LIVE: News conference related to Cherrie Mahan’s disappearance touts $100K reward, asks for information about blue backpack
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SUMMIT TWP — A Tuesday, May 6, news conference on the 40-year-old disappearance of Cherrie Mahan announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to her discovery and asked the public to be aware of a missing blue backpack.
Iowa-based private investigator Steve Ridge joined Cherrie’s mother, Janice McKinney, and others at the noon conference at the Bonniebrook Club House & Golf Course. They spoke about how the 8-year-old disappeared from her Winfield Township home on Feb. 22, 1985, after she reportedly got off the school bus at Cornplanter Road.
“This has been the hardest 40 years of my life,” McKinney said.
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 hopes to unearth information that will lead to the location or identity of Cherrie Mahan’s remains. He said he is hopeful, already receiving more than a dozen tips.
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.
He said is “light years” ahead of other cases he’s looked into.
“This mom deserves resolution,” he said.
Ridge said he is convinced Cherrie, who was declared legally dead in 1998, knew her abductor and that her backpack was likely submerged in a pond near her grandmother’s home on Tower Road, Saxonburg.
He showed an image of what the blue backpack may have looked like. He asked the public for tips about the backpack.
“Even though it’s 40 years later, this is still something we should be looking at,” he said.
In his 10 weeks with the case thus far, he said, he’s finding people do have information but the challenge is getting them to talk.
His goal, he said, is to “complete the mosaic or puzzle of this case for justice to be done.”
