Mother of missing student gets closure after nine years of wondering

For nine years, nine months and 13 days, Nancy Ekelund would remove a small yellow Post-it note from her desk at work and replace it with a new one. Each slip of paper represented a day that her daughter, Lynsie, was missing.

But last Wednesday around 1:50 p.m., she received a phone call that would halt that practice.

It was from the Placentia Police Department; officers wanted her to come home as soon as possible. At first, Ekelund was excited. She thought maybe police would be delivering good news about her daughter, who disappeared Feb. 17, 2001, after a night out with friends. “When I drove up and I looked through the car window, I knew she would be standing there,” she said.

Instead, police informed her that Christopher McAmis, 31, of Fullerton had confessed to the attempted rape and strangulation of Lynsie Ekelund, a 20-year-old journalism student. McAmis had maintained his innocence for years, telling authorities that he dropped the Fullerton College student off near her northern Orange County home after she accompanied him on a trip to San Diego. But last week, when detectives presented him with fresh evidence, McAmis led them to where he had buried her in Santa Clarita. McAmis has been charged with murder and remains in custody.

“All of a sudden, they are here, and they had the worst news I’d ever expect to hear,” Nancy Ekelund said, sitting stunned in her living room the night after police uncovered human remains believed to be those of her daughter.

Ever since Lynsie Ekelund vanished, her mother had always held out hope that she was alive somewhere. The two were almost inseparable after a car accident left Lynsie, then 5, partially paralyzed. She had 28 orthopedic surgeries throughout her life.

“She just wanted to be normal,” Nancy Ekelund said. “I don’t think she ever felt she was.”

After her daughter disappeared, Nancy Ekelund published a cookbook to raise money for the search. She printed more than 16,000 color fliers and distributed each one herself. Every year at the Orange County Fair, the thin, soft-spoken woman with a high-pitched voice would stand at the entrances and hand out fliers. She flew to New York and appeared on various talk shows, including those hosted by Montel Williams and John Walsh.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “I was doing anything to keep her name out there.”

For seven years, she drove around with various posters on her car featuring Lynsie’s face. It became normal for other drivers to tap her bumper while trying to see the poster’s details.

“The last couple years, I really felt that she was alive,” she said, adding that people still told her that they saw Lynsie. Her license plate reads “MISING L.” On her rear window, a white sticker proclaims, “Memories become treasures.”

“Now I know she’s not hurting anymore,” she said.

Now, Nancy Ekelund said she is preparing for a long legal battle as prosecutors try to convict McAmis on murder charges.

“It’s a closure to whether she’s alive or not,” she said. “But it’s the beginning of the legal part.”

Although the news is painful, Ekelund said, “we don’t have to spend the rest of our lives wondering.”

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com