Four days after an 86-year-old Harvard woman failed to return to her farmhouse after running an errand, McHenry County authorities Monday will bring in more detectives, a canine rescue unit and Illinois State Police airplanes to search for her.
McHenry County sheriff’s police looking for Vivian Kruckenberg will check out a host of tips prompted by hundreds of fliers posted by the woman’s family and friends in the surrounding area.
“As a family, you want to do as much as you can,” said Tyler Kruckenberg, 33, her grandson. “But we’re getting to the point where we’ve done as much as we can and now have to wait.”
Vivian Kruckenberg, a mother of eight, grandmother of 28 and great-grandmother of 42, was last seen at 10:30 a.m. Thursday leaving a tax preparation office in Marengo where she had gone to pay her taxes.
She drove to the office, about 15 miles south of her home, in her blue Oldsmobile, which also has not been found.
One of the tips the Sheriff’s Department is investigating came in late Saturday from a truck driver who reported seeing an elderly woman in a blue car getting onto the Northwest Tollway near Marengo about 11:30 a.m. Thursday.
Until they received that tip, the investigation had focused on the roads leading from Marengo to Kruckenberg’s home.
“Here we were looking at one end of the county, and here she may be at the other end,” said sheriff’s Detective Michael Cisner. “We’ve already searched at truck stops up and down the” Northwest Tollway.
Her family started getting worried about her Thursday afternoon. About 9 p.m. they called police after they became convinced she wasn’t visiting family members. They said it was out of character for her to stray from her routine.
“She’s a homebody,” her son George Kruckenberg, 66, said. “She doesn’t like to travel much and she only goes out when she has to.”
Family members said Vivian Kruckenberg always shops at the same supermarket in Harvard, visits the bank once a week, has her hair done every Friday morning and always takes the main roads.
“She’s not a woman who would go out to do her taxes and then decided to go shopping. That’s not her,” said Laurie Alexander, a granddaughter.
She was noticeably absent from the Easter Sunday service at St. Paul Lutheran church in Harvard, where she always sat in the third row on the left side. Thirty family members attended the service.
“People kept coming up to me and saying, `I keep expecting Vivian to just walk in,'” said Jeanette Kruckenberg, George’s wife.
Vivian Kruckenberg lived with her son Jim on the family’s dairy farm near the of Boone and McHenry County line.
Though elderly and taking medication for a heart condition, she had a clear mind and passed her driver’s license examination in October, family members said.
“I forget more than she does,” Jeanette Kruckenberg said.
Alexander said the tip on the tollway sighting was perplexing.
“Whenever she has to go outside of the area, we always drive her. Marengo is about as far as she goes by herself,” she said.
Vivian Kruckenberg’s family members searched for her Friday on their own. But by Saturday morning, 125 people had offered to help.
“In a town like this, everybody knows everybody else,” said Dave Dacy, who searched from his plane over McHenry County Saturday. “When something like this happens, you feel you have to be part of it.”
Kruckenberg was driving a 1995 blue Oldsmobile with Illinois plate VK6710. She is 5-feet-4 and weighs 110 pounds. She has white hair and blue eyes.
Anyone with information is asked to call the McHenry County Sheriff’s Department at 815-338-2144.
