A Fargo woman looks to win $25k in a magazine contest to give back to those looking for missing persons
Crystal Andersen’s mom went missing over 30 years ago and was buried as a Jane Doe in Wyoming in 1983.
FARGO, N.D. (Valley News Live) - A Fargo woman is in the running to be on the cover of Inked Magazine, and the winning prize is $25,000.
With the money, she hopes to give back to the groups who helped her find her mom.
We sat down with her to learn more.
“I just want to give some hope to people that you can bring them back,” says Inked Magazine cover competitor Crystal Andersen.
Her mother, Mary Lynn Anderson, missing over 30 years ago in Wyoming.
“I never got to meet my mom. I have pictures together with her when I was little, but we never knew what happened to her,” says Andersen.
She never gave up trying to find the woman she never got a chance to know.
Andersen entered her mom’s information on sites that profile missing persons to get her name out there.
“We had a few situations where we’d seen some missing Jane Does and we thought that could be my mom because that sounded like the area she was in last time she was seen,” she says.
When she called the sheriff’s office where her mom had last been seen...
“Her information was completely wiped out,” says Andersen.
But in 2016...
“The BCA showed up at our door and said my mom had been buried as a Jane Doe in Gilette, Wyoming since 1983,” she says.
Her family brought her mom’s remains back home and laid her to rest, but the case investigating her death remains open.
So far, there are still no leads on what happened to her.
“She was buried in a gravel pit out there. It was actually road workers who had found her remains, her skull and everything,” says Andersen.
This year, she entered a contest to hopefully bring awareness to those who are missing.
If she wins the Inked Magazine Cover Competition, Andersen says she wants to give some of this prize money back to those who helped her find her mom and many more missing persons.
“I see so many of these organizations are having problems running because they don’t have enough volunteers or money to keep these pages going with everything they need. A lot of these people, this is what they do,” she says.
She’s even started a nonprofit of her own to help find missing persons.
“It’s something that my mom would’ve wanted me to do. I want families to have that help. There wasn’t these kind of things back when my mom went missing. Never give up on them. It’s been over 30 years, but it can happen,” says Andersen.
The competition ends in March, but voting for Crystal is free and can be done once a day.
GoFundMe: North Dakotans United for Missing Persons
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