Mother of dead Falls Twp. woman found in Burlco always held out hope

She was going to come home. Dee Lynch was sure of that. The daughter who had struggled with drugs - and disappeared in April - just had to be alive.

Molly Lynch, then 22, had left her family's Falls Township home without warning before, for a month once. That time, she ended up in Kensington.

In her two sisters' tortured dreams, Molly was gone. But Dee Lynch had a gut feeling, an intuition. "Call it what you want," she said. So the family combed the streets of Kensington every few weeks, to no avail.

On Monday, a Falls Township officer assigned to the case after Lynch was reported missing met with her family. They hadn't spoken for nearly a year. The officer wanted a sample of her DNA. Dee Lynch gave him her daughter's blue blanket, the one she had snuggled in as an infant and wrapped herself in even as an adult when she sucked her thumb.

On Wednesday, after Burlington County authorities, working with Falls Township police, announced they had positively identified Molly Lynch from remains discovered on a wooded trail in Pemberton Township in June, her mother still struggled.

"I almost still expect her to come home," said Dee Lynch, a security officer at Falls Township Park. "Part of me thinks they have the wrong person."

Although the cause of death is undetermined, it has been ruled a homicide.

"She had the most beautiful smile, literally," her mother said. "She just had these demons. She couldn't fight them. They got the best of her."

Molly Lynch struggled mostly with crack cocaine and heroin, her mother said.

But last March, she completed a 28-day stay at an inpatient rehab center, her mother said. She was home for two weeks. Then she met a boy at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

"That was the beginning of her downfall," said Lynch, 51, of Levittown.

In April, the family reported Molly missing to Falls Township police as well as Philadelphia police.

Two ATV riders found the body off Quail Run Trail. It had no clothes, jewelry, or identifying marks, according to NamUs, a national database of the unidentified dead maintained by the National Institute of Justice.

Last week, officials released a sketch that finally put a face on the remains.

After months had passed with no significant clues as to who the victim was or how she died, a forensic anthropologist worked with an artist to create a sketch of what they believed she would have looked like, giving her brown eyes, brown hair, and common features.

That brought a fresh round of publicity and an unspecified break in the case this week.

Police in Pemberton Township, Falls Township, and the Burlington County Prosecutor's Office are continuing the investigation.