Article appeared April 26, 2006 on page 1A

Since her return to her family, I had hoped to interview 15-year-old Elizabeth Thomsen. I had developed a good relationship with the family through past interviews and articles. After several days of unreturned phone calls, a photographer and I decided to take a chance and show up at the family farm. Thomsen's parents let us sit down with Elizabeth noting they had been satisfied with previous articles.

This series of articles won third place for continued news coverage in the 2005-06 New York State Associated Press Association contest.

COLUMBUS - The night before police found her in Maryland, Elizabeth Thomsen said she broke down. "I stayed up all night crying because I missed the family," Thomsen said Tuesday.

Now back home with her parents and five siblings at their Chenango County farm, 15-year-old Thomsen struggles with mixed emotions. She feels bad about the suffering her family endured while she was gone, but she still loves Lewis J. Lee, the 54-year-old former pastor with whom she ran away on March 18.

"I still love him," Thomsen said. "That's not going to change. I'm not afraid of that. I'll tell the world about that."

Police seized as evidence a gold and diamond ring that Lee had given Thomsen.

Lee faces several felony counts of custodial interference and rape in connection with his relationship with Thomsen. Police had chased Lee and Thomsen through several Southern states for a month until a tip from Lee's daughter, who lives in Maryland, led police to Lee's location on April 17. He is now in Chenango County Jail on $1 million cash bail.

Thomsen, a bright-eyed, outgoing youth, describes those four weeks with Lee as "the trip." During the month on the run, she fell in love with the Tennessee countryside and hopes to return there someday. She also remembered the mountains of West Virginia and close brushes with police.

She and Lee were at a diner in a small Tennessee town when a waitress recognized them. "I actually saw her calling the police," Thomsen said. She and Lee left quickly, and "drove for four or five hours."

Her parents described the month without their daughter as a nightmare. Now that their daughter is home, the family is trying to establish a normal routine. They sat on the couch and laughed at home movies the first night Elizabeth came home. Thomsen, who is home-schooled, is busy making up for a month of lost schoolwork. Tuesday, a stack of books were piled on the kitchen table in front of her.

The Thomsens are preparing for the wedding of Elizabeth's older sister, Candace, in May. Elizabeth, her mother and her sisters went shopping on Saturday, while her father and older brother were busy logging. The logging is a necessary supplement to the family's income after milk prices fell again this year, Marsha Thomsen said.

The Thomsens live on a 75-cow dairy farm in Columbus, a rural community in the northeast corner of Chenango County. It's a family farm, her father Mike Thomsen had said, and the whole family works on the farm. It's a life Elizabeth said she loves.

"I'm proud of that (growing up on the farm)," she said. "I wouldn't want to change my childhood." Life on the farm, she said, teaches responsibility.

Elizabeth's young brothers and sisters ran through the house Tuesday, shouting and laughing. Their faces were red and blue from popsicles earlier that afternoon. Elizabeth held her 18-month-old brother, Joseph, on her lap when she talked.

When Elizabeth was gone, Marsha said, the house was somber. "They were very quiet and solemn," she said of her children. "Especially little Anna (who is 3 years old)."

At home with her family, her school work and the farm, Elizabeth is looking toward the future.

"I'm mostly trying to figure out what I'm going to do, where I'm going from here," Elizabeth said. She said she thinks about going to college to be a nurse. She's practicing the guitar and working on her singing. She'd love to move to Tennessee and be a singer, she said.

"I think maybe she thought I would miss her help on the farm the most," Marsha Thomsen said of her daughter. "That's not what I missed. More than anything, I missed her smile, her joking around. Her happy-go-lucky-ness. She added sunshine to every day."