Where are they?

Search continues for missing family

JOLIET - Thomas and Tracy Bockhol's boss at Merichka's restaurant remembered the brother and sister telling of the dangers involved in delivering newspapers in the early morning with their mother on the family's near West Side route.

"All of us employees here, we'd tell them, 'Why do you guys keep doing this?'" said Tom Zazzetti, manager of the Theodore Street restaurant. "Did they drive up on a drug deal at three in the morning you don't know."

Nobody seems to know what happened to Tom, 23, Tracy, 26, and their mother Karen Bockhol, 49, after the three left The Herald News distribution center on Caterpillar Drive about 4 a.m. to deliver papers on the route near their Stone Street home.

Karen's son, Wayne Bockhol, expected his mother, brother and sister to return home about 7:30 a.m. The route has been in his family for 23 years.

When they did not he tried calling his mother on her cell phone and contacting her by her pager, all to no avail. Then he turned to the police for help.

Detectives interviewed family members the last two days and officers have scoured the city looking for the Bockhols and the 1989 white Dodge Caravan they drove on their route.

A tollway authority helicopter flew over the city, looking for signs of the vanished family Monday morning, and at least three people called police to say they had spotted the van and it's distinctive handicap license plate BEANA 8.

"We've had a lot of calls," said Joliet police Cmdr. James Grace. "A lot of people are well intentioned."

Sightings were reported in town and as far away as Indiana.

Another man, Dave Rosol of LaGrange Park, told The Herald News he saw the van, driven by a woman with blond hair, on southbound Interstate 94 near Deerfield about 11:30 p.m. Sunday night.

"There was nothing abnormal about it that I noticed," Rosol said, noting that the license plate caught his attention.

"Then when the news came on I thought, gosh, could that be the same one?" Rosol said. "I'm almost certain it was."

Police also investigated reports of an early Sunday morning traffic accident involving a white van at the intersection of Bridge and Bluff streets.

A woman told detectives she saw the accident from the window of her nearby Evergreen Terrace apartment about 4:30 a.m., said Joliet police Lt. James Stewart. Another man told police he witnessed the accident between 6:30 and 7 a.m.

Police photographed the intersection and skidmarks tearing up a grass panel between the street and sidewalk. Stewart said he doubts the ripped up grass was left by the van accident, which witnesses said was minor and occurred in the intersection.

Wayne Bockhol was skeptical about the notion his mother had been in a van accident.

"If there was, she would have called somebody," he said. "My mom's so paranoid, she'd call."

Adding to the mystery is that most mornings the Bockhols split up the route, with Thomas walking door to door to houses west of Center Street and Tracy and Karen delivering east of Center from the van.

"Maybe she saw something and said, 'Forget it, you're going with me,'" Wayne Bockhol suggested.

The Bockhols were known by their fellow newspaper carriers as diligent and friendly. Zazzetti, who hired Thomas and Tracy to work at Merichka's eight years ago, said they were model employees at the restaurant as well.

"They've never hardly requested any days off here," he said. "Tom would come into work sick. They worked hard for their money, they went the extra mile."

The brother and sister average between 40 and 50 hours a week at the restaurant. Saturday night they left about 9 p.m. and were due at the distribution center about 2 a.m. Zazzetti was one of the last at Merichka's to see them.

"It doesn't make any sense to me," he said. "If somebody tried to rob them, they'd take the shirts off their backs to get rid of them. They would take the shirts off their backs for anyone."