Cherrie Mahan's mysterious disappearance haunts her mother 35 years later

Despite an endless stream of tips over the past three decades, investigators have no new leads. Authorities initially focused on a van seen in the vicinity on the day of the disappearance. But the van — a bright blue or green 1976 Dodge with a mural of a skier on the side — was never found, despite sightings of more than a dozen vans generally fitting that description.

“Sometimes you have a feeling who did it, but you need someone to speak about it,’’ said Teddi Hesser, a criminal investigator on the Pennsylvania State Police’s Criminal Investigation Unit. “I have been here and sat in on two or three reviews on the Mahan case. We sit around and brainstorm and look for new leads we haven’t thought of. You go back through the files and see if there is something that was missed.”

Hesser knows — as with most crimes — there are people who have all the answers.

The problem is those people have never been found or come forward with answers in the Mahan case.

“Is there a name there that no one talked to?” she said. “Let’s go and talk to that person and see what they might remember. When it goes this long, it usually takes someone with direct knowledge to come forward.’’

All the information on Mahan’s case sits in a 5-foot-wide file cabinet that stretches to the ceiling at the Butler state police station. Now digitized with help from the FBI, it’s a monumental amount of information.

Trooper Max DeLuca, the state police lead investigator on the case for the past three years, sifts through the information regularly.

“The biggest investigation after Cherrie Mahan is in three to five binders,’’ DeLuca said.

DeLuca is assigned to the state’s criminal assessment team. He is in charge of investigations including missing persons and homicide for the five-county area of Butler, Lawrence, Mercer, Beaver and Armstrong counties.

He is still amazed by the number of tips that continue to emerge.

“Cases that are 10 or 20 years old — you get less tips as it goes on,’’ DeLuca said. “Most cases that are almost 40 years old, you get no tips. The cases are just cold.’’

The Mahan case is different. It attracted the national spotlight, and local news outlets kept the disappearance fresh in people’s minds.

Mahan has been featured on national TV networks and shows dedicated to finding missing children. She was the first person featured on the famous “Have you seen me?” circulars produced by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“There are always leads coming in, and we look at all of them,’’ DeLuca said. “Every lead has a different amount of credence, but you check every one because you don’t want that one to be the one that would solve the case.

“Each time a story is done, we get more. People will remember something and say, ‘I should have probably told someone this 20 years ago.’ ”

Authorities most recently investigated leads that led nowhere, he said. State police used police dogs to search properties, and the FBI recently did interviews out of state.

The department still gets calls to check out vans being scrapped for the possibility it was the one involved in the case.

“We still get tips from Crimestoppers all the time, but there is something with that van — the description — that people seem to remember,’’ Hesser said. “With the anniversary of the crime, we get more. Every time the media does something, we get more tips.’’

DeLuca said several months ago, a woman came forward believing she could be Cherrie Mahan.

“But the fingerprints didn’t match,’’ DeLuca said.

That type of claim surfaces frequently, he said.

“I have gone out and checked the DNA to see if we have a match on other cases,’’ Hesser said. “You have to check everything.’’

DeLuca said as an investigator, he brings his work home, wondering what happened to Cherrie and others like her.

Would he like to be the one who solves the case?

“It doesn’t matter to me if I’m the one who solves it,’’ DeLuca said. “But I want to be there when it happens.

“You stay positive on all the cases like this. You want to solve them all. Somebody knows something.’’

Until there is closure, the unknown still tears at Cherrie’s mother.

“God doesn’t always give us a timeline,’’ McKinney said. “Maybe that’s all Cherrie was supposed to be here, those eight short years of her life.

“But she gave so much.’’