In this blog are going to discuss the 2011 disappearance of Timmothy Pitzen. Timmothy was taken on a vacation by his mother Amy in May 2011. Amy would take her life and leave a note stating that Timmothy was safe but that he would never be found. Now, almost 14 years later, Timmothy remains missing.
Please note that many of the quotes from people involved in this case come from this Chicago Mag article.
Timmothy was born in Aurora, Illinois on October 18, 2004. His parents are James (Jim) Pitzen and Amy Joan Marie Fry-Pitzen.
As some background into his parents, Jim was born and raised in Clinton, Iowa.
Amy was born May 3, 1968 to Lee and Alana (Anderson) Fry. Amy grew up in Libertyville, Iowa and graduated from Libertyville High School and Iowa State University.
Jim and Amy met in 2002 at a going away party for Amy in Ames, Iowa. Amy was leaving Iowa to move to Antioch, Illinois. Jim had moved to Ames for work and a friend had asked him to come along to the farewell party.
Jim and Amy were very different. Amy was said to enjoy parties and traveling. Jim has said that he is a ‘regular guy’ who likes the Blackhawks, fixing up cars and getting a quiet beer with a friend every now and then.
After the party, Jim and Amy began dating. Jim helped her move to Antioch and they began a long-distance relationship. Jim would make the 354 mile/ 5.5 hour drive to see Amy every few weeks.
Jim learned that Amy, who was 34 at the time, had been divorced three times. He also said she had a history of depression and had attempted suicide twice. She told Jim that she had once parked her car on some train tracks, but had reconsidered at the last minute. She checked herself into a psychiatric ward after that incident.
When Jim and Amy were dating, Amy tried to take her life. Jim became worried as Amy had been stressed following a job interview and she had stopped answering her phone. He got a call from a hospital who told him that Amy had taken sleeping pills and had fallen down a 30 foot embankment. She fractured a vertebra and suffered hypothermia.
Jim was stunned and frightened when Amy finally called. What was happening with her? he asked. “Oh, I’m better,” she told him. “I’m back on my meds and I’ve seen a couple of doctors. They’ve changed stuff around, and I’m feeling really good.”
Among her prescriptions were lorazepam (the generic version of Ativan) for anxiety and Wellbutrin and Lexapro for depression. The problem was that she didn’t always take them, and when she didn’t, she was a different person. “She’d act real funny,” Jim says. “Big highs and lows. She would become real emotional. If I asked whether she was taking her pills, she’d yell at me: ‘Don’t ask me about that!’ ” He soon began to avoid the subject.
Amy’s sister Kara has spoken to the media and said that they did not have an easy family life growing up. “It’s just something that me and my sister and my brother have all struggled with in our different ways.”
“My sister basically spent her life searching for something that would make her happy,” says Kara. “You know, ‘This job will make me happy, living here will make me happy.’ ” When her first husband introduced her to the Mormon faith, to which she would remain an adherent for the rest of her life, she thought it might be the answer. But that, like so many other promising things, was followed by an inevitable letdown. “I think, at her core, she was just unhappy, and she was not able to get through that,” says Kara. “The counseling, the medication — none of it really worked.”
Amy had said that she was worried that she may pass her mental health issues on to any child that she had and therefore, she did not want any children. She and Jim had discussed this and thought it was a moot point anyway. Jim had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma when he was 20 and was told that the chemo he underwent had made him sterile.
So the couple were shocked when Amy found out that she was pregnant, just over a year after they had started dating. “They both kind of looked at it as a miracle, a sign that this was something meant to happen,” said Kara.
They decided to get married in May 2004, when Amy was four months pregnant. They had moved to Aurora, Illinois by that point and both Jim and Amy were working for Amy’s father in commercial real estate.
As we mentioned, Timmothy was born in October 2004. His name is spelled with two M’s. He was named after Amy’s brother Timothy who passed at birth and the extra letter was added to distinguish between the two.
