The Happy Ending Post.

SEATTLE, Sept. 28 — No one had heard from Tanya Rider for more than a week. Her husband, having already opened up their bank and phone accounts to investigators, was just sitting down to take a polygraph test to prove that he had not harmed her.

Twenty feet down a roadside ravine, still strapped into the front seat of her Honda Element, Ms. Rider, 33, responded faintly when rescuers called her name through the blackberry bushes that had helped conceal her since her car ran off the road near the Seattle suburb of Renton on Sept. 19. Her kidneys were failing from dehydration and a buildup of toxins caused by muscle damage. Her clavicle and ribs were broken, her shoulder dislocated, her left leg severely hurt.

It was the signal from her cellphone that finally led investigators to Ms. Rider on Thursday, after what her husband of eight years, Tom, said Friday were days of futile efforts to have her disappearance investigated as a missing person case.

On Friday, Ms. Rider was in critical but stable condition at Harborview Medical Center here, said Dr. Lisa McIntyre, her attending physician. The doctor declared Ms. Rider’s survival “a feat” and credited her youth and relative good health with helping to see her through.

Mr. Rider, weary, relieved and frustrated as he sat before reporters and television cameras at the hospital on Friday, expressed gratitude to the police officers who found his wife, but not for what he said were the restrictions that kept them from finding her sooner.

“The policy that tied their hands nearly cost my wife her life,” he said.

Ms. Rider was last seen leaving work at a Fred Meyer department store in Bellevue, Wash., on Sept. 19. Mr. Rider, 39, said that he has two jobs, delivering pizza at night and working as a superintendent of housing developments during the day, and that he did not know for sure that his wife was missing until the morning of Sept. 22. At that point, he said, he called the police in Bellevue, which is about 15 miles north of their home in Maple Valley. He said they told him the case was out of their jurisdiction and they referred him to the King County Sheriff’s Office.

Mr. Rider said he was told by the sheriff’s office that his wife could not be treated as a missing person yet because she was an adult who had showed no signs of dementia or of being suicidal. He said he began asking as early as Sept. 22 if investigators could try to trace his wife through cellphone signals but was told no, because she had not been classified as a missing person.

Rodney Chinnick, a spokesman for the King County Sheriff’s Office, told reporters that activity on one of Ms. Rider’s bank accounts after she was reported missing initially “left us with a false impression that this was a voluntary missing-person case.”

Mr. Chinnick said investigators initially thought that only Ms. Rider had access to the account. Mr. Rider said Friday that he told the police that that was not the case and that the account showed activity because he used it to buy gas while he was driving around the area trying to find his wife.

Mr. Rider said he volunteered records to investigators and offered to have a polygraph test to “eliminate myself” from suspicion and expedite the investigation. That process, he said, led investigators to treat his wife as a missing person. Investigators soon traced her cellphone signal to a tower less than five miles from where she disappeared. They then searched the area on the ground and found the Honda.

“Once they had their hands untied, they found her amazingly fast,” Mr. Rider said.

Rescuers had to cut off the roof of the Honda to remove her, and Dr. McIntyre said Ms. Rider appeared to have been positioned so that much of her weight rested on a seat belt.


From The New York Times. If only more stories ended like this.