Missing U.S. Woman : Haunting Notes From a Tour of Life

I’ve always had this thing about time--there’s never enough.

-- From Sandra Valentine’s diary

At 31, Sandra Valentine seemed to have it all.

The daughter of a well-to-do Manhattan lawyer, she had gone to all the right schools. She was tall, chic and smart. And her charm had helped her become one of New York City’s highest-paid office-equipment salespeople.

But like so many young, single people on America’s fast track, she felt that something was missing. And so, Valentine decided to quit her job, take a year off and travel the world to find it.

Her search began a year ago and took her to Japan, Australia, New Zealand, China, Tibet and India, where she recorded the words of the Dalai Lama as well as those of illiterate street vendors; then to Thailand, where she studied the “four noble truths” of existence and explored the lessons and eccentricities of “The Land of Smiles.”

Seeking Insight

Through it all, she avoided the five-star tourist hotels, choosing instead simple guest houses--not for the price but for the insight into the culture she gained by staying there.

“So what’s most important to me?” she asked herself in her travel diary. “Everyone else seems to know themselves better than I do--I’m not happy with any one image of myself. I want to experience everything, but I want a simple, happy life.”

Although she scrimped on lodgings, she spent lavishly on gifts and air freight fees to ship souvenirs and photo albums to her parents as she traveled.

But last March, her search ended here--6,000 feet above the Indian Ocean in the heart of the quaint and colorful tea estates, relics of Britain’s Colonial empire, that have long been islands of peace in the center of an island at war.

On March 28, Sandra Valentine disappeared.

Efficient, Disciplined

It took several weeks before her parents realized she was missing. Valentine, an efficient and disciplined woman, had written to her parents, sister and friends every few days throughout her travels. But the letters took weeks to reach America, and the last letter her parents received was dated March 24. It was not until mid-May that Richard Valentine realized something had gone very wrong for his resourceful daughter.

In June, her parents came to Sri Lanka and spent three weeks searching for clues. They hired a Seychelles-based private detective to scour the guest houses and tourist sites. They offered rewards and had their daughter’s photographs printed in Sri Lanka’s national newspapers. They even examined a partially decomposed body of a young woman found in a Nuwara Eliya stream last month, only to find that the teeth didn’t match the missing American’s dental charts.

Finally, the Valentines gave up and went home.

But earlier this month, in a discovery as puzzling as the young woman’s disappearance, the police recovered her diary.

Rain-soaked and moldy, it was inside her small, soiled, navy blue backpack, which had been tossed from the roadside onto the lawn of Nuwara Eliya’s posh President’s Bungalow, the summer retreat of the Sri Lankan president. It was discovered by a caretaker on his morning rounds.

Mixed in with the diary was Valentine’s heavily underlined “Lonely Planet Guidebook to Sri Lanka,” a government tourist map, a pair of broken, white-framed sunglasses, an empty camera case, a crumpled and torn letter--meant for her sister, probably the last one she wrote--and her American Express credit card.

The diary provides few clues to Valentine’s fate, which police and U.S. officials in Sri Lanka now suspect was murder. It also confirms that whatever happened to her occurred here, somewhere in the mountain jungles and green-velvet tea estates in and around Nuwara Eliya, which has been largely immune to the double-edged ethnic insurgency that claims about 40 lives a day on the island.

The diary is the last known record of Sandra Valentine’s life, the most recent clue in this mystery of an American lost in Asia. And, in her own hand, the diary contains some universal messages of a road so often traveled, a world search to find a deeper meaning in one’s life--a search that sometimes ends in tragedy.

“I guess the message of all of this is, you can’t be too careful,” said Richard Sherman, the U.S. consul in Colombo, who has spent months on the Valentine case.

“Thousands of people travel around the world, and hundreds of people travel the world the way Sandra Valentine did and have a nice trip, and everything is fine,” Sherman said.

“But if you want to get out and meet the people, it’s still better to do it on your terms--not their terms. After all, you’re not one of them, and the potential is always there that something can go wrong--even in this case, where we have a lady who took remarkable precautions.”

Careful Traveler

“Remarkable” is apt. Unlike the tens of thousands of hippie travelers of the 1970s, Sandra Valentine always registered with the U.S. embassy or consulate the moment she arrived in a new country.

“I was surprised, to say the least,” Sherman said, recalling that he met and spoke with Valentine for a few minutes shortly after she arrived in Sri Lanka from Bombay on March 20. “Very few tourists ever come in and register anymore.

“She was definitely not one of these hippie-type travelers,” Sherman continued. “She had a good head about her. She had been backpacking, hiking and riding the trains in India. And she asked all the right questions. She knew there was a war in the country and wanted to know where it was safe and where there was trouble.”

According to Valentine’s diary, such carefulness was one of two common threads through all of her months of travels. The other was an apparently insatiable desire to learn.

In her writings during more than a month in China last October and November, there were pages and pages of Chinese history dating back to the ancient dynasties, key Chinese phrases and their English translations, a mini-dissertation on the types of Chinese currency and proverbs ranging from the wisdom of Confucius to the wisecrack of a Chinese waiter: “If it’s over 100 decibels, it’s a thumping good restaurant by Chinese standards.”

Later, during her early December travels in Thailand, which included mountain treks in Chiang Mai and strolls along white-sand beaches, her writings ranged from detailed lists of souvenirs and gifts, each with purchase price and dollar equivalent, to the Four Noble Truths of Thai Buddhism, which describe how one can attain a life free of suffering. “The truth of suffering: Existence is suffering,” says one; “The truth of the cessation of suffering: Eliminate desire,” says another.