“It was like all of a sudden her life had meaning,” Kara said, “that ‘OK, maybe this is it: I was meant to be Tim’s mom, and this is my path.’ And it did seem to be it for a while. She seemed to be very happy.” By all accounts, she doted on Tim. “He was the apple of her eye,” Jim said. “They were inseparable.” Adds Kara: “They almost spoke their own language.”
“He was super smart, high energy, funny,” the father says, leaning forward. The way his boy ran, with a funny little waddle-shuffle “like a chubby old man,” always made Jim chuckle. “I had a go-kart in the back shed, and when Tim was about 3, I made the gas pedal so you couldn’t push it all the way down. He was out in the backyard just buzzing doughnuts.”
Jim and Amy’s marriage had many stressors. Amy’s father had to close his business at one point. Jim had already moved on to new employment, but that meant Amy was out of work. She ended up finding new employment, but her depression and anxiety were worsening.
They almost split up in 2008 after Jim found texts between Amy and one of her ex-husbands. They had discussed getting together while Jim was out of town.
“They’d had lunch a couple of times,” Jim says, “and they were supposed to meet that weekend. I told her to make up her mind: ‘If you want to be with that guy, go be with that guy. We’ll get a divorce, and I don’t care how much money your dad has, I’ll find a way to get custody of Timmothy.’ ” Of all the harsh words they’d spoken to each other, that threat struck Amy hardest. One of her fears was that a judge would take Tim from her and grant Jim custody because she had a history of mental health issues, said Kara: “That terrified her.”
Amy decided to stay, Jim said, “but I told her, ‘If I find another text to your ex, we’re done.’ ” As far as he knows, they had no further contact.
By May 2011, Jim and Amy’s seven-year marriage seemed to be failing. Jim said they had been fighting for weeks prior. One of their fights was regarding a trip that Amy had planned to the Bahamas. Jim objected to the trip and it caused some issues. Amy had then taken a trip anyway with a friend and she seemed happy when she returned.
“She had a good time,” Jim said “Things weren’t perfect, but she seemed back to normal.”
On the afternoon of May 10, 2011, Amy came home early from work, saying that she was unwell. She left her car parked at her job. Jim made arrangements to get to work later himself the next day so that he could drop Timmothy to school and then drop Amy to work as her vehicle was there.
Jim has spoken about the events of the following day, May 11.
“Tim hopped out of the back of the Jeep, waved, you know, ‘Love you, Dad,’ ” Jim said.
“Love you, too,” the father responded. “I’ll see you in a little bit.” He watched his son, in his T-shirt and green shorts, bound away, his Spider-Man backpack bouncing.
In the car outside Amy’s job, the couple kissed. “I said, ‘Love you.’ She said, ‘Love you, too,’ ” Jim says. “And then I just watched her go in the building.”
The kindergarten day was very short and Timmothy was due to be picked up by Jim at 10.30am. When Jim went inside, the teacher at the check-in desk looked at him, puzzled. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to pick Tim up.”
“He left this morning.”
“What?”
“Can I see who signed him out?”
He looked at the signature.
Amy.
Amy had told the school she was collecting Timmothy as there was a family emergency.
Jim started calling Amy. She didn’t answer his calls and he left messages. She did not return any of his calls.
Jim assumed Amy was still mad about their Bahamas argument. He said that she would often drive somewhere for a few hours to clear her head. He did think it was unusual that she had taken Timmothy with her this time.
Jim called Kara to ask if she had heard from Amy. She hadn’t. A few days prior, Amy had called and tried to talk to Kara but Kara was busy. “She obviously wanted to talk,” Kara said. “But I was late for something. I just wasn’t up to getting into something heavy at that moment. So I rushed her off the phone.”
Jim started searching their home and found that Amy had not taken any of her medication with her. The bottles were full and untouched, which indicates to Jim that she may have not been taking them for a while.
