Levitz still wore heels, but she also dressed in turtlenecks and Capri leggings and wore her blond hair pulled back. When her sister talked about buying some cheap dresses for her granddaughters to play dress-up, Levitz volunteered her evening gowns.

"I said, 'Jacquie, I'm talking about $5 dresses, not $5000 gowns' and she just said, 'I don't ever plan to put on another one anyway,'" recalled Shivers.

Backyard of Levitz's home

She spent her days supervising a construction crew that sometimes grew to 40 men. She made them coffee and joked with them, but she also wore a hard hat and inspected their work closely.

There was to be a children's room with kid-size furniture for her grandnieces and nephews, a den with comfy recliners for her brothers-in-law to watch sports, and a master bedroom with a safari theme for her son. Walter Bolton still lived near Washington, D.C. He had never married and according to Moody, Levitz was trying to get him to move to Vicksburg.

Levitz's world in Vicksburg was fairly small.

"She had not really started to socialize. She went to one little Mary Kay party — just to meet her neighbors. She would never wear Mary Kay," said Shivers of the makeup line popular in middle-America.

The Investigation

In the days after Levitz's disappearance, local authorities determined she was last seen late Saturday afternoon, picking at wallpaper samples in Vicksburg.

Because the case was a potential kidnapping with interstate implications, the FBI joined the investigation. Agents fanned out across California, Florida and Washington, D.C., combed through Levitz's business and legal files and interviewed her family and acquaintances.

"We just cooperated fully," said her lawyer, Marschall. When asked who gained from her disappearance or death, the lawyer answered, "No one as far as I could tell. Obviously her son is a beneficiary, but he's not and has never been considered a suspect. He was physically thousands of miles away when this happened."

According to relatives, Bolton is in poor health. He inherited about $4 million when his mother was officially declared dead, five years after her disappearance.

Sheriffs officers and police interviewed scores of locals, in fact anyone who knew she was in Vicksburg.

"Not too many people knew. I sure didn't. I'd never even heard of Levitz furniture before this," Brown said.

Each member of the construction crew was questioned, but everyone cooperated and there were no obvious threats to Levitz.

"There were no police reports to indicate she had been followed or threatened or anything like that," said Warren County Sheriff Martin Pace, the lead investigator in the case before he was elected to his current post.