Next came Nepal, the Himalayan kingdom, where Valentine wrote, “I feel like I went back in time a few centuries, walking down the street,” and where she described the warmth of a three-course Christmas Eve meal of roast duck, stuffing, beer and banana cake “around a roaring fire with candles.”

“All the Nepalese really want us to have a merry Christmas, even though it’s not their holiday,” she noted. And, for humor, she wrote down an oft-repeated witticism in the world’s only Hindu kingdom: “If you hit a cow and kill it, 10-20 years in prison. If you hit a man, just pay a fine.”

It was in India, Valentine’s last stop before Sri Lanka, where she traveled the widest and wrote the most prolifically, on subjects ranging from religion to the price of ski equipment in the mountain resort of Gulmarg.

Under the heading, “Notes from Dharamsala, Feb. 27, 1989,” she quoted extensively from the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s religious leader, who has been in exile in northern India since the 1950 Communist invasion of Tibet.

Quotes From Dalai Lama

“If there is no peace in one’s mind, there can be no peace in one’s approach to others,” read one of the Dalai Lama’s quotes. “Everything becomes an object of memory. Leave the world empty-handed and naked,” declared another. And, finally, “The suffering of death is unavoidable.”

The diary clearly indicates that Sri Lanka, her next stop, was to have been a short trip for Valentine.

During most of her world tour, she traveled with another young American woman, who fell ill for the second time in India and decided to return to the United States. Valentine insisted on pushing on to Sri Lanka. The diary, guidebook and other notes she wrote indicate that within 10 days, she was to leave for East Africa, where friends were awaiting her arrival.

She was planning to be on Indian Airlines Flight IC 508 on March 30. The flight took off two days after her disappearance.

According to her diary, her eight days in Sri Lanka were largely uneventful--three days on the beach at a $5-a-night guest house, three more in a Colombo suburb that had an “ugly beach” but “nice people.” She remarked on the country’s extraordinary beauty but noted, “One thing that annoyed me . . . were guys acting friendly and helping me find my way, and then asking for money. It’s not the 5 or 10 rupees, it’s the principle of the thing.”

The final night she described in the diary included “the best dancing in Asia”--traditional dancers in Kandy, Sri Lanka’s ancient Buddhist center. She stayed in another seedy, $2-a-night guest house that night, and Asanga Abeywickerama, the son of the owner, remembered her well.

“We talked for about a half- hour,” he said. “She was very kind, very friendly. I told her Kandy was very beautiful and that she should stay three or four days. But she said she wanted to spend a day or two in Nuwara Eliya, and then she had to get back to India to go to Africa or something.”

Valentine left her large, overstuffed backpack at the guest house, saying she would return within two days and collect it on her way to the airport. But the pack--a larger companion to the runner’s pack that appeared at the President’s Bungalow--remained there on a shelf this week, still awaiting her return.

The next morning, the 28th, Asanga’s brother dropped Valentine at the bus station. She took a public bus for 26 rupees (about 80 cents) to a tea estate open to tourists near Nuwara Eliya, where she signed the registration book, took a guided tour and hitched a ride with a West German couple into Nuwara Eliya.

“We dropped her from the car near the golf links sometime in the early afternoon,” the German tourists recalled in a letter they wrote to Valentine’s parents when they saw a news report of her disappearance. “We never saw her again.”

A hotel clerk at Nuwara Eliya’s prestigious Grand Hotel recalled seeing the American that afternoon, when she used the phone to call Colombo to confirm her flight on the 30th.

But a search of every guest house in Nuwara Eliya, including the two that Valentine listed in her diary, found no trace of her after that phone call.

“One assumption is that she met someone that afternoon and stayed with them,” said one police investigator in Nuwara Eliya. “Either they killed her for money or something else, or she went off to one of our remote tourist sites and it happened there.

“After all this time, I just can’t imagine she’s alive.”

She left a few clues as to her plans. She underlined Adam’s Peak in her guidebook, and a handwritten note on her tourist map indicated that she planned to sleep under the stars there that night. The site is a remote jungle mountaintop where, for just a few seconds at dawn, a perfect triangle of light inexplicably forms in the sky. And many world travelers do sleep outside at a government campsite there--although few go alone.

“Most of the theories at this point are all variations on a theme,” said Sherman, the U.S. consul. “Her most engaging factor was that she was very, very gregarious. She made friends very easily, as evidenced by the ride with the Germans up to Nuwara Eliya.

“She always saw the good side in people and was very open until she had reason not to be. I imagine her gregariousness got her involved with somebody she shouldn’t have been involved with, and . . . well, the rest is still just guesswork at this point.”

There is one more clue, a vague one, found on the only highly personal page in Valentine’s diary--the page on which she openly expressed her confusion about the meaning of her life.

“I can’t do everything at once,” she wrote in the undated entry. “I’m sitting here thinking about doing at least 20 things--worrying about it and not doing any of them.”

She then referred to a paradox she noticed in herself: her need for a plan and her desire to be “more spontaneous.”

“When I don’t have a plan of action, I’m not happy. But I want to be more spontaneous and just concentrate on the present moment. . . . I’m trying to better define myself. But I don’t want to define myself too narrowly. . . .

“What am I afraid of? Losing control? Missing out on something? Regretting that I did the wrong thing or spent my time unwisely? There’s just so much that I’m interested in. And never enough time.”

Musing over the entry, the Nuwara Eliya police inspector shook his head.

“Maybe,” he said, “Sandra Valentine just picked the wrong time and the wrong place to be spontaneous.”