Girl Missing, Bay Village, OH - 1989
The unsolved abduction and murder of my hometown neighbor
A quarter was the price of quelling the what-ifs. Always a quarter or two zipped into the smaller pouch of our backpacks, jingling around with an extra house key and Rain-Blo wrappers. What if our bikes got flat tires? Or we lent our key to our little sister? What if we had to walk to the Superette to use the payphone, which smelled of four decades of cigarette smoke, to call our mom at work?
In 1989, we had a mind map of all the nearby pay phones in case we had to make an emergency call: the lobbies of the library and grocery store; outside the women’s changing room at the city pool; in the vestibule at church. We also knew whose answering machine picked up on the third ring, and how to make a collect call without paying for it (MOM.PICKMEUP.LIBRARY). We sometimes invented mnemonic devices for numbers that mattered. Even if we didn’t write them down, they would stay with us.
Kids had always carried pocket change just in case, but the disappearance of Amy from this quiet hamlet along Lake Erie yanked the curtains off our bedroom windows.
Kids had always carried pocket change just in case, but the disappearance of Amy from this quiet hamlet along Lake Erie yanked the curtains off our bedroom windows. Our young lives, buffered by suburban comforts: nets on every basketball hoop, wood chips under every jungle gym, bikes rarely locked. But underneath the manicured lawns rumbled something more insidious.
First, the man had called Amy’s home phone. Then, he had arranged to meet her after school at an ice cream parlor. Description: White male, medium build and height, wire rimmed glasses, moppy haircut. We believed the man in the police sketch took her in broad daylight under the guise of someone who wanted to help her buy a present to celebrate her mother’s new promotion.
After Amy, parents said, “Here’s an extra quarter for your backpack.” They said, “Don’t go anywhere with someone you don’t know—even if they say it would make us happy.” Stranger Danger was the pernicious fear, the what-ifs, the who-coulds, the where-of- all-places, the unanswerable unfathomables that every parent and every child tried not to speak aloud as the newspaper splashed new leads and theories about Amy and the man on the front page. We came of age still fearing The Stranger, rather than the strange ways a familiar relationship could turn on us, or the way a night could turn strange, or how the person in the mirror could become a stranger even to our very self.
We all looked for Amy. We memorized the details of her face, as if the horse earrings dangling from her ears in her school photo would be the same ones we would recognize out in the world. A few days after she disappeared, we set out trick-or-treating under a deep, navy sky. We walked up to the homes of strangers and willingly took the candy. But it was Amy who haunted our thoughts. Where was she? Why wasn’t she able to call her parents? If she didn’t have a quarter, didn’t she know how to make a collect call?
We looked both ways when we crossed Wolf Road on our mountain bikes. Amy walked this same pavement from her school to the shopping plaza. Nothing will ever chill our spine like the thought of her bike parked in the rack, alone under that same deep, navy sky. All the rides it would not take home, and the little girl who would not outgrow it by next summer.
A few days after she disappeared, we set out trick-or-treating under a deep, navy sky. We walked up to the homes of strangers and willingly took the candy. But it was Amy who haunted our thoughts. Where was she? Why wasn’t she able to call her parents? If she didn’t have a quarter, didn’t she know how to make a collect call?
The news came sudden and certain, like a call we picked up on the first ring. Our parents did not keep us home from school. We hung our backpacks on the hooks of our lockers, and settled into our desks. The news felt heavy as it settled into our laps. Amy’s body had been found, discarded in a ditch. The particulars of how Amy had been assaulted would crystallize and snap into focus only as our minds matured over many years.
Decades passed. Police chiefs retired; FBI agents came out of retirement to squint their eyes a little longer at the case. Sometimes a new lead emerged, or the hope of a DNA link streaked across the sky like a fading comet. Soon enough the case would grow cold again. Our questions abided: How did this man’s sickness prevent a child from growing up? How did he steal a childhood—while everyone was watching? We wondered: did everyone have an Amy? A girl who sent us all out retracing our steps. We looked for the last place we remembered having our innocence. We struggled to remember, as our eyes scanned the streets, and the lights grew dim.
***
The case of Amy Renee Mihaljevic remains unsolved. The FBI is offering a reward up to $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual(s) responsible for her death.
Kendra Stanton Lee is a writer and teacher in Boston. Her essays have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, JMWW, Pangyrus, and elsewhere. For more on her work, visit www.kendrastantonlee.com.
