Amanda Smith spent 24 years in limbo, after her mother seemingly vanished into thin air back in 2001 – but now it’s been revealed that Michele Hundley Smith is, in fact, alive and well
When Amanda Smith and her siblings said goodbye to their mum who was popping out to do some Christmas shopping in 2001, they had no idea that they would never see her again.
For 24 agonising years, Amanda campaigned relentlessly to find Michele Hundley Smith, but all this time, her mother had been living a double life. She has now been left reeling after finding out her mother is “alive and well” but just did not want to be found.
Michele, now 62, has told authorities she does not want her family to be given her location – or for her whereabout to be released, and Amanda released a heartbreaking statement on the Facebook page she has run dedicated to finding her missing mum. She said that since finding out her mother was alive, but did not want to see her family, she has been going through a “whirlwind of emotions”.
She admitted that she was both “ecstatic” to find out her mother is well, but also furious at what she and her siblings, who were seven, 14 and 19 at the time Michele walked out of the door and never came home, have been put through in the years since – constantly questioning what might have happened to their mum.
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Michele’s disappearance was thoroughly investigated by both the police and the FBI at the time she vanished from her home in North Carolina, but her family still have few answers about why she left, and why she has only just revealed she is all right.
In her candid statement, Amanda admitted that her family will likely all have different responses to this update, and that they are all individuals who are entitled to their feelings after being kept in the dark for so long. However, her pain at the conflict she feels herself was palpable. “I am heartbroken, I am all over the map,” she wrote. “Will I have a relationship once more with my mom? Honestly I can’t answer that because I don’t even know…
“My initial reaction would be yes absolutely but then I think of all the hurt.” However, Amanda writes with great empathy, “My mom is only human just as we all are.”
She adds that she can “absolutely understand taking off and leaving” but that doesn’t mean, in her view, Michele “gets off scot free without accountability or responsibility”. Amanda also pointed out that she shares some coping mechanisms with her mum. “I am a runner as well and while this isn’t something to be proud of at all, it’s a part of being human. Each one of us humans have our faults, we each have a shadow part and we each deserve the chance to better ourselves and to heal from our past.”
Amanda also fiercely defended her father in her statement, hitting back at speculation that had been levied at him that he might have been the reason that Michele chose to make herself disappear.
The Facebook page where Amanda posted the statement had provided details of the disappearance, including that she had been driving a forest-green 1995 Pontiac Trans Sport van, which was never found. It also showed how desperately some of the family believed that Michele had not gone of her own volition: Michele would have “never left her children by choice”.
However, in 2020, Amanda told Dateline that her father had a far more sinister theory. “He believes she just took off and left him, and us, that night,” she told the programme – now it seems he was correct in his prediciton.
Amanda admitted back in that interview that it was “possible” her mum had left of her own free will, and that it was “hard to rule out that she just left all of us and started a new life”. However, she said that “there’s also something that nags at me that something happened to her on her way back home”.
The Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that they had discovered Michele is “alive and well” but that she does not want her location to be shared with anyone.
Her cousin, Barbara Byrd told local news station WFMYNews2 that this had not been totally easy to hear. “I kind of want to go outside and scream ‘she’s alive, she’s alive’. For years, we didn’t know if we were grieving or waiting… My biggest question is to her ‘What happened all those years ago in December? What made you leave? What happened?”
She continued: “I understand and respect that she doesn’t want any of us to contact her. I’m not angry. The biggest answer I had today was she was alive. Nothing else matters right at this moment.”