Soundtrack of a cold case

August 19, 2010 at 10:08 pm by Brian Koonz

Hi everyone,

As soon as Beth Profeta slid the CD into the tray and pressed play, she felt the “spirt bumps” as she calls them, ripple across her arms.

The connection, Profeta will tell you, was instant and unmistakable the first time she heard “Mary’s Song.”

It was the saddest kind of tribute, the hushed whispers of a broken heart wrapped in the eternal embrace of guitar chords.

“I didn’t know Jessie Mayer before she wrote it, but somehow, she knew me and my family,” Profeta said Thursday afternoon at a local coffee shop. “The words were perfect.”

Mayer, a Connecticut-based singer and songwriter, also seemed to know Mary Badaracco, Profeta’s mother and the victim of a sinister cold case that’s gone unsolved for way too long.

This week marks the 26th anniversary of Badaracco’s disappearance from her Sherman home, a story that never made sense from the time it was spun.

On Sunday, Mary Badaracco will be remembered by the CUE Center for Missing Persons at Hatters Park in Danbury. The vigil will start at 3:30 p.m. and copies of “Mary’s Song” will be sold for $5, with every penny going to support the CUE Center.

“After all the evil we’ve seen, it just goes to show you how beautiful people can be,” Profeta said. “We’re so grateful to all the angels out there trying to help us find my mother.”

Everything else — the lost birthday parties, the lost prom pictures, the lost hugs and kisses — are gone forever, lost to an unspeakable crime.

Badaracco, who was reported missing Aug. 20, 1984, loved mowing the grass in her bare feet and feeding the deer by hand in her lush backyard.

She loved a good beer and a good joke. But more than anything, Mary Badaracco loved her two girls, Beth and Sherrie.

“We meant everything to her. Family was everything to my mother,” Profeta said. “My mother never would have left us without saying a word.”

To read more about Beth Profeta and her mother, Mary Badaracco, check out my “Take on Life” column Friday.

Only in the print edition of The News-Times.

Be Sociable, Share!