Mitrice Richardson, who vanished after being released from an L.A. County sheriff's station early one September morning last year, may be alive and living in Las Vegas, according to law enforcement officials.
On Thursday, at a news conference in that city, they will make a public plea for her to come forward.
"Please let us know you're OK," Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, said of their message to Richardson. "You're not in trouble. You've done nothing wrong. You are not the subject of a criminal investigation. You will not be arrested."
A friend from Richardson's teenage years said he saw her in a bar at the Rio on Father's Day weekend in June, prompting a search by L.A. County sheriff's investigators. Her father, Michael Richardson, said a Sheriff's Department official told him that they had information on numerous sightings.
Whitmore wouldn't give a number, but said, "They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't believe they had credible information of her whereabouts. They want to prove or disprove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these sightings are indeed fact or indeed not fact."
So far, authorities have neither located her nor established for sure that it was Richardson who was spotted — and not simply a woman who resembles her.
"Absolutely possible," Whitmore said of the latter scenario.
Also working on the case, and to be represented at the news conference, he said, are Los Angeles police — the lead investigators in the disappearance for months — and Las Vegas police. "They want to make it definitive," Whitmore said.
Nothing has been definitive since Richardson —a Cal State Fullerton graduate whose 25th birthday was in April — showed up at Geoffrey's restaurant in Malibu last Sept. 16, acting bizarrely and speaking in gibberish. Unable to pay her $89 dinner bill, she was arrested and taken into custody.
Shortly after midnight, she was released from the Lost Hills/Malibu sheriff's station in Calabasas without her car, which had been impounded, or her cellphone and purse, which were in the car. Several months later, police investigators discovered evidence in her diaries that she was probably suffering from severe bipolar disorder.