run with it, call me. she fought and fought and fought for justice. justice for tara. and as sharon would say, my tara. she s always said, my tara. reporter: but none of these efforts turned up anything useful. and the sheriff s case wasn t going anywhere either. there was no getting around it. justice for tara just was not happening. in fact, the case was growing cold. stone cold. eventually mike gandy retired, as did these two cops, way up north. retired and moved to sunny florida. and i got very bored. reporter: oh oh. it turns out the three cops were not ready to hand in their badges. with extraordinary attention to detail, they were about to reignite the investigation and give a heart broken family new hope. coming up. i always felt this was a case that could be solved.
here as you re sitting up all night gut-wrenching pain. big hole. praying that, oh, please, please don t let this be true. reporter: before the sun came up, sharon called 911 again. and a new officer arrived. a woman deputy, i ll never forget that. and she came. and i remember saying to her, please help me. and she did. she got the ball rolling. she listened to me. the deputy called in crime scene investigators. i remember my mother waking me and my brother up. and i remember seeing so many people there, and the crime scene van outside. reporter: now deputies were taking tara s disappearance seriously. mike gandy was a captain at the charlotte county sheriff s office back then. sometimes you ll respond to a scene or a call where someone s missing and you can tell from the family interaction that it s not a big deal. this was not the case with tara s mom.
news source or a detective that wasn t supposed to tell her. and then she would confirm it, run with it, call me. she fought and fought and fought for justice. justice for tara. and as sharon would say, my tara. she s always said, my tara. reporter: but none of these efforts turned up anything useful. and the sheriff s case wasn t going anywhere either. there was no getting around it. justice for tara just was not happening. in fact, the case was growing cold. stone cold. eventually mike gandy retired, as did these two cops, way up north. retired and moved to sunny florida. and i got very bored. reporter: oh oh. coming up i always felt this was a case that could be solved. reporter: enter the cold case squad! could they do what no one else had? how important was that? extremely important. reporter: when dateline continues.
reporter: really. i would do it every day. we would go in the woods so far, we didn t even know where we came out half the time. we didn t even know where we were. reporter: captain gandy s investigators searched for tara as well. the investigation shifted this morning with deputies searching 500 acres of pasture. if someone called and said, hey, we saw a suspicious vehicle in this wooded area, or there s buzzards and vultures over here, and we would always go and search. we did have a couple of different times where we used cadaver dogs in certain areas. reporter: four weeks after tara vanished she turned 20, and they tried to stay positive, as they told the local nbc station, wbbh. [ crying ] and we had the presents. and i ll never forget this. i went to open one, and my son said, you re not opening that.
and he thought some of the unsolved cases in town needed a new look and called upon the retired detective mike gandy. and these two, who had been detectives up north before they, too, retired and moved to punta gorda, mike vogel and kurt mehl. i moved to florida and came down here to hunt and fish and play golf and go boating and go to the beach and just relax. and that lasted a couple months. i got very bored. reporter: and so three bored ex-detectives put on badges again to form the sheriff s very first official cold case unit and decided early on they d work on tara s case. prosecutor feinberg was finally optimistic, sort of. i always felt that this was a case that could be solved. if it had a new set of eyes, it had somebody that could put the case together, connect all of the dots.