New York private investigator Gil Alba took to the woods near Pisgah State Park this weekend with a small band of volunteers to search for a long lost local family.
Tina and Bethany Sinclair have been missing since February 2001, when the mother and daughter disappeared without a trace from their Mountain Road home. Though numerous searches have taken place in the past, Alba said new information prompted him to mount yet another recovery attempt.
The search concentrated on a northeastern section of Pisgah off Beal’s Road, which is near a property formerly owned by Eugene Van Bowman Jr. Bowman lived with the Sinclairs and was named a “person of interest” by the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office.
“We’re all creatures of habit,” Alba said, as he strolled along a muddy trail Sunday afternoon, twiddling a stick. “I think this is a spot where anyone would feel comfortable coming.”
Alba and Susanne Kynast, a search and rescue volunteer from the Maine-based Down East Emergency Medicine Institute, led the search, which mostly consisted of walking along heavily-traveled paths and looking at stone walls for disturbances.
“I don’t look at it as a job. I see this as a calling,” Alba said of his private investigative practice, which he founded in 1996 after retiring from the New York City Police Department. “I’m on a lot of shows — MSNBC, CNN, Fox News.”
Alba said he was unfamiliar with the details of prior searches and was not working with New Hampshire authorities, but felt confident that by generating publicity he could unearth more clues.
“Get some pictures with me in them and I’ll put them on my Web site,” he instructed one member of the search party. “I have a Web site — albainvestigations.com.”
Alba’s group covered just a couple miles of trails in the massive, 13,500 acre state park, but volunteer Bob Betournas of Enfield, Conn., said he felt the search was well worth it.
“If you don’t start picking away at that haystack somewhere, you’ll never find that needle,” he said.
Tim Alexander, a friend of the family from Vernon who lent the group some local expertise, agreed.
“I think something’s gonna happen. We’ve got a lot of people involved,” said Alexander, who bought a new metal detector to help with the search. “A lot more people are coming forward who had things happen to them.”
The group struck upon some luck when they encountered local landowner Wayne Dingman, who was riding along the trail on his all-terrain vehicle. He explained to the New York private eye some key elements of the local geography, like floating bogs, cellar holes and wells.
Dingman said he and fellow residents have long been keeping an eye out for signs of the Sinclairs.
“Everybody knew he lived up here, so whenever anybody goes for a walk up here, they’re always looking,” he said.
None of the areas Dingman pointed to, however, netted any new finds.
The two-day search, which also included a dive team of three searching the bottom of the Connecticut River between the Chesterfield and Hinsdale bridges, ended without any momentous discoveries, but all involved said it had been a success.
“I’m not disappointed. Even if we were sort of at a dead end, I’m not disappointed because we were able to eliminate some things, which narrows things down better for us,” said Tina Sinclair’s sister, Sharon Garry, who helped organize the search with Alba. “We started in a couple of areas of Pisgah we’re not finished with.”
Alba agreed.
“It was definitely a success. Just because you don’t find anything doesn’t mean it’s not a success. We eliminated some areas we don’t have to come out and search again. When you go searching you get a feel for the area,” he said late Sunday as he drove home to New York. “Geraldo just called me.”
