Sharon Pulaski was born at some time in 1963 to Andrew and Sophie (nee Urbanski) Pulaski in Alden, NY. The couple were married in Cheektowaga on November 7, 1959 and had three children: two boys (Andrew and Brian) and Sharon. Mr. Pulaski served in the US Army, and the family eventually settled down at 1369 Townline Road on the Lancaster/Alden border. Sharon graduated from Alden High School in 1980, but aside from that little is known about her background. I found some pictures of her on classmates.com, and going through her high school yearbook I was able to see that she participated in a number of different extracurricular activities, including poetry workshop, photography club, and science club. From what I’ve gathered (through comments on social media posts about her), the Pulaski’s were a very close-knit, loving Roman Catholic family that were private and mostly kept to themselves. They were very involved with their church and helping people in the local community.

Sharon had green eyes, brown hair, was 5’4″ tall, weighed 130 pounds and wore corrective lenses. She had a two inch long scar on her right shoulder, a tattoo of a heart on her right arm, and was last seen wearing white sneakers, blue jeans, and either a black or white shirt. On October 7, 1983 Sharon gave birth to a son named Steven, who she raised at her parent’s home up to her disappearance. Strangely enough, I went to high school with him and graduated the year before him. We were in different social circles and I didn’t hang out with him but I remember he was nice and very passionate about his faith.

Before she left, Sharon told her mother that she was running to the store but would be back in fifteen minutes. Mr. Pulaski reported to law enforcement that his twenty-four year daughter had left home on July 20, 1987 and never returned home; she has not been seen or heard from since. Sharon left the residence in her vehicle, a blue 1985 Plymouth Reliant with NY tags, license plate number 6679-BLZ. Just a few months later in August of 1987 Pulaski’s vehicle was pulled over in California, however she was not one of the four people inside. To be fair, she was reported missing in New York and it was the 1980’s. There was a good chance the officer had no idea the vehicle’s owner was missing. But wouldn’t it be suspicious regardless? A car with New York plates gets pulled over across the country and its owner isn’t one of the four occupants inside? Obviously it was eventually figured out (as we know about it), but I wonder if the cop that pulled the car over even bothered getting the names of the people inside? Was this situation ever revisited and were they questioned? For some reason a police report was never filed and the individuals were never taken in for questioning. In September 1987 Pulaski’s sedan was found abandoned in Seattle.

After I posted on a few Alden, NY Facebook groups asking for more information about Sharon, I had a few people reach out to me that knew her. Additionally, going through the comments, a few acquaintances of hers said that they had absolutely no idea where she went and didn’t even have so much as a working theory as to what happened to her. According to a post about Sharon on the Facebook group  ‘Jane Does and Missing 1970’s-1980’s,’ she did on occasion take off for short periods of time but always came back… until she didn’t. An individual by the name of Andrew Pulaski commented that ‘she’s my aunt, she disappeared the day of mother’s baby shower, according to my parents she said she wasn’t able to attend that day and when they came back home she was gone but all of her son’s documents (SSN, birth certificate, medical docs) were left neatly on the bed.’ I also got some information about Pulaski from a childhood friend of mine, Michael Mack. He said his mom Karen (who I also know, as they lived down the street from my family for many years) grew up with her. When I spoke to her a few days later she confirmed that they were best friends until she disappeared. Just like everyone else I spoke with, Karen had absolutely no idea what happened to Sharon or where she went. It’s as if the earth just swallowed her up.

This is just my own personal observation, but I find that investigating agencies are far less likely to take a missing persons case seriously if they feel the individual left in any way on their own accord. I even look at Bundy cases, like Brenda Ball and Donna Manson, who were both frequent hitchhikers and would often take off for brief periods of time before eventually turning up again. LE was extremely hesitant to even link Balls disappearance to the other Ted murders that were taking place all over the Seattle area at the time (although it was her skull that was the first one discovered at Taylor Mountain on March 1, 1975). I wonder if that’s why I couldn’t find any articles or news reports on Sharon, because they thought she was a runaway. Fourteen year old Brenda Joy Baker also comes to mind, as her disappearance didn’t make the news until her body was discovered (for my non-Bundy readers, she was a frequent hitchhiker that ran away from home on multiple occasions and was last seen getting into a pick-up truck in May 1974).

Looking into it there were quite a few possible routes to get to the golden state from Alden. One incredibly frustrating part of all this is the lack of information out there. California is a large state… Where exactly was her car pulled over? It’s at least a day and a half trip, and that’s driving straight through. I think there’s a few different possibilities that could have happened to Sharon… maybe she got tired of small town living and simply left? That theory reminds me of Nancy Perry-Baird out of Utah, who vanished without a trace from the gas station she worked at on the 4th of July in 1975. Like Pulaski, Nancy also had a young son, roughly the same age as Steven. But why would anyone willingly leave their child behind? And Perry-Baird was GONE gone (just like Sharon). Or was there maybe a more sinister aspect to her disappearance? Perhaps she picked up a hitchhiker that pulled a weapon on her, taking control and subduing the young mother? Or did she plan on taking off only for a few days but something happened along the way that prevented her from returning home. One possible suggestion I read on a FB post was maybe she fell in with the wrong crowd, which somehow resulted in her untimely demise? But where would she be after all this time? According to Karen Mack, NO ONE has any clue what happened to her. Her disappearance came completely out of left field to everybody and made absolutely no sense.

