Missing and Not Accounted For : Disappearance: Edyth Ann Warner, 35, has not been seen since February. Her parents, Edyth and Randle Dewees of Laguna Niguel, still want an answer.

The stress has taken its toll on Edyth Dewees’ health.

“I’ve been completely ill since the beginning,” she said, fidgeting at her dining room table. “Don’t get me teary. I’m so ill I don’t even go out. In truth, I can’t even watch a weather report on television. I know it’s going to sound odd, but I just wonder: On that map, are they where it’s raining?”

Edyth and Randle Dewees’ daughter, Edyth Ann Warner, 35, and her 12-year-old son are missing.

They’ve been gone since Feb. 23, when, according to a report filed by Warner’s second husband, Henry Warner, they walked out of their home in student housing at the University of New Mexico in Las Cruces.

Henry Warner filed the missing persons report seven days later. He told police the couple had been having marital problems and that his wife told him she and Nicholas Smith, her son from a previous marriage, were going to stay with a friend.

The university police department investigated and saw nothing to indicate foul play. Police suspect that because it appears that she took some of the couple’s money--nearly $1,000 in cash and $10,000 in gold and silver--that Edyth Ann Warner chose to disappear.

But the Deweeses are not satisfied.

There are, they say, too many unanswered questions:

Why hasn’t their daughter contacted them or any of her friends and other relatives?

Why hasn’t their grandson called his father, Ron Smith of El Toro, or used the airline ticket bought for him so he could visit his father during spring break?

And why did Edyth Ann Warner leave behind most of her clothes, her car and--more importantly--her other son, 3-year-old Andrew?

“This is not something that my daughter would do,” Edyth Dewees, 65, argues. “It’s as though they disappeared off the face of the earth. We just keep hoping that somebody will see that this just isn’t the way things happen.”

Experts estimate that as many as 85% of the 23,235 missing adults reported to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center as of September have disappeared voluntarily.

“Unfortunately, it often does happen that somebody just disappears on their own,” said Jeralita Costa, executive director of Family and Friends of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims, a nonprofit resource and referral organization based in Seattle.

“However, there are lots of cases where there has been foul play and nothing that points to foul play exists--where the family knows that it’s just totally out of character” for the person to voluntarily disappear.

“Mostly we’ve heard of men who will disappear on their families, but generally a mother does not leave her child behind.”

The Deweeses last saw their daughter and grandson during a Christmas visit to Orange County last year, and they talked to her several times by phone in January and early February.

But in early March, they said, when they called two nights in a row, their son-in-law told them that their daughter was either not home or out for a walk.

When Randle Dewees called on the third night, Warner informed him that Edyth and Nicholas had not been home since Feb. 23.

“It wasn’t her habit to run away. The most she would have done is come back to California,” said Dewees, 68, who is a quality control engineer.

On March 7, the day after the third phone conversation with Henry Warner, Randle Dewees drove with Ron Smith, who is Nick’s father, to Las Cruces.

Their first stop was at the Warner home at the university’s student housing. Randle Dewees said his son-in-law, then an engineering student at the university, refused to talk to him, that he was busy studying for finals. Henry Warner had never been close to his in-laws, according to Dewees, who describes their relationship as strained. Warner, who now lives in Los Alamos, did not not return a phone call from The Times.

Dewees and Smith went to Nick’s elementary school, where they were told that the boy had not been in class Feb. 22. The men also drove to the airport in El Paso, Tex., about 30 miles away, where they waited to see whether Nick would show up to take the spring break flight to Orange County that had been scheduled for that weekend.

Dewees said he and Smith spent most of their time in Las Cruces with the university police, however, “trying to convince them that this is more serious than someone walking off.”

After two disheartening days, the two men returned home to Orange County.

Two weeks later, Randle Dewees made another trip to Las Cruces. This time, he canvassed the student housing neighborhood. One woman who knew his daughter told him that she had seen Edyth Ann Warner leave her house with a number of cardboard boxes in her station wagon a week before she disappeared.

