it was dinner time and they re usually all home for dinner and she wasn t around. what d you do? i went to the police station. and they told me that i had to wait 24 hours to file a report. she should have been home. she s not home. now we re calling friends, trying to find out where she s at. we went to like the different parks and there was a carnival and not far away, so we went to different places looking for her. what are you thinking? she maybe got hurt? she s in a hospital somewhere? i didn t know. i had no idea. i mean, anything bad wasn t even in the picture. so it was still, boy, is she going to get a talking to when she comes home? yeah. and i figured she d be home. cindy s brother, sister, mother, and father divided the search. two to stay by the phones, the others driving down dark streets, looking for the blond teenager. had she run off with scott?
cindy zarzycki became one of those have you seen this child faces on the back of store coupons. forever 13 years old. she d walked off to dairy queen on a sunday morning in 1986 and was never seen again. she looked up to me. i let her down. why do you say that? because i wasn t there. cindy s older sister, connie, had been away from the house that weekend. her kid brother eddie was also tortured with guilt. i wish i d been there and out. you wish you would have
streets, looking for the blond teenager. had she run off with scott? was this her little rebellion against her father s grounding rules? where could cindy be, missing now for more than 12 hours? at that point, we were still hoping that she had just spent the night at somebody s house. and i remember my mom coming into the room saying, do you know where cindy is? she said, if you know anything, you better spill it. now, you re a 13-year-old yourself. were you wondering where she was? i was concerned right away, yeah. but on the bright side, this was east detroit with the motto a family town. bad stuff happened in the big city nearby, not here. you didn t hear about that in east detroit, you heard about it in other states. and so when you re 13, you think you re untouchable. still, that sunday night, the phone didn t ring. cindy s bed stayed empty. it was panic. you knew that there was something wrong. her mom wanted everyone to just take a deep breath. it s not like
them, the family made sure that day, she turned up at the front the early 90s was the name of cindy sightings around the candlelight vigil spurred media interest, a new detective named allow it to be opened. one of detective davis first questions was to find out what cindy s teen crush back then, the boy named scott, knew about
school. like cathy, she told the cops about cindy s plans to meet someone at dairy queen on sunday. but she had the impression the officers had already locked on to a theory that cindy was hiding out at another girlfriend s. they seemed to want to discuss more about who would keep her if she ran away. they assumed she s not here, what could happen, she ran away, open and closed. on their own, family members did what they could to find cindy. they staked out the trailer park where cindy s boyfriend, scott, lived, hoping she might be there. they printed and distributed posters of their missing daughter and sister. her mother, alice, asked the local papers if they d run her picture as a news item. but they turned her down in that age before amber alerts. cindy had just seen a movie, desperately seeking susan. so i put an ad in the personals desperately seeking cindy, nobody responded to it.