Malden police said yesterday that Colleen Hurley, a former law school student who was reported missing more than 18 months ago, was accidentally removed from a computerized missing persons network.

Police Lieutenant Tom Swanson said Hurley's name, which was last on the list in November 2000, may have been deleted after a computer ''meltdown.'' The database is linked to other police departments across the state and can be accessed through a nationwide system.

''She's not in our database. She's not in the statewide database,'' he said. ''We had a little computer meltdown, and we don't actually have anything on her.''

Despite the error, Hurley's parents say Malden police kept telling them that their daughter's missing-person case was active and that she was listed on the computer registry. The Hurleys said police insisted that there was little they could do to bring her home because she is an adult capable of making her own decisions.

Also yesterday, Acting Governor Jane Swift's office contacted the Hurleys at their Connecticut home and asked them to testify in Boston before the next meeting of the Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence.

The Hurleys believe that their daughter, who they say is intelligent but sheltered and inexperienced with men, is being abused and controlled by a boyfriend she met a few months before she vanished.

''For a year and a half we've been banging on every door and we couldn't get anyone to listen to us,'' Bill Hurley said in a telephone interview yesterday. ''Even when (missing Washington intern) Chandra Levy was in the news, they blew us off. It's encouraging to us now that people out there are recognizing what is happening.''

Still, the Hurleys say, the publicity hasn't yielded any new clues on their daughter's fate, and she hasn't called home.

''I try not to think of the worst case scenario,'' Bill Hurley said. ''I try to think of the best case - that she's just mad at her mother and me and she just doesn't want to talk to us.''

Colleen Hurley has been missing since June 2000, shortly after participating in a Suffolk Law School graduation ceremony. Friends and her parents say she had been dating an unemployed man who lived with his parents around the corner from Colleen's Malden apartment.

After meeting him, her parents say, Colleen Hurley became more and more withdrawn; she stopped seeing her friends and calling her parents and stopped attending law school, even though she participated in graduation exercises with her class.

Bill Hurley said he was frustrated but not surprised that Malden police did not inform them that information about his daughter was no longer on their missing-persons computer database.

''It's always been the runaround,'' he said. ''I was told numerous times, `There's no evidence of a crime, and as far as we're concerned she's a willing participant''' in her situation.

Bill Hurley said the police always reassured him that his daughter's name remained on the missing persons list, something he had considered his last, best hope of finding her.

''Unfortunately, Colleen Hurley's story is a wrenching but all too common tale,'' said Barbara Kennedy, executive director of the governor's domestic violence panel.

Boston Globe

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2002