City marks 1 year without Behrman

Jill Behrman's room, nestled in a sleepy southside neighborhood, remains just as she left it one year ago.\nFBI agents and evidence technicians filed through last June and July, retreiving journals, her address book and other personal items. They searched for clues, anything that might explain her disappearance last May 31.\nBut it still looks as though she had been packing for her summer job yesterday. It's still littered with stacks of jeans and tank tops, towels and toiletries.\nJill, a lifelong Bloomington resident who had just finished her freshman year, had been packing for her job at Camp Brosius, IU's alumni camp in Wisconsin. Scheduled to work at noon at the Student Recreational Sports Center, Jill checked her e-mail at 9:30 that morning before going out for a bike ride.\nAbout 10 minutes later, a friend saw her riding down Harrell Road, not far from her Hyde Park home. It's the last anyone saw her -- in the flesh.\nHer picture now adorns storefronts throughout Bloomington and southwest Indiana. Bright yellow ribbons hug trees as a reminder. But the flyers have crinkled and faded with time, the ribbons frayed.\nHer parents, Eric and Marilyn, still have trouble accepting her disappearance. \n"We think that we live in a very safe Bloomington community, that things like this just don't happen here," Eric said. These are things that happen in other places and to other people, and things like this don't happen here -- but it did."\nEric and Marilyn have settled into a world both familiar and foreign. \n"It's still kind of hard to go shopping," Marilyn said. "I'll pass by the Gap and wonder what's on sale. I always used to shop there for Jill. In the supermarket, I'll pick up carrots -- which she always used to eat with veggie dip -- and have to put them back.\n"It's things like that, in normal everyday life."\nThey sit on the same balcony pew in church every Sunday, but the presumed abduction of their daughter has challeged their deeply held Methodist faith.\n"You wonder why God would let something like this happen," Marilyn said. "She was normal, typical -- she was such a good person. But life goes on."\nMarilyn tried to suppress the tears while she listened to the casette player in the kitchen. Eric had just brought home a tape of Casey Kasem's recent dedication to Jill. Kleenex is only an arm's away in the kitchen.\nJust thinking about Jill often brings the Behrmans to tears. They can't bring themselves to think about what might have happened.\n"We know what might've happened," Eric said. "But we don't know what really happened. You can spend a lot of energy on the imaginative dark side. But all we have is theories." \nBut what the Behrmans want more than anything is to know -- and the prospect also terrifies them.\n"We're kind of scared to find out," Marilyn said. "We suspect it's not going to go down the good road.\n"We're not giving up," she said. "But you've got to face facts, however hard it might be"