime had been committed in the apartment.

But neither does that mean Linda wasn’t harmed there, he said.

“It’s an unknown,” Duby said.

Fruitless leads

Mailman said she has talked or exchanged text messages with several people who claim to know what happened to Linda.

But none of those claims has solved the mystery.

Mailman said she received text messages in 2024 from someone who said he was present when Linda was killed, but that he doesn’t know where she was buried.

Mailman said she has heard multiple rumors that Linda’s killers moved her body more than once, and that her final grave is in Idaho.

Mailman said she believes that’s true, but acknowledges that nothing has been found to prove the claim.

She said Linda’s birth certificate was found in a backpack displayed in a pile of free items at a yard sale in 2022, either in Baker City or Haines.

Although Linda’s relatives know she had a history of drug addiction, and that she associated with people who both used and sold drugs, they believe that the motivation for her murder was more likely money.

Sarah said in a 2022 interview that Linda had withdrawn $400 from an account just before she went missing.

“The two people I think did it, I think they wanted that money,” Sarah said.

Sarah believes Linda was a victim of her own kindness, that she tried to help the people who ended up killing her.

“She always tried to help people out,” Sarah said in 2022. “Because she had lived on the street, she tried to help the people she met out there.”

Lucille Lane, another of Linda’s younger sisters, agrees.

“She had always kind of taken in the outcasts and the troubled ones,” Lane, who lives in Pocatello, Idaho, said in 2022. “She had been in and out of that lifestyle.”

Waiting and wondering

Despite the frustration that mounts as the months and the years pass, Mailman said she tries to remain optimistic that Linda’s killers will be caught, convicted and punished.

And of course she and Linda’s loved ones hope her remains will be found so they can say goodbye properly.

“I do think there will be a resolution at some point,” Mailman said. “I’m hopeful that people will be prosecuted at some point.”

But for now, as they have for almost six years, when they drive on Broadway Street, and look at the apartment, Linda’s family and friends can only wonder.

And wait.

“I’d like to hope that somebody would come forward and say something. I think a lot of people know the truth.”

— Stephanie Mailman, Linda Peterson’s daughter-in-law