In a write-up for Pulaski on the Facebook page ‘Jane Does and Missing 1970’s-1980’s,’ someone commented that serial killer Tommy Lee Sells was in the general western NY area just before Pulaski disappeared in 1987, and sure as shit they were right. Also referred to as The Coast to Coast Killer, Sells killed twenty-eight year old Suzanne M. Korza on May 2, 1987 after getting in a fight with her fiance and leaving a Lockport bar. Eight years later her skeletal remains were found at the base of an escarpment near Niagara Falls. Susan was from Lancaser, NY and strangely enough went to the same high school as my Mom (St. Mary’s, but Suzanne was a couple of years younger than she was). Korza’s official date of death is listed as September 5, 1995, which was the date she was found. Her case went unsolved until 2004, when Sells confessed to her murder while he was waiting to be executed for the murder of a young girl in Texas.

On December 31, 1999 Sells entered a Del Rio residence and sexually assaulted 13-year old Kaylene Harris. He sexually assaulted then killed the teenager, stabbing her sixteen times and slashing her throat. He then cut the throat of her friend, 10 year old Krystal Surles, who luckily survived the brutal attack. Unfortunately, Sells was a lot like Henry Lee Lucas and liked to confess to murders and crimes he didn’t commit (he claimed to have killed over 70 people). Regardless of what the number really was, he was found guilty of killing Harris on September 18, 2000. Two days later he was sentenced to death. Because of his link to Lockport (which is about 45 to 55 minutes away from Alden), Pulaski and a second unidentified missing woman were deemed to be possibly linked to Sells. Interestingly enough, Facebook user Kelly Rosemellia commented that the serial killer being considered a potential suspect in Sharon’s disappearance was just a crackpot theory dreamt up by some lazy detectives that didn’t feel like investigating her disappearance properly. Additionally, most people from the general Alden area that knew Pulaski don’t buy the theory that Sells had something to do with her disappearance.

Just a few months after Sharon disappeared on October 15, 1987, Sells drugged Stefanie Stroh with LSD before he strangled her to death. Stroh was hitchhiking home to San Francisco after a year-long trek through Europe and Asia. The day the 20-year-old disappeared Stefanie was seen standing next a road with her thumb out in Winnemucca, Nevada. After accepting a ride from the serial killer, Sells killed her. He then encased her feet in concrete and dumped her remains in a desert hot spring. Her body has never been recovered. Sells was executed by lethal injection at the age of forty-nine at 6:14 PM on April 3, 2014.

According to one Facebook user whose parents lived across the street from the Pulaski family, ‘We weren’t close, but they seemed like a nice hard working family. I asked my parents if they recalled anything about the event. They do remember her leaving and never returning. And my Dad recalled that their family received a call saying they found her car down south. Our family just assumed that she ran away to start a new life. I don’t recall ever seeing any news reports or articles about her saying that she was missing.’

I had a new friend reach out to me about the fact that Sharon’s father was a member of the Knights of Columbus. Per his obituary, Andrew Pulaski specifically was a Fourth Degree member of the Father John Schaus Council of the K of C’s, 4652. The Fourth Degree is the highest degree of the order and members who reach this elite status are addressed as ‘Sir Knight.’ In 1985, Pulaski was given the title of man of the year by the Holy Name Society and was even named knight of the year by the Father Joseph Schaus Council in 1987. I mean this makes sense, as the Pulaski family was very active at their home parish of St. John the Baptist out of Alden. Looking into it, the Knights of Columbus is the world’s largest Catholic family fraternal service organization, with 1.7 million participants. It provides its members and their families with volunteer opportunities in service to the Catholic Church, their communities, families and young people. This new friend however suggested a more ominous, ritualistic aspect surrounding the society, and even suggested that they possibly had something to do with Sharon Pulaski’s disappearance. I mean, no secret society is going to admit to being a secret society. Of course they’re going to say they don’t have anything less than the very best of intentions. On a semi-related note, I had a friend from elementary school whose mother accidentally walked in on a Masons meeting one night and saw something… dark, and not exactly right (I don’t know if she had to use their bathroom or needed directions or what exactly). My GF said it was almost as if her mom walked in on a ritual of some sort… thankfully she realized that she shouldn’t have been there and quickly left.

After graduating from high school in 2002, Steven went on to attend ECC for a bit before eventually getting hired at FedEx. Unfortunately, while looking for information about his mom I learned he died sometime in 2020. I couldn’t find any sort of obituary for him. Sharon’s dad Andrew passed away on May 11, 1989 in Buffalo, and her mother died on February 15, 2013. Her brother Andrew lives in Alden and Brian resides in Lancaster. If Sharon was alive in November 2023 she would be sixty years old.