The Hunt for Julie Johnson : Searcher Puts Flyers to Work on Bus Journey
Donald Vasily and Hugh Dalton worked together for almost 19 years in the clank and roar of the Chrysler transmission plant in Kokomo, Ind.
They had met during a coffee break, when Dalton asked Vasily about his car. Back then, before he learned better, Vasily drove a VW in a town where the sign at the union hall said foreign cars will be towed at the owner’s expense.
They talked often after that--Dalton, the journeyman pipe fitter and Vasily, the green young machine operator.
Dalton gave Vasily spiritual advice and helped him through the rough spots, like the layoffs in the 1970s, when Vasily had to go chop cotton in the South for $1.36 an hour, and the flashbacks that had followed him home from Vietnam.
Over the years, cars got smaller, and families got bigger. Dalton’s oldest girl, Julie, got married and had four kids of her own.
Then, this year, on the first day of March, 29-year-old Julie Johnson, “a good Christian woman, a good mother,” took her kids to a movie, drove them home to the Kokomo Regency Trailer Court, Space 250, put them to bed and disappeared. Her father found her old, blue Citation, locked and in working order, on a state highway seven minutes away from Space 250.
In time, several hundred people would search for Johnson through the cold spring mud of Howard County. Nothing. Donald Vasily had never met Johnson, but one day, still on crutches from foot surgery, he stumped over to the house of the man who had done him so many good turns, and said he wanted to do something , “not just sit back and read it in the paper.”
And that is how Vasily came to ride Greyhound buses for 56 hours last week, from Indiana to Los Angeles, carrying with him some of the 3,000 missing-woman flyers he had printed up, and handing them out to cabbies and cooks and bus passengers, hoping that one of them will land in front of someone who knows something about Johnson.
It was supposed to be a vacation for Vasily and his wife, coming to California to visit his wife’s daughter from her first marriage. He still holds to that, yet on his trip to the Los Angeles Zoo he passed out flyers to tourists and a zookeeper. Johnson’s face on all those flyers make it something heavier than any holiday could be.
It carries a picture of the blue-eyed, dark-haired woman and the promise of the family’s $5,000 reward. Between buses in Amarillo, Tex., Vasily, 45, stood outside a blood bank and gave them to people. He slipped one through the mail slot of the Amarillo newspaper.
He handed one to an Amish couple in Illinois and to a bus passenger on crutches, who said he had been a security guard for Telly Savalas. The woman from Upstate New York, who got on the bus in Illinois and sat for miles knitting dolls, took one. She clucked over “a terrible thing” like that, and promised to copy it and hand it around. In St. Louis, made bold by his mission, Vasily the teetotaler ventured into a bar, and the bartender pledged to post it.
A flyer stayed behind at Smitty’s Barber Shop in Albuquerque, N.M., and with the little man selling apples and tomatoes near the bus station. At a Dunkin’ Donuts in Missouri, the counter girl promised, “This flyer will be on the door before your bus leaves.” In Arizona, a woman going to visit her dying twin brother took a flyer. So did the 81-year-old crippled woman in Texas for whom he bought a Coke, and so did the country music radio disc jockey who rode with them from Illinois to Los Angeles.
Sick of bus stop food and enticed by the banana split ads, Vasily and his wife walked over to the Dairy Queen in Flagstaff, Ariz., and talked with three young women in a white Chrysler convertible. “I was enthused about that, seeing they were driving a Chrysler product.” He gave them a flyer, and couldn’t resist: “That’s a nice car you got there,” he told them. “I build those transmissions, you know.” His only reward, Vasily says, is giving something back to Dalton, even to God.
He doesn’t figure the odds. He just believes. “A truck driver who’d never been there before could have seen that car, a salesman who was just passing through, someone on vacation might have just gone by there. I firmly believe somebody seen that car that night. . . . The Lord will lead him to us.”
Back in Indiana, Howard County Sheriff’s Lt. Henry Bolger says that they are considering everything, even a case of amnesia. “I wouldn’t rule anything out. You never know, someone may have run across an unidentified woman on their way to California.”
He has heard of Vasily’s campaign. “We get calls on him from a lot of different people wanting to know if this guy’s just a weirdo or what,” said Bolger, who tells them no and explains the matter. “He is apparently talking to a lot of people. I hope he keeps it up.”
Johnson’s family is considering everything too. Her mother gave Vasily a white coat that belonged to Johnson in case he found one of those psychics that they say can help find missing people.
On Wednesday, Vasily’s wife went out with her daughter into the fresh spring sunshine. Vasily stayed behind, giving an interview and trying to find a print shop to work up some more flyers. Maybe tomorrow they can visit one of those beautiful parks he’s heard about; he intends to hand out some flyers there too.
The Vasilys will be here until Saturday morning. Then they take the bus back to Kokomo.