Jim tried to file reports with the Aurora Police Department.
“Well, we have to give her a little more time,” an officer told him. “Another 24 hours at least.”
The next day, two officers showed up at his work. “They said, ‘OK, we’ll just take the missing persons report. Do you have a picture of the two of them?’ ” Jim thought a minute and then realized he had something that might work. “I went home and found a dot matrix photo of them at a Chuck E. Cheese and said, ‘This is the best I can do off the top of my head.’ They said, ‘OK, we’ll file this, and if something else happens, we’ll get back to you.’ ”
By Friday, May 13, 2011, Amy finally reached out. She called her mother. Their mother then called Kara.
“Everything’s fine,” their mother told her. “She was upset and she just needed some time alone.” “We all kind of breathed a sigh of relief, like, OK, she’ll be coming home soon.”
One of Amy’s next calls was not to Jim, but to his older brother, Chuck. Puzzled and concerned, Chuck asked her to phone Jim. A father had a right to know where his wife and child were, he told her. Amy’s reply struck the brother as disturbing: “Tim is my son, and I can do what I want.’
Chuck told Jim about the call and Jim then attempted to call Amy again, multiple times. She did not answer any of his calls. There have been questions as to why Amy called Chuck and not Jim. Jim would later learn that Amy had apparently tried to call him, but the call failed.
On Saturday May 14, 2011, two detectives from the Aurora PD knocked at Jim’s door. They told him they had information about Amy.
These details about this incident are from the Chicago Mag article about this case:
“We found Amy deceased,” one of the detectives said.
Jim stared at him for a moment. He heard the words, but they didn’t register.
“What do you mean, deceased?”
The detectives explained that she had been found in a Rockford motel, dead of an apparent suicide.
Jim was still trying to make sense of the news when the next thought popped into his head.
“Where is Tim? Where is my son?”
The detectives looked at each other, then back at Jim. “We don’t know,” one said. “He wasn’t there.”
“We’re looking,” said the other.
Jim learned that Amy had left behind a suicide note in the motel room. She also mailed letters to her mother and her best friend.
“I’ve taken him somewhere safe,” she wrote to her mom. “He will be well cared for and he says that he loves you. Please know that there is nothing that you could have said or done that would have changed my mind.”
Police started to investigate Amy’s last movements in an attempt to track down Timmothy. They discovered that as soon as Jim had dropped Amy to work, she had left in her 2004 blue Ford Expedition that she had left parked there the day before.
She arrived back at the school at around 8.15am. Timmothy can be seen with Amy in the lobby on CCTV around 20 minutes after that.
At 10am, Amy drove to an auto repair shop. Her car was a few years old by that point and this stop suggests that she knew she would be driving hundreds of miles, and wanted the car to be able to make it.
An employee of the repair shop dropped Amy and Timmothy to the Brookfield Zoo. At around 3pm, Amy and Timmothy went and retrieved their car and drove around an hour north to KeyLime Cove Water Resort in Gurnee, Illinois. They stayed for one night there.
The next day, Thursday, they drove to the Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells. This was around 165 miles/just over 2 hours from their first stop.
They stopped at stores along the way to buy clothes for Timmothy, toys, gas and drinks.
After spending the night at the Kalahari, they checked out the next morning. They can be seen on CCTV at the reception desk.
These are the last known images of Timmothy.
Amy then drove for around 170 miles. At 12.30pm, she stopped and made the calls we mentioned earlier to her friends and family. Timmothy could be heard in the background. Timmothy even spoke with Chuck at one point.
After she made the calls, Amy turned off her phone and drove south along the Rock River to Sterling, Illinois. This is around 80 miles west of their home in Aurora.
Amy’s family have said they have no idea why she went to the area. When they looked into her I-Pass history, it showed that she had made at least two other trips to the area previously.
