The family’s circumstances changed when her parents divorced during her early teenage years. Deanne remarried a man named Robert Becker, and the family moved from their previous home to Wyncote, Pennsylvania. Kimberly began attending Bishop McDevitt High School. By her family’s account, she found the transition difficult. She had not adjusted to the divorce, and she had not adjusted to the stepfather or to the new living situation.
Cousins, speaking to journalists after the identification, mentioned that alcoholism was a prevalent problem in the extended family, particularly involving James McLean, her biological father. They described her as having sometimes run away to her father’s house before being brought back home. These are the recollections of relatives looking back across three decades at a family situation whose details they knew only partially; they should be understood as the account of how things appeared from the outside, filtered through memory and subsequent knowledge.
What Kimberly’s own experience was during these years is not known. What can be documented is the moment when she decided to leave.
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## The Note and the Departure
In the fall of 1986, Kimberly McLean was eighteen years old. She had just moved out of her mother’s home in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania — a suburb of Philadelphia roughly half an hour’s drive from Wyncote. The move appeared to represent an initial, relatively conventional step toward adult independence: a young person getting an apartment of her own not far from the family home.
Then she was gone.
She left a note for her mother telling her she was leaving and telling her not to look for her. The message was unambiguous in its instruction if not in its explanation. She gave her family no destination, no contact information, no indication of where she was going or why she was going there.