BAY VILLAGE, Ohio — Sunday marks 35 years since 10-year-old Amy Mihaljevic disappeared from a Bay Village shopping center on Oct. 27, 1989.
Investigators believe she was lured to that location by a man who claimed to work with her mom. He reportedly said he wanted to help Amy buy her mother a gift, as she had recently been promoted at work.
Amy's body was found four months later in Ashland County.
Investigators have since worked tens of thousands of leads. Bay Village Detective Sergeant Jay Elish said it is frustrating to know this case remains unsolved.
"Over the past 35 years, there have been dozens of investigators that have looked into this case. I still talk to them to this day. They're very frustrated even in retirement that they weren't able to solve this case," said Elish. "It sort of sticks with you. It's one of those cases that you'd love to see solved, not only for the family but for Amy."
One complicating factor in this case has been narrowing down the list of suspects.
"Today, we work off of a lot of the information in the past," Elish said. "There have been a lot of people that were considered suspects if you will, that we've been able to rule out. Some of them, we haven't been able to rule out and that's the problem. If we can't rule someone out, they would always be considered a suspect. So, there are a number of people that we have looked into that we haven't necessarily been able to rule out."
The path forward could be DNA testing. Recently, Bay Village Police revealed unknown male DNA was found on Amy's clothing. The amount is too low to provide a link to her killer now, but that could change.
"We continue to work with a number of DNA labs around the country, the most state-of-the-art labs," said Elish. "We always have things that we're testing. We hold off on certain items to wait for DNA to advance, and that's sort of where we're at right now."
The wait-and-see approach while testing advances, according to Elish, is because DNA samples are limited.
"Some of the items that we've been testing, we can no longer test because we've basically tested them so many times that we've utilized everything we can and there would be no more DNA available to test from some of those items of evidence," Elish said. "But anything that we have left, we continue to try to test just to exhaust that avenue of the investigation."
Regardless, police still press on in hopes of solving this crime for Amy and her family.
"We still invest hundreds of hours a year into this case," said Elish. "We don't forget the fact we still care about Amy Mihaljevic and the case involving her."
On Saturday, a memorial Run/Walk will be held in honor of Amy Mihaljevic in Bay Village. Money raised from the event will go towards providing the cost of DNA testing. Testing, they said, cost upwards of $70,000 in the upcoming year.
More information on the event can be found HERE.