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DETROIT (AP) — Sometimes, Pia Farrenkopf's family wouldn't hear from her for years at a time.
No letters. No visits. No phone calls. No hint of how the Pontiac woman was, where she was — or how she was living her life.
And then one day, one relative or another would go to the mailbox, and there would be a postcard from Pia. From Amsterdam or Austria. Ireland or Las Vegas. One Christmas Eve, she made a surprise call from the Italian Alps.
"Sometimes she would go, literally, for years without us hearing from her," her sister, Jean LeBlanc, who lives near Boston, where Pia and her nine sisters and brothers grew up, told the Detroit Free Press (http://on.freep.com/1BOPxgr ). "And then all of a sudden, she'd show up, so nobody ever thought anything about it."
Some of her siblings tried to get in touch with her when they hadn't heard from her in a long time, but she often didn't answer her phone. Paula Logan, another sister, figured that Pia was out of the country — or just didn't want to be bothered.
So when she dropped completely from sight six years ago, her family never even realized she was missing — until 2014, when repairmen were hired to do some work on her foreclosed home.
One year ago this Thursday, two of those workers walked into her garage and made a discovery so chilling that they ran from the house and called 911.
What they found put to rest any questions about where Pia Farrenkopf had been all those years. But why she was there and what happened to her remain a mystery still today.
Pia's neighborhood in Pontiac was solidly middle class, a newer subdivision of tidy houses and young trees. It was a far cry from Southie, what was then a rough, working-class neighborhood of Boston, where she lived with her large Catholic family when she was younger.
Today, Southie is undergoing a transformation and its property values have skyrocketed, but the neighborhood still is home to blocks and blocks of row houses, broken up into apartments and duplexes, where generations of immigrants, many of them Irish, raised large families.
In interviews with the Free Press, three of her sisters and others who knew Farrenkopf were circumspect and revealed few details of the family's early years. From what little they said and the questions they declined to answer, it seemed clear that the family with 10 children had known some hard times. Their father, Joseph Farrenkopf, died in 1981 while Pia was still in high school. One of their two brothers died years later.
Pia graduated in 1983 from Cardinal Cushing Central High School in South Boston. Today, the school is long gone, and a high-end apartment complex sits on the site.
Sister Mary Mulligan, who was principal of the all-girls Catholic school, still remembers Farrenkopf, more than 30 years later.
"Although she was very smart," — in Mulligan's thick Boston accent, the word comes out "smaht" — "I felt that she was more of a loner."
Mulligan flipped through the 1983 yearbook and found just two pictures of Farrenkopf: one with the National Honor Society, where Farrenkopf served as treasurer, and her school picture.
"I wish I could remember her better," said Mulligan, 84. "But maybe that's the essence of her personality. That she didn't get very close to people."
Besides getting good grades, Farrenkopf painted and drew, and won an art award while attending high school. The Boston Globe reported the award in its Jan. 17, 1980, edition.
She also received a college scholarship at the University of Massachusetts Boston and began attending classes there in the fall semester of 1983.
"Pia was always reading," her mother, Marie Farrenkopf, was quoted as saying in a university newspaper article about the scholarship. "When there were no other books around, she'd read an encyclopedia."
She attended UMass Boston on and off and also took classes at nearby Bunker Hill Community College in 1985, but didn't graduate from either, school records showed. By the 1990s, she was working for a technology company in Little Rock, Arkansas, programming banking software for loan applications.
She never married or had children, but was an aunt to dozens of nieces and nephews. Friends remember that she loved crossword puzzles and often had 24-hour news on the TV at her home. She was a fan of "Star Trek" and "Lost."
Pia lived a prosperous life in Michigan. She had a good job, saved her money, traveled extensively and spent more than $100,000 on her new home on Savanna Drive.
By 2003, she was ready to take on a new challenge. She had struggled with her weight throughout her life and began making plans to open a fitness business called Slender Lady in Waterford.
She asked her sister LeBlanc, then a manager at a Curves fitness center in Massachusetts, to go with her to Texas, and the two spent a week together learning about health and nutrition.
"At the time, she was overweight," LeBlanc recalled, saying that may have been the motivation behind the business.
As the sisters got ready to part ways in Texas, both told the other, "I love you," and Farrenkopf returned to her job in Michigan.
It is unclear what happened to the dream for Slender Lady, but court records indicate the venture did not end well. Farrenkopf did not respond to a lawsuit in 2005 charging that she had broken the lease in Waterford. The company that sued was awarded more than $101,000 in a default judgment, although it's unclear how much, if any, was ever collected.
In May 2008, Farrenkopf resigned from her job in Michigan with Fidelity National Information Services — previously known as ALLTEL Information Services — after 23 years with the company. Company officials called her "an exemplary employee" in a statement to the Free Press but didn't elaborate on the circumstances surrounding her departure.
The month she resigned, her bank account had $87,199.80 in it, according to a report by the Oakland County Sheriff's Office. No more deposits were made after that point.
It's unclear how she spent her days after she stopped working.
She was pulled over in October 2008 and cited for driving with a suspended license, expired plates and no proof of insurance.
On Feb. 25, 2009, $1,500 was withdrawn from her account, the investigators' report said.
It was the last deduction she made.
When her mortgage payments stopped and the house was foreclosed on, workers were sent in to preserve the house.
In January, the mortgage holder sent two men to inspect the house and garage and take photographs. They went into the garage and one of them opened the door of a 2003 green Jeep Liberty, searched for the registration and then left. They reported nothing unusual.
Then Trademark Property Solutions was hired to make repairs, and two other men were dispatched to fix the hole in the roof that was allowing raccoons to nest there. They also were supposed to take photos of the house and garage.
On March 5, 2014, Matthew Anderson and Charles Goff walked into the two-car garage and saw the SUV parked there. Goff later told deputies he saw what he thought was a Halloween mask in the backseat and opened the back door.
"It smelled like death," Goff said.
The pair ran from the house and called 911.
Oakland County Sheriff's deputies arrived on the scene and made a stunning discovery: Pia Farrenkopf, dressed in a black jacket, blue shirt and jeans, was slumped in the back of the SUV, her knees behind the driver's seat.
"She was a good person," said Joan Gill Strack, who worked with her in Little Rock. "And it breaks my heart that her body sat there for so long with nobody knowing."
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Information from: Detroit Free Press, http://www.freep.com
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