State investigators trying again to solve case of woman who disappeared 67 years ago

By: JournalNow Staff | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 18, 2008

WILMINGTON --

State investigators have returned to Carolina Beach in an attempt to solve the case of a woman who disappeared with her young daughter 67 years ago.
The Star-News of Wilmington reported that Carolina Beach Police Chief William Younginer said the State Bureau of Investigation reopened the case after a relative of the two saw ground-penetrating radar technology used on a police television show.
The SBI used the equipment last Thursday to scan a concrete slab below a home in Carolina Beach with the hope of finding the bodies.
Leila Bryan, 36, and her 4-year-old daughter Mary Rachel disappeared on May 10, 1941. Agents with the SBI and other law enforcement officials tracked leads from New York to Florida looking for them, according to old newspaper articles.
Younginer said Leila Bryan's husband, E.C. Bryan, who is now deceased, had been a suspect. Younginer also said Bryan laid concrete beneath the home, which had been on stilts, and left soon after.
But a story about the case, called "The Incredible Disappearance," by Pat Clausen, which is posted on the Internet, includes newspaper clippings from the early 1940s.
According to an article in the 1941 issue of the Wilmington Morning Star, Leila Bryan and Mary Rachel left home the night they disappeared. They headed to a nearby grocery store in a black Ford Coupe and were never seen again.
The next day, Carolina Beach police and New Hanover County sheriff's deputies searched the woods between Carolina Beach and Wilmington.
In the days that followed, police used a private airplane to search the county's back roads for Bryan's Ford, and police dragged the Cape Fear River as well as inlets off the inland waterway.
Six weeks after the disappearance, the SBI director telegraphed the War Department in Washington, D.C., and asked for 200 troops to help comb the swamps. The newspaper stories don't show whether the request was granted.
A year after the disappearance, authorities hoped technology would lead them to Leila Bryan's Ford. Authorities used an "electric submersible detector" to search the inland waterway near U.S. 421, according to The News & Observer of Raleigh.
Now, decades later, police are once again hoping modern technology brings the break they need.
In the coming days, the SBI will analyze images they took last Thursday with the ground-penetrating radar, Younginer said.