Jandi Hughes was almost 8 years old when she was reunited with her mother.

Hughes remembers the meeting was arranged because her mother, Rhonda Karren, "was getting her life in order." Two weeks later, on Sept. 28, 1987, the Vernal mother went missing, and evidence at the scene showed that foul play was involved.

Hughes remembers the day she met her mother as though it were yesterday, but the sad events surrounding her mother's disappearance are blurry.

"The day I met her is so vivid in my mind," she said.

Hughes' family, both her father and the paternal grandparents who raised her, stayed away from any discussion of Karren, and even as a child, Hughes knew not to ask questions.

"We met her, and it was like that was the end of it," she said.

If Hughes had few details, the community had plenty. Almost everyone living in Vernal in the late 1980s knew that police believed Karren had been kidnapped and most likely murdered. Karren was 31 at the time and in the process of divorcing her third husband.

Police later speculated that her body may have been put down a well along with acid in an attempt to permanently erase the crime. Efforts late last year to use new technology to find Karren's killer failed to come up with anything that would be useful to investigators in court.

But all of that matters little to Hughes, a 27-year-old single mother of two, because for the first time since her mother disappeared almost 20 years ago, there will be some closure for the family.

This Saturday at 10 a.m. a memorial service will be held for Karren at Thompson-Blackburn Mortuary in Vernal — the first such service since 1987. In addition, a marker will eventually be placed in the Maeser Cemetery, providing a place where her children and grandchildren, her widowed mother — Audrey Slaugh — and friends can grieve.

Hughes said she has envisioned putting up some type of marker for years.

"I can go there when I am having a bad day, I can tell her all the important events that happen in my life," Hughes said. "I can feel like she can be there."

Hughes' father didn't like to talk about Karren. So Hughes waited until she was 16 to do some research on her own.

She went to the library in Vernal and searched for hours through the records. When she finally found a local newspaper article about her mother's disappearance, she was devastated.

"She didn't even make the front page," Hughes said. "It was on the third page with a little article. ... I was so upset, I stormed out of the library."

But she said she will never give up hope that someday her mother's body will be found.

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E-mail: lezleewhiting@hotmail.com