Central Pennsylvania woman, Brenda Heist, 51, who went missing 11 years ago and was pronounced dead in 2010, has turned herself into the police in Florida.
Heist disappeared after dropping off her two children to school, with dinner defrosting and the laundry not even finished yet. She had been going through a divorce with Lee Heist, now remarried, and she was denied housing assistance.
According to ABC News, this led her to leave with hitchhikers who befriended her in a park.
After hitchhiking to South Florida and sleeping under bridges, she lived with a man in a trailer for seven years before becoming homeless and living in a tent community for the last two.
On Friday, she turned herself into Monroe County sheriff's deputies in Key Largo, Florida. She said she had been arrested recently with a different name. She informed them she was a missing person.
Heist’s ex-husband, who has collected on a life insurance policy on her, said at a news conference on Wednesday that he’s angry with her because he was deemed suspect after her disappearance.
Orlando’s WFTV notes her kids were 8 and 12 when she left and now one is in college and the other is a college graduate.
"She said she thought of her family and children everyday and her parents. However, she never acted on that, never made any phone calls, not one,” Detective John Schofield from the Lititz Borough Police Department said.