What Amy did for the next several hours remains unknown. At 8pm, she resurfaced on CCTV. She was seen alone, at a Sullivan’s Foods in Winnebago, Illinois. She purchased stationery and envelopes to write her suicide notes on.
Amy then checked into the Rockford Motel by 11.30pm. A maid found her body at 12.30pm the next day.
Amy had used a box cutter to slash her wrist and neck. Police found a partially consumed bottle of Triaminic, a liquid cough and cold medicine for children, and Tim’s child identification card. Included in Amy’s note: a message to the motel staff that she was sorry they would have to clean up after her.
Amy’s cell phone was not found in the motel room.
None of the toys that Amy had purchased for Timmothy on their vacation were found in the motel room. This gave the family hope that maybe the belongings were still with the child.
Amy’s visitation was held on May 20, 2011 and her funeral was held the following day.
Kara has spoke about Jim’s shock during the services.
“He barely moved during the entire wake,” she recalls. “He didn’t eat anything. He didn’t speak much. He just stood next to the casket. I remember thinking, Do you need to go to the bathroom or anything? Because he never moved from that spot. He was just totally numb. We all were.”
Investigators determined that the box cutter that Amy had taken her life with had only remnants of her own blood. They did say there was a ‘concerning amount’ of blood found in her car and that blood belonged to Timmothy. The family said they thought that blood was due to a severe nosebleed that Timmothy had suffered not long before he vanished.
Police also processed the evidence found on Amy’s SUV in an attempt to narrow down where she may have left Timmothy.
Based on sediments and plant material, the vehicle was stopped for an unknown period of time on a wide gravel shoulder, gravel road, or short gravel turnout either adjacent to, or just off of, an asphalt secondary road that had at one time, been treated with glass road-marking beads. In close proximity to the gravel shoulder or road where the vehicle stopped, it backed into a grassy meadow or field to a spot that is nearly treeless. There are birch and oak trees in the general area but not directly over or at the spot where the SUV stopped. Both Queen Anne’s Lace and black mustard plants grow in a row along the border of the field or the shoulder of the road.
In addition, there is no corn growing in or adjacent to the spot where the SUV stopped, nor is there any indication that the area had been used for agriculture in the recent past. Instead, the evidence strongly suggests that grasses have been the only major plants growing in the immediate area which leads scientists to believe that it is a meadow and not, for example, a field that had once been farmland and not recently sown. Forensic results indicate that the grass was not cut which helps rule out a rural residential lawn or a park. There is also a strong likelihood that there is a pond, small stream, or creek in the area.
Scientists further believe that the meadow is most likely in Northwestern Illinois with Lee and Whiteside Counties as the most likely locations. However, areas in Carroll, Ogle, Stephenson, and Winnebago Counties cannot be ruled out. Microtrace has since performed other tests but has not been able to further narrow down the 6 county area— an area much too large for police to conduct ground searches.
Missing items that may yield clues and those of which people should be looking for include Timmothy’s Spider Man backpack, several toys and a tube of toothpaste Amy had bought for Timmothy before he disappeared; and Amy’s cell phone and I-Pass device. Since there are several state parks and other popular areas for outdoor enthusiasts in that part of Illinois, police are also hoping that hikers, bikers, boaters, and other visitors will be on the lookout for the items.
In 2013, Amy’s cellphone was found on Illinois Route 78, north of Mount Carroll. She had disposed of her phone behind a grain storage building.
Over the years, there were many reported sightings of Timmothy that did not pan out.
One of the most seemingly legitimate happened in April 2019. Residents in Newport, Kentucky called police to report a teenager who was shaken and distraught and wandering the streets. When authorities found this male, he said he was Timmothy.
All day, as they awaited the results of a DNA test, Jim, Kara, and the rest of the family agonized over the possibility that this was indeed Timmothy. “I completely got my hopes up,” Kara said. “I thought it was real, 100 percent. It just didn’t occur to me that it could not be him. I was thinking things like, Who’s going to pick him up? Does he need clothes? I’m, like, packing my stuff.”
