Is her character cut out of the 97 minute version? Seriously, I watched the film just 2 or 3 days ago and don't recall seeing her. Perhaps she just looked like hell and I didn't recognize her? The name of her character Rachel Grayson doesn't ring a bell either. Maybe this is just a brain fart on my part.
It maybe that different television networks have prepared their own shorter versions because she was certainly entirely absent from the one I've seen numerous times over recent years.
If she isn't in the shorter version, then the ending doesn't make sense, as you find out that everything she said was true . I watched this on tv recently, and she was in it, so the ending made sense to me.
I never said the cuts made sense! I'm in the UK, so it may be that we're talking about different shorter versions - the BBC showed this quite regularly from 1994 up until about ten years ago, the initial broadcast was the full two-part version but subsequently it only appeared as a single feature-length one, this version definitely omitted Kidder's character.
There definitely are different edits of this film. The 95-min. VHS I have (which was distributed by a company called World Vision--don't know if they still exist) does have Kidder's 'trance' scene with Riley, but omits the introduction of her character where she initially contacts the police station.