Sunday, February 17, 2013
Pittsburgh native disappears in June 2011, just after she moved back to Western PA from Florida.
Amanda Marie Koller had moved back to the Pittsburgh area from Orlando, FL in May 2011. The 23-year-old did not establish or maintain a permanent address in the few short weeks after her return, according to her mother. On Sunday, June 12, 2011, Pittsburgh Police stopped and cited her for operating a vehicle without a valid inspection and also without an emissions inspection. Her car, a purple 2005 Scion TC, has a Pennsylvania license plate and also one from Florida. Both expired in 2011. The license numbers are Pennsylvania GLH 0116 and Florida ANA 4580, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. She has not been seen nor heard from since. Amanda is described as standing 5 feet to 5 feet, 5 inches tall, weighing about 100 to …
Sunday, December 2, 2012
He's been missing from Pittsburgh since March 1993, though he was reported in New York City and possibly San Francisco a few weeks after he disappeared.
Oakland is teeming with college students on any given day as students from Carnegie Mellon, Pitt and Carlow cross back and forth between traffic as they go to and from classes. Andrew Karis was a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1993, when he disappeared on a March day. He was last seen on March 1, then, suddenly, he was missing from among those crowds of students. Also known by the nicknames Andy, Drew and Sparky, he was last seen on campus on March 1 that year. When he was reported missing, authorities tracked his credit card and telephone records, and determined that he might have purchased a Greyhound bus ticket to New York City. He was 19 years old at the time of his disappearance and would be 39 …
Sunday, October 7, 2012
The newborn infant was left near a Hazelwood church—his mother never found.
Easter Sunday is the day Christians observe Christ's triumph over death and the renewal of life for all beings. That day of celebration turned dark just before Easter services April 7, 1996 at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Hazelwood. Two church members discovered the body of a newborn infant in an alley between the church and the adjacent property at Mansion Street and Gate Lodge Way. The baby boy seemed to have been swaddled in a pink towel but rolled out of it at some point during the chilly April night when the thermometer registered a low of 26 degrees. He was unclothed, next to the towel, when they discovered him frozen to death. Dr. Cyril Wecht, then Allegheny County coroner, ruled that the child died …
Sunday, September 16, 2012
This Blair County girl disappeared as she walked to school in 1965.
Editor's note: Patch's Unsolved Cases generally features cases from southwestern Pennsylvania. On a trip this summer, I passed right by the small town of Tyrone, just north of Altoona. Tyrone, to me, has always meant Kathy Shea. Her face, which appeared in newspapers and on TV at the time of her 1965 disappearance, has haunted me since I was a child because she was just a few years younger than me. As I looked over at Tyrone from the new highway, I knew I had to share her story. It's a tale that's happened too many times—a young girl on her way to or from school vanishes into thin air. And that is the story of Kathleen Ann Shea of Tyrone, PA, who was 6 years old when she disappeared on March 18, 1965. She was last seen traveling north …
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Patch has been featuring missing persons, the unidentified dead and homicide victims with open case files, but today we are honoring the labors of those who work these cases by sharing some solved cases.
When someone goes missing, there's usually a large effort by law enforcement, family and friends to find them. When someone is murdered without a known suspect, police and relatives try to find out who did it. And when a body is discovered and no kin claim it, advocates who work on such cases push to link circumstances or DNA to bring them home. In honor of Labor Day, Patch is recognizing the efforts of all who work to solve these cases, bring the missing and unidentified home, and provide closure to the families or justice for the victims of unsolved homicides. Included in that are the many people who give the missing and unidentified "temporary homes" on websites like the Doe Network or NamUS until they are found or claimed. Here are 10 …
Sunday, August 19, 2012
In 1991, the 28 year old returned from a date, went back out and was never seen again.
Terry Slaugenhoupt, 28, came home from a date to the East Liberty apartment vicinity of the 1400 block of North St. Clair Street that she shared with a roommate. There are two versions of what happened next. One is that she got a phone call and told her roommate she was going out again. The other is that she told the roommate she was going out to make a phone call. No one knows who the call was to or from and where she was headed—and two decades ago, tracking calls wasn't as easy as it is today. That was the last time Terry was seen and she was never heard from again. She would be 50 years old today. At the time of her disappearance, on Jan. 6, 1991, she was 5 feet, 2 inches tall, and weighed between 105-120 pounds. She had long, curly …
Sunday, August 12, 2012
The 1-year-old was last seen in the front yard of his West End home in 1986.
Jamie Martin Thornton was a little more than a month shy of his second birthday as he played in the front yard of his home in the West End of Pittsburgh on Oct. 4, 1986. But when his birthday arrived on Nov. 12 that year, Jamie, whose nickname was "J.T," wasn't there to celebrate it. Some reports say he disappeared in Chartiers Creek. There is very little information available on his case, other than the standard online listings on the Pennsylvania Missing Persons, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, NamUs and The Doe Network. He is considered one of the "endangered missing." Today, he would be 27 years old. In a March 7, 2011 story, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Jamie's mother, Gloria Steffens of Overbrook, became …
Sunday, July 22, 2012
The baby boy was found dead on Neville Island in 1999.
Most babies are brought into the world wanted, cared for and loved. But there are some babies who aren't that lucky. On April 11, 1999, some buzzards circling near the river's edge caught the attention of two employees doing a security check on the 3-11 p.m. shift at Pittsburgh Gear Co., a manufacturing company on Neville Island. As they walked down a rutted path toward the banks of the Ohio River, they saw what drew the buzzards' attention—the lifeless body of a baby boy caught in the rocks and twigs in very shallow water off to the side of an old boat ramp. Part of his umbilical cord was still attached. According to an April 12, 1999 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the men called police. Law enforcement officials said at the time …
Sunday, June 17, 2012
The elderly woman found over a hillside in Avalon was never identified.
The woman survived about eight decades on this earth, but her death gave no dignity to those years. On June 19, 1997, the mummified body of a petite black woman with short, curly, gray-and-white hair—only 5 feet tall and weighing only 100 pounds—was found over a hillside behind the Ponderosa Restaurant at 920 Ohio River Boulevard (Route 65) in Avalon. The woman, who was found inside a blue sleeping bag, was wrapped in two black plastic trash bags—one tied over her head, one tied over her feet—then wrapped again in what authorities believe was a plastic mattress cover, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. Her head was lying on a pillow with a towel covering her face. Her body was covered with a green blanket. She was …
Sunday, May 27, 2012
The mother of two from Ross Township vanished last September.
To an outsider, Monday, Sept. 26, 2011 might have seemed like an average day in Jamie Nichole Peterson's life. Her children, a 9-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl, left for school that morning from their Ross Township home in the area of North Fremont Avenue, near Bellevue Borough. Jamie, 30, went to buy groceries at the Giant Eagle at 4110 Brighton Rd., and, according to some reports, also a Home Depot, then returned home. The last person to see Peterson was an ex-boyfriend who came over early that afternoon to pick up clothing he had left behind. Jamie had broken off the five-year relationship three weeks earlier, according to her father, Jim Peterson, a former state constable from Ross Township. Witnesses said she and the ex-boyfriend …
dee vensel
11:12 am on Monday, August 13, 2012
I hope she gets to hold him again someday. more ›