Cherrie Mahan news conference highlights $100,000 reward, blue backpack
SUMMIT TWP — Even 40 years after her disappearance, family and friends of Cherrie Mahan have not given up hope on a conclusive ending to the mystery.
At a news conference held at the Bonniebrook Club House & Golf Course on Tuesday, May 6, Iowa-based private investigator Steve Ridge made official his offer of $100,000 as a reward for information leading to Cherrie’s location and asked the public to be aware of a missing blue backpack.
“This has been the hardest 40 years of my life,” said Cherrie’s mother, Janice McKinney. “I have never, ever, given up hope, and hope is something that we all have to have, because without hope, you can’t live at all. And I have a lot of hope that we’re going to find Cherrie and bring her home.”
Ridge, a former broadcast journalist, recently offered his services to the family as a private investigator to help solve the decades-long cold case. Ridge said he hopes to unearth information that will lead to the location or identity of Cherrie’s remains.
“I’ve only been working on the case for 10 weeks, but so much work has already been done,” Ridge said.
Cherrie, then 8 years old, disappeared Feb. 22, 1985, after stepping off a school bus near her home on Cornplanter Road in Winfield Township. She was declared legally dead in 1998. In the wake of the 40th anniversary of the event, Ridge, along with the Facebook group Cherrie’s Angels, have received an avalanche of tips from the public.
“I asked (McKinney) today, ‘Were you a little skeptical when you heard this guy from Iowa was going to come in with a $100,000 reward?’ And she said, ‘Yes,’” Ridge said. “That is the fear of a new hope that’s going to let you down. And it’s tough. It beats the (expletive) out of you. I’ve seen it in other cases.
“And I can try to do something about it.”
Ridge said the Cherrie case is only the third time as a private investigator that he has offered a monetary reward, and that he felt especially compelled by this case.
“I’m not going to make a practice out of it, or I’d run out of money,” Ridge said. “I feel like I was called to do this when I saw the circumstances of this case. I quickly determined that there was great momentum already underway. A lot of them were determined to move this case forward, as opposed to simply commemorate the 40th anniversary.”
Ridge said that he was limited in the amount of new leads he could provide to the public. However, one of the new leads mentioned a blue backpack Cherrie was said to be carrying at the time she went missing.
“I am convinced, through some fairly recent testimony and input, that Cherrie’s bookbag was very likely submerged in a pond in an area very near her grandmother's home,” Ridge said.
He then produced a rendering of what the backpack may have looked like.
Ridge said there is a chance that some residual evidence from the backpack may still exist in the immediate area of the pond, located on Tower Road, even four decades later, which could make for a crucial lead in the investigation.
“I don’t want to shift the emphasis exclusively to trying to find this blue bag,” Ridge said. “But ... this is still something that we should be looking at.”
Ridge also mentioned that he believed there was a connection of some kind between Cherrie and her attacker.
“I am convinced that Cherrie knew her abductor. I don’t think there's any doubt about it,” Ridge said. “I think that we already know, to some degree, who was involved, or at least has significant knowledge with regard to the case.”
There have been reports that Cherrie was taken into a van painted with a decal of a skier on a mountain, which Bailey Gizienski, a representative of Cherrie’s Angels, said the group believes the marked van could have been a distraction from the blue sedan that was also spotted behind Cherrie’s bus.
Ridge said he’s also using artificial intelligence to look for links between names that have come up in the case. He said family trees from the area in 1985 are connected in ways that may be hard for the naked eye to see looking at charts, and AI may provide a solution.
While Ridge is licensed to perform as a private investigator in his native Iowa, he does not hold such a license in Pennsylvania. As a result, he does not have access to records from the state police’s investigation of Cherrie’s disappearance.
“I consider that an advantage,” Ridge said. “I think that sometimes taking a zero-based approach to a case is better than seeing where people left off.”
Ridge said he took the same approach when he began investigating the disappearance of Jodi Huisentruit, an Iowa TV news anchor who disappeared in 1995. Ridge’s investigation into her disappearance began in 2019.
“There was a book that had been written about the investigation,” Ridge said. “I intentionally didn’t read the book, because I didn’t want to get locked into a narrative.”
Although Ridge does not have access to state police records yet, he still encourages anyone with any information to share it with state police and himself.
“This has to be a cooperative venture,” Ridge said. “We don’t want to work independently. I don’t want to do anything to supplant the state police. As a courtesy, I touched base with them and sought their blessing. I don’t expect them to share anything with me. On the other hand, I will be happy to share things with them as I come across them.”
Christina Gizienski, who helps run the Cherrie’s Angels Facebook page, also encourages those with information on Cherrie’s disappearance to reach out to their page.
“They can search ‘Find Cherrie Mahan’ and go to our Facebook or Instagram page and send us a message, or go to the links in our bio and send us an anonymous tip,” Christina Gizienski said.
