One moment, Linda Jean Anger was there. The next moment, she was gone.
What happened between those two moments on May 7, 1993? No one seems to know. And what is known — the report from her ex-husband, the lack of contact with her family, her leaving her kids — makes little sense.
On that Friday morning, Linda Anger, then 40 years old, disappeared with nary a clue left behind.
“We are not much further on this than we were one year ago in regards to knowing her whereabouts,” then-Olmsted County Sheriff Capt. Dave Mueller told the Post Bulletin a year after Anger went missing.
Not much else has been learned in the intervening years.
“We have not had any leads in this case,” Olmsted County Sheriff’s Lt. Malinda Hanson said Wednesday, May 31, 2023, roughly 30 years after Anger’s disappearance.
On the morning of May 7, 1993, Anger and her two children were living with her ex-husband, Dennis Anger, and Dennis’ new wife, Gina Russ, in a home at a Paws & Claws facility located in Salem Township south of Byron.
According to police reports at the time, Dennis said he and Linda left the house at about 7:30 a.m. as the children were waiting for the school bus. The children — DJ and Erik, then 13 and 11, respectively — corroborated that part of the story, saying their parents got in the car and left. As Anger later told deputies, Linda had an early appointment with someone at the courthouse — then located at 200 Second St. SW — where she planned to meet with someone from social services to obtain some aid for her and her children. Anger said he dropped her off in the parking lot at 8 a.m.
“Linda did not have an appointment with social services and nobody was expecting her,” Hanson said.
In fact, reports from the time insist that no one saw Linda in the parking lot, and no one in the building met with her that morning.
Anger added that he then went home, Hanson said, where Russ was alone, asleep after working late the previous night.
Between the boys seeing Linda and Anger drive off in the car, and Anger’s report that he left her at the courthouse parking lot, no one has seen Linda since.
Linda had moved to Rochester from Bullhead City, Arizona, three months previously. She and Anger had an informal custody arrangement where she kept the boys during the school year, and Anger got the children in the summer. But wanting her boys to be closer to their father, she moved to Rochester and lived with Anger and Russ.
The whole group lived in a house at the Paws & Claws site.
After arriving in Rochester, Linda found work at Schmitt Printing in Rochester. One of her coworkers, Kevin Chinn, first noted her absence that morning.
Hanson said according to reports at the time, on that Friday, her coworker called and requested a welfare check on Linda because she had not shown up for work. Deputies went out to the house, and Anger stated he dropped Linda off at social services that morning. He also reported she told him she planned to take a few days off from work.
By Sunday, Linda had still not shown up for work, and Chinn came to the government center to report Linda was missing. When deputies went to the Anger residence on Monday, Anger reported her missing as well.
At the time, Chinn called her disappearance strange.
“It just didn’t sound right,” Chinn said.
Chinn did corroborate part of Anger’s story, telling law enforcement he thought Linda may have been going to the courthouse to obtain medical assistance for her children and financial assistance so she and her children could get a hotel room.
Russ said at the time they were “mystified” by Linda’s disappearance. She described Linda as friendly but quiet, and a good mother to her two young sons.
“We don’t know what’s going on,” Russ said.
According to Russ, Anger and Linda had been married for about four years, divorcing 11 years previously. Linda, originally from California, had lived in Arizona until February 1993 when she moved to Rochester.
It was a move her family in Arizona thought ill-advised. Her sister, Sandra Carr of Bullhead City, said the family told Linda to let the boys go live with Anger and take a break from being a single mother. But Linda gave up her job at a casino to move north.
“But she wouldn’t do that,” Carr told the Post Bulletin in July 1993. “She wouldn’t leave those kids. That was the most important thing.”
Carr added that leaving without calling was also out of character for her sister. “It’s just not like her,” Carr said. “She would have called.
“We are so worried,” Carr said. “You just never think that something like this would happen to someone in your family.”
Carr said nearly three months into Linda’s disappearance that the family had begun to fear for Linda’s life.
“I wish I had money to fly up there and investigate myself,” she said, expressing frustration with the progress being made in Minnesota on the case. “But I don’t.”
Carr wasn’t the only one feeling the frustration.
Chuck Sorenson, a chief deputy with the Olmsted County Sheriff’s Office at the time, said leads were “few and far between.” Tips that Linda may have been seen in Albert Lea or on a Rochester City Lines bus heading north to the Twin Cities came to nothing. And no clues led to the suspicion of foul play, other than Linda’s unexplained disappearance.
At the one-year mark, Mueller said, “It has been from the beginning a very suspicious disappearance. At this point, we don’t have any new information to show that she is alive, nor do we have anything more than we had a year ago to point that she is deceased, other than not having contact with family members.”
Still, Mueller said there was little reason to believe she was hiding out.
In 2007, Dennis Anger died, and anything else he might have known went with him.
In 2008, Olmsted County Sheriff’s Detective Dave Rikhus told the Post Bulletin that each year he walks the same plot of land south of Byron looking for clues, hoping for some nugget of inspiration that will lead him to answers, lead him to Linda.
“I’ve walked the area looking for any kind of a sign,” Rikhus said.
Rikhus, who recently retired, said in 2008 that he suspected Linda was the victim of a homicide. But without a body and without any evidence at all, prosecuting someone for a suspected crime is impossible.
On May 5, 2023, the Olmsted County Sheriff’s Office posted a reminder of Linda’s disappearance, again asking for anyone with knowledge of her disappearance to step forward and help solve the case.
After 30 years, Hanson said deputies and detectives still hope to close the case.
“The benefit of finding out any additional information about Linda’s disappearance or possible death is always beneficial to the family, community and all who investigated her disappearance,” Hanson said.