Mary Mergel

CHATSWORTH, Ga. — It has been 14 years since Mary Mergel disappeared from her Murray County home, but her niece Lori Koense says she still has hope the disappearance will be solved.

“I’d like to think the police will find something new, that someone will break and talk, that something will happen. But it doesn’t seem to be happening yet,” she said.

Mergel, then 65, had moved to Murray County from New Jersey a few years earlier. Her house was off Devonwood Lane near Chatsworth.

“She was born and raised in New Jersey and lived here most of her life,” said Koense. “She followed her son (Paul Mergel) to Georgia. He had three small children at the time, and she followed him down to be with the grandchildren. I don’t know what his connection to Georgia was.”

Koense said her aunt’s husband needed medical care he couldn’t get locally, so she placed him in a nursing home in New Jersey and returned frequently to the state to be with him. But after he died in early 2004, Mergel decided she was going to sell the home she and her son lived in and return to New Jersey. Around March or April, friends and family members stopped hearing from Mergel.

“We don’t know how long she was missing,” Koense said. “At first, people weren’t hearing from her. Then when they started calling her, it always went to voice mail and the calls were never returned. And the stories we were hearing from my cousin just didn’t add up. ‘She’s on vacation.’ Really? Where? ‘I don’t know.'”

On May, 30, 2004, family in New Jersey filed a missing persons report with the Murray County Sheriff’s Office. According to a 2013 story in the Daily Citizen-News, when officers visited Mergel’s home they found her belongings had been packed away.

“My mother and one brother went to the house,” said Koense. “He (Paul Mergel) had sold her car, her washer, dryer.”

Officers interviewed neighbors, even brought in search dogs, but could find no trace of Mergel.

Paul Mergel was charged with several offenses related to cashing Mary Mergel’s Social Security checks after her disappearance. He pleaded guilty to seven counts of first degree forgery and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, went to prison for about a year and was released on probation. A phone number for Paul Mergel could not be found.

Joe Montgomery, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent in the Calhoun office, said that agency continues to work on the case.

“We are looking at it as a missing person/death investigation case,” he said. “She has been declared dead because she has been missing so long. We don’t know if it’s foul play or if she died of natural causes and was buried somewhere. We are not ruling anything out.”

In 2013, investigators received a tip on where they could find Mary Mergel’s body. They spent four days searching the area where they were told to look. They brought in crime scene specialists and cadaver dogs, but they found nothing.

That same year, Paul Mergel was arrested on drug charges in New Jersey, according to newspaper accounts.

Murray County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Jimmy Davenport says that agency also continues to investigate the disappearance.

“There have been leads we have been tracking. We can’t release any information on those leads,” he said. “Anytime we have an open case, it is never put on a shelf. The detective who works it continues to think about it, continues to look at it, I would say, on a weekly basis.”

Koense says she believes law enforcement officials may know more than they are revealing.

“I think that maybe they don’t want to tip their hands,” she said. “I have to hope that is the case.”