Police have made a new appeal over one of Britain’s longest-running missing persons cases – a wife who mysteriously vanished 33 years ago.
June Ellena Brockway has not been seen since she discharged herself from a hospital in December 1979.
Detectives say Mrs Brockway, then aged 43, briefly returned to her home in Plymouth, Devon, packed a bag, then disappeared.
Her husband reported her missing but officers have never found her and Devon and Cornwall Police is now re-examining the case.
PC Ian Watson said: ”We have no recorded sightings of June in the last 33 years.
”She would now be a 76-year-old lady and is the longest-standing missing person for Plymouth. Her whereabouts remain a mystery.”
Mrs Brockway was deemed a “low-risk missing person” when police launched their original probe, appealing for sightings of a thin, white woman who wore a chocolate brown overcoat and a platinum wedding ring.
According to a front page report in the Western Evening Herald on January 9, 1980, Mrs Brockway “discharged herself prematurely” from Plymouth’s Royal Naval Hospital on Friday December 28.
It went on: “She returned to her home and was last seen in the St Budeaux area at about 12.20pm later that day.
“It is believed that about an hour later she travelled by taxi to the North Road area with a view to obtaining accommodation or catching a train, possibly to Bristol or Cardiff.”
In the report she was described as being “5ft 3in tall, very thin build, pale complexion, brown eyes, dark shoulder-length hair turning grey”.
Detectives suspect Mrs Brockway, whose maiden name was Waterfield, was suffering depression at the time of her disappearance.
Her mother died when she was just 11 and she had two brothers, though no children of her own.
In the decades after the missing person report was filed detectives lost track of her husband, who moved home and left no forwarding address, and have not been able to track down any other family.
Renee MacRae, a Scottish woman who vanished in 1976 with her three-year-old son Andrew, is currently Britain’s longest running missing persons case.
Genette Tate, then 13, disappeared from near her home in Devon in August 1978.
