Brenda Heist vanished in February 2002 after last being seen dropping off her children at school.
She was going through a divorce from Lee Heist and was applying for housing assistance so that she could get her own apartment.
However, her request was denied, Schofield said earlier.
“She was very upset, she was sitting in a park crying, thinking about how she would raise her children, feeling sorry for herself,” he said.
It wasn’t long before she was approached by two males and a female who asked her what was wrong. After she told them what had happened, they invited her to hitchhike with them down to Florida.
“At a whim, she decided at that very moment, she would go along with them,” Schofield said.
Schofield spoke to Heist at length, and she explained where she had been for the past 11 years.
“She was very emotional; she hung her head; she’s ashamed. She was crying when I met with her. She knows what she did was completely wrong, but all that while, she’d never made one effort to call or contact her family at all,” Schofield said.
Heist told police she spent the first two years homeless, living under bridges, eating food thrown out by restaurants after they closed.
For the next seven years, she lived in a camper with a man she had met. They made money as day laborers, cleaning boats and doing other odd jobs for which they didn’t have to show ID and were paid in cash.
After that relationship soured, Schofield said, she lived on the street again for another two years.
“The hardest thing I had to deal with was, the families of some of my children’s friends would not let them play with them, because of what they thought of me. That just tore me apart. I hope they’ve learned a lesson not to prejudge,” he said.
“I don’t think we know the full story yet,” Schofield told CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” on Friday.
“The facts are she left, she turned her back on her family. She started a new life down in Florida … Whether she lived homeless or whether she lived a wonderful life as a live-in housekeeper, I don’t think that was for the 11 years, that was just for the last few years here.”
Schofield said Heist is still looking at charges for false IDs, thefts and possession of drugs and drugs paraphernalia in Florida. There also may be false ID and theft charges to face in Pennsylvania, he said.
