Face-to-face with a killer

I still remember pressing my toddler-sized hands against the window and breathing on the glass. It was October 29th, 1989, and I was less than one week away from turning four years old. I was at a dry cleaning shop with my mom in her hometown of Bay Village, Ohio, where my family had recently moved. We were living with my grandmother on Lincoln Road while our new house was under construction.

“Ashley, get down from there!”

I still remember my mom saying it, because her voice hasn’t changed in the three decades since. I was standing on a ledge in front of the window, watching a man pace back and forth on the sidewalk outside.

“Ashley, come over here,” my mom said again, and this time I obeyed. By the time we left the dry cleaner, the man was gone. My mom would later tell the police she didn’t like the way he looked at me.

No one in the shopping plaza knew this day would go down as the most notorious in Bay Village's history, rivaled only by the Sam Sheppard murder in the 1950s. On that beautiful fall afternoon, a Friday, a fifth grader at Bay Middle School named Amy Mihaljevic disappeared from that shopping center. Amy told her friends a man had called her a few days before the kidnapping, claiming he was her mother’s co-worker. The stranger offered to take Amy to buy a gift for her mom to celebrate her recent promotion.

The offer was a ruse, of course: Amy’s mother hadn’t been promoted, and investigators discovered that several young girls in the area had received similar calls that autumn. Amy Mihaljevic, for whatever tragic reason, took the bait.

The news of the kidnapping rocked the quiet suburb of Bay Village that weekend. Parents kept their kids home during trick-or-treating. A “missing” poster of Amy’s face became omnipresent. My mom got a call from the Bay Village police, who took her name from a list of customers who had been in the shopping center at the time of the abduction. They wanted to know if she’d seen anything suspicious. She recounted the story of the man watching me on the other side of the window; how her Mom Intuition kicked in and alarm bells went off. Did she get a good look at him? Not really, she said—but my daughter did.

The police asked my mother if she was willing to undergo hypnosis in the hopes of remembering more. But our involvement in the case ends there: the police didn’t call her again. For common-sense reasons, they declined to interview a four-year-old. Amy’s body was discovered on February 8th, 1990, in Ashland County, fifty miles from home. She had been bludgeoned and stabbed in the neck with a pointed object.

No one has ever been arrested for Amy Mihaljevic’s murder. While reports of new suspects emerge every few years, investigators inevitably hit a dead end, and the case goes cold again.

At the risk of offending my local police department, I’d say that calling the investigation “bungled” is an understatement. The Bay Village police, in conjunction with the FBI, spent years pursuing suspects who turned out to be wholly innocent: social outcasts, men with a history of mental illness, and, in one case, a schizophrenic Vietnam veteran who lived in a group home. One suspect, Billy Strunak, committed suicide after being accused of Amy’s murder—and his suicide was considered evidence of his guilt. (Police have more or less admitted that Strunak had nothing to do with the killing.) To anyone familiar with the case, it’s obvious that investigators wasted a lot of time barking up the wrong tree, pursuing suspects who made easy scapegoats. The real killer is probably still on the loose, still free to harm other unwitting victims.

When I share this story with other locals familiar with the case, they ask me, “Why don’t you try to help? You might have seen the guy.” Maybe the police could show me a photo line-up. Maybe I, instead of my mom, could undergo hypnosis. Maybe there’s a nugget of a memory buried deep inside my brain, and with the right technology or the right guidance, I could remember exactly what that man looked like.

Because, as it stands now, I don’t. I was four. At this point, thirty-one years later, I’m not even sure if my memory of that day is the original, uncut, and unedited version—or if it’s been corrupted by years of telling and re-telling, tainted by new information.

“How reliable are our memories? Are they reliable enough that you would put your life, or someone else’s life, at stake? This is the case when witnesses testify in court or when someone identifies a suspect,” researchers from Penn State’s psychology department explained on their blog. “…Memory isn’t always completely accurate. Sometimes, it is quite the opposite. Stress can influence someone’s memory. Outside influences can also affect someone’s memory.”

Even when eyewitnesses are grown adults, their memories aren’t nearly as reliable as we might assume. This is true even when they’re recalling the most unforgettable scenes: rapes, murders, carjackings, and other traumatic events. The fallibility of human memory has produced startling headlines like this one: “I was certain, but I was wrong.”

“One night someone broke into my apartment, put a knife to my throat and raped me,” a rape survivor named Jennifer Thompson wrote. “…I studied every single detail on the rapist's face. I looked at his hairline; I looked for scars, for tattoos, for anything that would help me identify him…Several days later, looking at a series of police photos, I identified my attacker. I knew this was the man. I was completely confident. I was sure.”

She was sure, but she was also wrong. Thompson’s eyewitness account sent a man named Ronald Cotton to prison. DNA evidence later proved that a different man, Bobby Poole, was Thompson’s rapist. Cotton was exonerated after spending more than a decade behind bars.

Considering all this, I know that I have nothing of value to offer the investigators still actively pursuing Amy’s case. I would like to see the mystery of her murder solved as much as anyone in this town. However, that will have to come from advances in DNA technology or someone coming forward with firsthand knowledge—like the woman who contacted police to say she believes her former boyfriend did it. In a sworn affidavit, the woman claimed she and her then-boyfriend lived less than two miles from the Bay Plaza where Amy was abducted, and he inexplicably didn’t return home the night she disappeared. The fibers found on Amy’s body also matched the car the unnamed suspect drove in 1989.

No arrest has been made, but the police issued a statement saying they are still “diligently working” on finding Amy’s killer. Even if this lead, like so many others, goes nowhere, they still hold out hope that someone, someday, will come forward with information that will crack the case.

I hope so, too. I also know that someone isn’t gonna be me.