For Chandra Levy’s parents, the search is over. Though a thousand questions remain, now they know. Their daughter, the young Washington intern who disappeared last year, is dead.
But for three South Florida families whose daughters vanished without a trace, there is no ending.
Missing, 20 months: Colleen Perris, 18, of Plantation, days away from getting a high school diploma when she disappeared.
Missing, 8 years: Shannon Melendi, 19, of Miami, a student at Atlanta’s Emory University when she vanished.
Missing, 13 years: Tiffany Sessions, 20, of Miami, a University of Florida student who went out to walk and never returned.
Look closely at their faces, forever young and always smiling, in photos their families now treasure. Like Chandra, they were young and vibrant, their lives stretching endlessly before them when the unfathomable happened.
Though the cases are not related, they do have some things in common. The police suspect foul play, though no bodies have been found.
And the parents share a bond they wish they didn’t.
Just last week, another unfortunate family joined the dreaded fraternity. Elizabeth Smart, 14, was taken at gunpoint from her Salt Lake City home. Despite more than a thousand tips, as of Friday, police say they’ve made little headway.
Parents whose children have been abducted ride an emotional roller coaster, elation with every promising tip followed by despair when it leads nowhere. Meanwhile, they grapple with unanswered questions and unspoken horror.
“How did she die? How much suffering did she go through?” says Luis Melendi, 54, Shannon’s father. “That’s my nightmare. That’s what plays in my mind.”
No matter how they tried — and they moved mountains trying — they couldn’t help their daughters. And now they can’t bury them.
“It’s a blow to our egos that someone could do anything to our children,” says Nick Perris, 55, Colleen’s father. “We’re the protectors. We’re supposed to keep our children safe.”
When they heard that Chandra Levy’s remains had been found in a Washington, D.C., park, they registered an identical response: relief. Relief for the Levys that their nightmare is over and a fervent wish theirs could be, too.
“With Tiffany, there’s never been that one defining moment when you can say, ‘She’s dead,'” says Patrick Sessions, 54, Tiffany’s father. “The Levys at least have that.”
Colleen Perris
No one says time makes it easier, because it doesn’t. Still, it’s different when your child has been missing months instead of years.
At 20 months, the wound is wide open and raw. They still dare to hope.
Nick Perris, for instance, routinely puts a fresh message on Colleen’s cell phone, in case she calls.
It’s your birthday and we wish you were here. We’re not mad at you. Call us.
Perris and wife, Nancy, 54, want to believe Colleen is off on a lark. They want to think their star-struck daughter, who loved to sing and act, headed west to California. Just another kid searching for stardom.
But the police gently remind them all evidence points against it.
Colleen had just dropped her boyfriend at work and apparently was driving to Coral Springs when last seen on Sept. 30, 2000. Her car was found six days later.
Like Tiffany and Shannon, she had so many plans, hopes and dreams. Why would she walk away from them?
She’d just finished high school through night classes and had signed up for singing lessons. She had tickets for a Colorado trip and a cruise. But the tickets weren’t used and her bank account remains untouched.
“Emotionally, when do you say, OK, it’s over?” Perris says. “I don’t want to give up.”
Though every day is hard, holidays are hardest. Now, another Father’s Day looms, their second without Colleen. Her last wonderfully goofy Father’s Day gift, Big Mouth Billy Bass, a fake fish on a plaque, hangs on a patio wall.
It sings, “Don’t worry/ Be happy.”
Perris, sitting in the family room with Colleen’s two cats looking on, talks quietly and calmly about their only child. He can even pull off a light-hearted comment. “Her CDs are out of date,” he says. “Looks like we’ll be buying her new ones.”
But at work, a postal station he owns in Plantation, he’ll bash the door in frustration. At the driving range, he unleashes his silent fury on golf balls.
At home, Colleen’s room is much as she left it. Cosmetics sit on a vanity and a bulletin board is plastered with pictures of her with friends. Her car sits in the garage.
“I go in her room and look around, then walk out,” says Nancy Perris, a nurse, weeping softly. “I feel like we have to know something before we box anything up. Is it two years or five years? I’ll know when the time is right, and that time may never come.”
Sometimes she tells herself that Colleen was theirs for 18 years and 18 years only. She tells herself to accept it, though her husband shakes his head at the thought.
“There’s an answer to everything,” he says. “And I have to find it.”
Shannon Melendi
Even when months stretch into years, there’s no going back. Normal life as these families knew it is a thing of the past. It’s more like starting over in a different world, in a different life.
Only in the past 18 months has Melendi, a portrait photographer, started shooting weddings again. He tried after Shannon disappeared but couldn’t.
“I spent half the wedding crying, knowing I’d never see her get married,” he says. “And that wasn’t fair to the bride.”
A few weeks ago, as the bride cut the cake, he slipped out to catch America’s Most Wanted, which again featured Shannon’s story. Then Melendi returned to the reception and continued shooting.
“I put it away in the drawer,” he says, speaking of the emotional storm he weathers daily. “Because I have to.”
In Melendi’s studio, a photo of Shannon as an adult sits on a nearby table. Another picture of Shannon at 3 hangs behind his desk.
But she really comes alive when Melendi gently turns the pages of her personal planner. Her final days are testimony to a busy, happy life, filled with fraternity dances and class assignments. MIAMI! she wrote, noting a trip home from college, adding a smiley face after the name.
