21 Years After His Mother Vanished, DNA Test Helps Her Son Understand

For 21 years, Darrell Forbis lived with anger and resentment against a mother he thought had abandoned him.

“I couldn’t understand why she had left without even leaving me a note,” said Forbis, who was 12 when his mother mysteriously disappeared one day from their Marysville motel room.

Part of that mystery was solved last week when authorities identified skeletal remains found in a 1980 Ford Thunderbird submerged in a Northern California lake. They were those of his mother, Mary Jane Gooding.

Officers from the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department dive team found Gooding’s remains in October while retrieving a stolen car that had fallen into shallow Ellis Lake.

The retrieval of his mother’s body made Forbis feel regret and shame for all the years he had spent thinking she had betrayed him.

“For 21 years I was mad at her,” he said, his voice breaking. “I spent all these years hating her, and she was only a block away from the house.”

Forbes said last week’s finding has brought some closure, but it has not solved the mystery of his mother’s death.

He was living in the motel with his mother on Oct. 10, 1981, when she vanished. The motel is a few steps from Ellis Lake.

“I got up that morning and went to school, and when I came back I thought it was weird no one was in the office,” Forbis said. “I walked around town; I went to grocery shops, trying to find her.”

For two weeks Forbis stayed at the motel, hoping his mother would show up. Eventually, the owners noticed he was alone and called authorities, who put him in foster care.

Forbis regrets those two weeks alone because he didn’t attend school. If he had, he would have walked past the lake every day.

“If I had gone to school, I would have walked around the lake and maybe I would have noticed something,” Forbis said.

When authorities discovered the car, they also found a piece of a Texas driver’s license containing Gooding’s name. But they wanted to do a DNA test to be sure of the woman’s identity, said Yuba County Sheriff Virginia Black.

Eight months after Gooding’s remains were found, a DNA test of a jawbone identified her.

Black said that the car probably ended up in the lake by accident and that foul play has been ruled out.

“There was nothing to indicate any trauma had been inflicted on the body,” she said. “We believe it was nighttime when it happened because the headlights were in the ‘on’ position.”

Mary Darlene Eldred, Gooding’s only daughter, doubts that her mother’s death was an accident.

Eldred said her mother had moved constantly across the country to avoid having to testify against drug dealers she had overheard at a bar talking about a drug shipment.

“My first thought was ‘They got her,’ ” Eldred, of Mebane, N.C., said. “She didn’t run fast enough, and they found her.” Forbis and Eldred, however, don’t have much hope that they will ever know what really happened.

Forbis, who is an electrician in North Carolina, says he is glad to know about his mother, but he wishes the news had come much earlier.

“You would think they would have looked in the lake after a missing-person report was filed,” Forbis said. “Somebody dropped the ball 21 years ago.”