By AMY WESTFELDT
Associated Press

NEW YORK - On the night before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, Sneha Anne Philip bought three pairs of shoes, bed linens and lingerie at a department store across from the World Trade Center. She was never heard from again.

Wild theories circulated about the 31-year-old doctor's whereabouts, along with the pictures her grieving husband left on billboards across the city.

Investigators initially thought that she may have orchestrated her own disappearance to get away from a troubled marriage, fights about suspected affairs with women and a drinking problem that threatened her job. She could have been kidnapped or murdered by a stranger, her loved ones feared.

Her family eventually settled on one heartbreaking answer to the mystery: Philip had gone to the trade center on Sept. 11 and died there. An appeals court agreed with them, declaring Jan. 31 that she died at the trade center and asking that her named be added to the official Sept. 11 death toll.

"As a family, we were obviously hopeful that, ‘OK, she's still alive,' in the beginning," her brother, Ashwin Philips, said Friday. "Obviously as time goes on, you realize, ‘OK, this is what happened.' She lived two blocks from the World Trade Center.' "

The case has been shrouded in mystery ever since the fires were raging at ground zero. Her husband rushed home to their apartment and found no sign of her.

Her body and belongings were never recovered at the trade-center site, but no trace has been found of many other victims. More than 1,100 people believed killed on Sept. 11 have still no identifiable remains. Philip also left her passport and identification at home, and never used her credit cards again.

Philip, a resident physician at St. Vincent's Hospital in Staten Island, did not work at the trade center and no one had seen her since Sept. 10, making it impossible to link her to ground zero, officials initially said. Because of that, she was removed from the Sept. 11 victims' list in 2004.

The family hopes to have her added to the death toll again. Her husband, Ron Lieberman, had gone to court to secure a place for his wife on the Sept. 11 memorial, not for the right to file wrongful-death suits, said his lawyer, Marc Bogatin. The federal Sept. 11 Victims Compensation Fund went out of business in 2003.

Philip was born in India and had lived with her husband in New York for about a year before the attacks. Lieberman is also a doctor, and the couple met at medical school in Chicago.

The last time Lieberman saw her, they fought outside a courthouse, where Philip had pleaded not guilty to filing a false complaint against a colleague, according to court papers filed in 2005. Lieberman accused her of "abusing drugs and alcohol and ... conducting bisexual acts," according to a Surrogate's Court ruling that refused to rule her a Sept. 11 victim.

She didn't come home to their apartment in Battery Park City after shopping at Century 21; a police detective overseeing her case thought he saw her on a videotape in her apartment building's lobby minutes before the first plane hit the north tower on Sept. 11. But her husband could not recognize her from the video.

A private investigator found that she sometimes stayed out all night drinking, and was let go from a previous job because of alcohol problems and tardiness, according to court papers.

But in last week's ruling, the state Supreme Court's Appellate Division rejected a court-appointed guardian's report that Philip may have risked her life by abusing alcohol and drugs, saying the sources in the report weren't credible and ruling that there was no proof she had died anywhere else in New York.

"She wasn't kidnapped by Martians," said Bogatin. "She's not hiding.... She never had any plans to leave."

Bogatin said that police initially investigated the possibility she was killed by a stranger, but said her body was likely to have been discovered. Philip Philip, the doctor's father, said that Philip had recently told her mother she had wanted to visit Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top floor of the trade center.

She likely attended a party held by the city's South Asian community in a hotel in the trade-center complex on Sept. 10, her brother said Friday. The twin towers would have been on her route home in the morning, and her brother said she may have died while helping wounded people in front of the towers.

"She wouldn't run away if the people needed help," Philips said.

The appeals panel said that while no direct evidence linked her to the trade-center site, it is "highly probable" she was there. A New York court issued a similar ruling in 2002 in the case of Juan LaFuente, a 61-year-old computer analyst who worked several blocks away from the trade center.

LaFuente has been added to the official victims' list and will be named on the Sept. 11 memorial. The medical examiner's office said it would review the ruling for Philip before making a decision.

Philip's family attended ceremonies at ground zero over the years, and buried an urn filled with trade-center ashes in her memory near her parents' upstate home. Ashwin Philips, 39, went to the site last year for the first time.

"It was good to finally be able to go there and just come full circle," he said.

His family had followed news of a recent renewed search for human remains at the site and hoped that one day someone would find his sister. Because he knows that some answers still can't be found.

"This is the most commonsense thing that happened to her," he said. "It's not that we have 100 percent proof. With all the information that we have, this is the most likely explanation."