By all accounts, Shannon was a woman with a future. She was president of her junior and senior classes at Southwest Miami High School. She was a champion debater who wanted to be a lawyer.
Then the unthinkable happened.
It was March 26, 1994, and Shannon was keeping score at a softball game at an Atlanta sports complex. She took a lunch break from her part-time job and was last seen with umpire Colvin “Butch” Hinton III.
Based on circumstantial evidence, police think he may have killed Shannon, though he denies it. In his past: a conviction for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. Today he’s in a North Carolina prison for arson and mail fraud and is due for release in December 2003.
Melendi tries not to fixate on Hinton’s future freedom. Rather, he works to see a Crime Victims’ Rights Amendment passed in Congress and takes classes to update his professional skills. He concentrates on his business, creating artful photos of happy moments.
Like all the parents of missing children he finds diversion, if not solace, in keeping busy.
But to this day he can’t watch videos of Shannon growing up or hear her voice on tape.
And tears come when he least expects it. When he sees a little girl or hears a snatch of a song Shannon liked.
“You never get over it,” says Yvonne Melendi, 55, Shannon’s mother, a banker. “The scar tissue just becomes a little thicker.”
The other day, she sat in her daughter’s room surrounded by Shannon’s things. Her Southwest Miami High soccer jersey, No. 19, retired by the school, hangs on the wall. So does a family portrait.
“This is her 10-year high school reunion and she should be home now, planning this,” Yvonne Melendi says. “She should be meeting with her friends and talking about who did what.”
It’s no easier for Shannon’s younger sister, Monique, who was a few days away from her 14th birthday when her sister vanished. In the early years, she created a fantasy world in which Shannon was away but would return.
Plagued by fears, Monique didn’t get her driver’s license until 18, nor did she go away to college. Today, at 22, she works in banking and lives at home.
“Everyone thinks as you get older, you learn to deal with it,” she says. “For me, it’s been the opposite.”
For comfort, the family gravitates to the simple green street signs that mark a section of Southwest 48th Street. The street runs by Shannon’s high school and was renamed Shannon Melendi Drive a year after she disappeared.
“I’ll go out of my way to drive down the street,” Yvonne Melendi says. “It’s like when someone goes to a cemetery to visit a loved one. The sign — it’s all I have.”
Tiffany Sessions
Tiffany Sessions’ final words to her father are securely stored in his safety box. They’re on his Valentine’s Day card, which Patrick Sessions found in her Gainesville apartment the day after she disappeared on Feb. 9, 1989.
On the front flap it read, “To a wonderful dad.” Inside: “I’m glad to have you in my corner.”
If only she knew.
After she didn’t return from a walk, Sessions, then a top executive with Arvida, a well-known development company, mounted one of the most intensive hunts in Florida history.
In those first frantic weeks, the governor made a public statement about her disappearance, the rich and powerful lent everything from airplanes to expertise and Sessions offered a $75,000 reward for her safe return.
But no trace of Tiffany.
“I’ve been sitting here for 13 years,” says Sessions, settling on a black leather couch in his bayfront Miami home. “But we’re no closer than the day Tiffany walked out that door.”
For nearly one-fourth of his life, Sessions has been looking for Tiffany, looking for answers. During that time, his job changed, his priorities changed and his red hair turned gray.
A year after Tiffany’s disappearance, he walked away from his Arvida job, emotionally spent. Divorced from her mother since Tiffany was 1, he remarried in 1990. But his wife, Margaret, died in a motorcycle accident the following year.
“Before all this happened, I had a charmed life,” he says. “Once I thought my life would get back, but you can’t go through those things and stay the same person.”
He has no tolerance for trivia. No patience for problems people bring on themselves. He knows what real tragedy is and the toll it takes.
“I pride myself in being tough,” Sessions says. “But there were days I just stayed in bed. Today, I consider myself lucky just to get through it.”
Focusing on his remaining family helps, specifically his son and Tiffany’s stepbrother, Jason, 30, who’s married and living in Jacksonville.
“In some ways the tragedy brought the family a lot closer together,” says Jason Sessions, who’s Patrick Sessions’ partner in real estate deals and car racing.
Today, Patrick Sessions finds it difficult intellectually to think Tiffany is alive. But emotionally, “I’ll have to see a body — something — to know that she’s gone.”
Every couple of months, he calls the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for updates. But he doesn’t get fired up any more because he’s hit so many dead ends.
One hopeful lead turned into a $200,000 extortion plot that landed one man in prison.
Another had investigators digging into a construction site near where Tiffany walked, but they turned up nothing.
Police have also investigated Michael Knickerbocker, a convicted rapist serving multiple life sentences in a Florida prison. Years ago, authorities received a letter implicating him in Tiffany’s disappearance. They later learned he wrote the letter, though he has denied any involvement.
When Sessions wants to block the past, he races at tracks from Homestead to Daytona. Going 160 miles an hour demands focus; he can think of nothing else.
He also serves on the advisory board of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and contributed to a 1998 U.S. Justice Department handbook called When Your Child Is Missing: A Family Survival Guide.
Like the other parents, Sessions wants to do something so history doesn’t repeat itself. Yes, it’s for other parents, but it’s for their own missing children, too. Wherever they are, they want them to know: Though they can’t hold them in their arms, they hold them forever in their hearts.
Liz Doup can be reached at or 954-356-4722.
