Search for missing Tucson woman turns grim

Read, a records clerk at Palo Verde Hospital and Sunday school teacher, was last seen Thursday evening. A relative checking up on Read Friday morning after she didn't answer her phone found the woman's front door unlocked, her crutches lying on the floor and her van missing. Family members said she had polio since childhood and couldn't get around without crutches and leg braces.

Her abandoned van was found burned less than two miles away, near the intersection of East Golf Links and South Kolb roads, mid-morning Friday, police said.

Police later obtained grainy surveillance video and records showing someone getting gas for Read's van at the Conoco station south of the intersection of East Golf Links and South Kolb roads and trying, unsuccessfully, to use her credit card to get money from an ATM machine at the Wells Fargo bank north of the intersection.

Tuesday police searched a vacant apartment complex undergoing renovation at 7001 E. Golf Links Road just west of the intersection, said Tucson Police Department spokesman Sgt. Fabian Pacheco.

He said the search went over some of the same areas covered before and included a unit-by-unit search of the apartment complex and a search of Lakeside Park area further east on Kolb Road.

Pacheco said workers involved in the complex renovation were asked to leave while search crews with the cadaver dogs went through each of the apartments.

He said the search at Lakeside Park did not include dragging the lake; he said the trained dogs could detect a body nearby, even if it were underwater.

Read's family has been circulating fliers, going door-to-door near the single woman’s home in the 7300 block of East Marigold Circle asking for the public's help in solving the disappearance.