On a guess that she may have stored some of her possessions, Dewees visited more than a dozen rental storage businesses within a three-mile radius of the campus. No one at any of them had heard of Edyth Ann Warner.

“Where she went with those boxes I have no idea,” Dewees said.

As he made his rounds, Dewees handed out the missing-person flyers he had had printed, leaving a stack with the university police and distributing them on the campus, at the bus station--”anyplace I stopped. If they let me post it, I posted it.”

In late March, the Deweeses hired an Orange County private investigator who was able to track down several unlisted phone numbers for their daughter’s close friends in California and in Hawaii. When those turned up nothing and with no other leads after six weeks, they dropped the investigator.

In early April, Ron Smith made his own return trip to New Mexico. After checking around visiting Las Cruces, he drove north to Los Alamos, where his ex-wife and Henry Warner had lived before moving to Las Cruces.

It was there that Smith got the lead that offered him and the Deweeses their first glimmer of hope. Two employees of a Los Alamos travel agency identified a photograph of Edyth Ann Warner as being that of a woman who had inquired about a flight in March.

“It’s the only thing I see any hope on,” Smith said. “I think they’re still around. The thing is, she’s not like this. I was married to her for eight years, and she never did anything like this. I think something serious happened to them.”

Since making his last trip to New Mexico in March, Randle Dewees has continued to make follow-up phone calls to people who knew his daughter, hoping that they may have heard from her.

Dewees said he has not been in touch with Henry Warner since July. “Henry hangs up on me when I talk to him,” Dewees says.

“We’ve gone every conceivable route,” Edyth Dewees said. “Right at first you don’t think the worst. In truth, I think they’re dead.”

The Deweeses say they are not pleased with the way the university police have handled the investigation.

“I think the university police really tried to just put this off and say it’s a domestic quarrel,” she said.

University of New Mexico police investigator Ralph Misquez acknowledged that the case is “inactive,” but he said that does not mean that it’s closed.

“It’s like any other case,” he said. “You work it when leads come up. But the case will not be closed until we locate the two missing persons.”

As far as he is concerned, he said, there is no reason at this time to believe there has been any foul play. “Sure, different people have their own ideas,” he said, “but I don’t have any evidence to warrant that.”

Misquez said he talked to the two Los Alamos travel agency employees on the phone after Smith talked to them in April, and that in July he made his own trip to Los Alamos to question them. “They positively identified her as being there in March inquiring on a flight. Which flight is unknown,” Misquez said.

And, he said, another photo identification had been made by a Greyhound bus driver Smith had tracked down on his trip to New Mexico in April: The driver of an Albuquerque-bound bus that left Las Cruces in mid-March made a positive identification of Nicholas Smith and said the woman with him “looked a lot like” the photograph of Edyth Ann Warner.

But even Misquez says that a photo identification is not concrete proof that the woman and boy on the bus were indeed Edyth Ann Warner and Nicholas Smith.

“A lot of times you can show somebody a photo and they say they’ve seen somebody and they haven’t,” he said. “Our concern is still for their welfare, to see them physically.”

Misquez said he is keeping tabs on the “vital statistics” of Edyth Ann Warner and her son, but that so far no one has called for Nicholas Smith’s school records in Las Cruces and there has been no activity on Edyth Ann Warner’s Social Security file, which would be used if she sought a job.

“I’ve done everything I can think of doing at this time,” Misquez said. “I’m sure it’s very hard on the parents, but I really don’t have any answers at this time. I sure wish I did.”

The first three months after her daughter and grandson were reported missing, Edyth Dewees would not leave the house. She wanted to make sure she would be there if her daughter phoned.

Her husband “tries to hope that nothing is wrong, but as a consequence he hardly talks. And he’s getting quieter and quieter. It’s been over a half year now.”

“After that long he has come to the conclusion that nobody’s going to call.”

* RELATED STORY: Why some adults disappear. E3