This made headlines, but very quickly, his claim was debunked. The male turned out to be Brian Michael Rini (23).
He was released from Belmont Correctional Institution in Ohio less than a month prior to his claim, after serving about fourteen months on charges of burglary and vandalism out of Medina County.
He had a history of mental illness and had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and bipolar disorder, according to his brother. He was sentenced to two years in prison for the hoax.
Aurora Police spokesman Sgt. Bill Rowley said, “Although we are disappointed that this turned out to be a hoax, we remain diligent in our search for Timmothy, as our missing person’s case remains unsolved.”
On Timmothy’s 18th birthday in 2022, his family spoke to the media and said they believed he was still alive.
“It’s 100% a story of hope for us. The entire family believes that Tim is out there, and Tim is alive,” said Kara.
“It’s not over yet. He’s not living the life that we think he should be living because I think he should be with his father,” Kara added. “But one day, we are going to see him and you’re gonna see the other side of the story. And that’s going to be amazing.”
Kara and Tim emphatically reject the theory that the situation may have been a murder-suicide.
“Not for one second did I think Timmothy was in danger,” said Kara. “It never occurred to me.”
Kara said that she believes Amy was worried that she would lose custody of Timmothy due to her history of mental illness.
“She was worried that her losing custody of Tim was a real possibility, and that was just not something that she could handle,” Kara said.
Kara said in 2022 that she had made the same drive that Amy did. This info is from NBC Chicago:
“If you turn left, that will take you to Dubuque,” Kara said.
She remembered this road was one she and her sister had traveled as children.
Dubuque, Iowa, was a place that her family often visited.
“We spent a lot of time on Route 20 back and forth when we were young, visiting our grandparents and an aunt and uncle. Amy actually lived with my grandparents for a period of time in the ’90s. She met people in Iowa. I believe [behind] whatever happened was a connection she made there,” said Jacobs.
Kara believes that Timmothy was handed off to another family in Iowa.
In 2024, Jim released a public message to Timmothy on the anniversary of his disappearance.
‘Dear Timmothy, the years apart have been hard, I am so looking forward for us to be reunited,’ he wrote.
‘There is so much of your young life I have not been able to be a part of while you have been missing. The future is bright, and I look forward to spending time with you, and getting to know my son again.
‘Till I see you again. Love, Dad.’
The family spoke to the media again in March 2025.
‘It’s kind of unfathomable that you can just go missing and nobody ever sees you again,’ Timmothy’s aunt, Jen West, told DailyMail.com.
‘I’ve never allowed myself to believe that we’re never going to find him, even though we may not.
‘I believe he’s okay and out there living somewhere. He probably doesn’t even know who he really is.
‘But he’s an adult now and I’ve always thought that maybe something would happen, maybe a memory would pop up and start a chain reaction in his mind to help him realize […] and I still think that’s the most likely way we’ll get him back.’
The family have also said that they believe Amy’s religious beliefs may hold clues as to what happened to Timmothy. Amy had concerted to Mormonism before her death. The family have said they believe Timmothy could have been given to a family in the church and may have been raised in a remote commune with limited access to the rest of the world.
Jen believes Tim was first taken to Texas and now possibly resides within one of the numerous Mormon communities south of the border in Mexico, which would account for the lack of credible sightings of Tim over the years.
‘Amy was the only Mormon in her family and our family, and I think she wanted Tim to be raised within the church,’ said Jen.
‘It’s the only thing I can think of that is plausible, where else can you go where nobody recognizes you and you can stay hidden?
‘We think he was told something happened to his parents and ‘you’re going to live with us now’, something along those lines.
‘I think he’s in Mexico, within one of these communities that protects their own.
‘I don’t have proof, of course but it’s just a gut feeling.’
SOURCE LIST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Timmothy_Pitzen