A Young Mother Goes Missing in 1980, and Her Daughter Spends Decades Looking for Answers

Liz Jin
5 min readJul 8, 2024

Bill Major claimed his wife had abandoned their family, but he was harboring a dark secret

Marlene Major was only twenty-five years old when she went missing; image source.

LaLana was four years old when her mother, Helen “Marlene” Major, suddenly disappeared.

Her father, Bill, told LaLana and her eight-year-old brother, Donald, that their mother was a drug-using prostitute who had abandoned them for another man.

Whether that was true or not, it’s shocking that a parent would tell their young, impressionable children that their own mother didn’t love them without considering the devastating emotional and psychological harm it could inflict.

LaLana only had loving memories of her mother. As she grew older, she shouldn’t shake her gut feeling that her mother would never have left her children without a compelling reason.

Years later, that reason became startlingly clear: Bill.

Bill and Marlene have an unconventional marriage.

Bill and Marlene had been married for nine years when she disappeared in 1980.

Despite sharing two children, the couple seemed to have an open marriage. Marlene was in a relationship with a man who worked for Bill and lived in a trailer on their…

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Liz Jin
Liz Jin

Written by Liz Jin

“I wake up in the morning with a desire to both save the world and savor the world. That makes it hard to plan my day.”

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