Missing, Day 3,650
When The Wife and I were very young, we both worked nights. After work, we'd often spend hours driving around Anytown or the outlying backroads, windows open, radio on, soaking up the wonder of being young. On the very early hours of June 7, 1992, we were soaking up the wonder of being young and driving Ozarks backroads in a new car -- a twin-cam Saturn SL2, for the record. As we drove, we saw much evidence of high-school graduation parties well in progress. Cars with their windows painted, packed chock-full of teenagers, many hanging out the windows or the sunroof or wherever else they could find to stick their heads out.

Somewhere in Anytown, about 2:30 a.m., a couple of girls left a graduation party to rest up before driving to Branson the next morning. They went back to the home of one of the girls. The girl's single mother had presumably already gone to sleep.

Somewhere in Anytown, about 2:30 a.m., these three women were seen for the last time.

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We woke up on Monday to the news guys on KTTS radio describing a weird story. Three women -- a mother, 47; her daughter, 19; and her daughter's friend, 18 -- had disappeared from a house about a mile northeast of ours. "Gone without a trace," we heard for the first of what would be about a million times. No sign of a struggle, no sign of any plans to disappear. The women left behind their purses, their cigarettes, their medications, and, in the case of one, the clothes she was wearing the previous evening.

Police were baffled. The Bugle found itself in the midst of the biggest local crime story, probably, ever. I was safely ensconsced in the sports department at the time, so I participated as an eager reader. That era is also where my habit of changing the radio station to the news on the hour began. An entire city of 140,000 was on edge, anxious to hear news about the people now known as the "Three Missing Women."

Posters went up. Billboards went up. Three women's faces stared back at everybody in Anytown. The mom, petite, with short hair, looking much younger than her 47 years. She was a hairdresser at the place my wife had her hair done, although my wife was not one of her clients. The daughter, blond, with a blemish of some sort on her chin. The friend, with impossibly long, thick brown hair, big brown eyes, an all-American beauty. The police department said it had leads. Then it denied it had leads. The police had the public on the lookout for a mid-'60s Dodge van; they even parked one on the lawn at the police department, just in case you weren't sure what a mid-'60s Dodge van looked like.

They needed to look like they were trying. Because the fact was, they didn't have a clue.

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The Bugle ran a graphic daily, with the three women's pictures. "Missing, Day 4" ... "Missing, Day 12" ... it moved from 1A to the metro cover ... "Missing, Day 45" ... "Missing, Day 96" ... it moved inside metro ... "Missing, Day 277" ... I don't remember when we finally pulled the plug. It was sometime before I left Anytown in late 1993.

In those early years, nobody was ever named seriously as a suspect. Several people were investigated, but nothing solid ever came up. The billboards came down, the posters faded, I moved away. The families of the mom and the daughter had them declared dead after five years, so they could get on with their lives. The parents of the other girl still wait. They formed an organization to help other parents and family members who faced similar awful predicaments.

The Bugle reports that the local police have their eyes on one man, who is currently a long-term guest of the state of Texas. He was sprung from death row in Florida in 1989, 11 years after the murder of a 19-year-old theme-park employee, because the Florida Supreme Court decided the jury didn't have enough evidence against him. Instead of ordering a re-trial, they freed him.

This man lived in Anytown in 1992. He's admitted to lying about his alibi. He worked as a utility locater. He has a long criminal record, and a long record of toying with police, giving them enough information to make them think he might could possibly maybe be a suspect but not enough to build a case against him. He may be the guy, but from what I read about him, it's going to be awful hard to pin this crime on him. He was smart enough to be set completely free after being on death row for 11 years; he's probably smart enough to duck this one.

It's been 10 years. In every place I've lived since then, I find myself paying extra attention whenever a story crosses my desk about a young woman's body being found. And, almost without fail, at the top of every hour, I still turn the radio to the news.