Sunday, February 17, 2013
She was last seen or heard from in June 2011, just after she moved back to Pittsburgh from Florida.
Amanda Marie Koller had moved back to the Pittsburgh area from Orlando in May 2011. The 23-year-old did not establish or maintain a permanent address in the few short weeks after her return, according to her mother. On Sunday, June 12, 2011, she was stopped by Pittsburgh police and cited for operating a vehicle without a valid inspection and also without an emissions inspection. Her car, a purple 2005 Scion TC has a Pennsylvania license plate and also one from Florida, both of which expired in 2011. The license numbers are Pennsylvania GLH 0116 and Florida ANA 4580, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. She has not been seen nor heard from since. Amanda is described as 5-feet to 5-foot 5, about 100 to 150 pounds with brown…
Sunday, January 27, 2013
The 16-year-old has been missing since Oct. 23, 2012.
Courtney Baltimore, 16, has been missing from her home in Pittsburgh since Oct. 23, 2012. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, she might have traveled to Hazelwood or Philadelphia. She is described as 6 feet tall, 180 pounds with black hair and brown eyes. She has a heart tattooed on her right hand. Anyone with information should contact the Pittsburgh Police Department at 412-255-2937 or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST (843-5678). For more information about this and other missing person cases, visit Pennsylvania Missing Persons, NamUs or the Doe Network.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
She took only her ID and Social Security cards when she left her Hazelwood home.
When Lonnett Myer Jackson left her home in the 5100 block of Chaplain Way in Pittsburgh's Hazelwood neighborhood sometime after 11 a.m. on April 11, 2006, she left behind her cell phone, keys and money. Relatives think she took her identification and Social Security cards, though. But she has not been seen or heard from since that day. At the time of her disappearance, Lonnett was 46 years old, 192 pounds and between 5-foot-3 to 5-foot-6. She had graying black hair and brown eyes, a surgical scare on the right side of her head near the hairline, a scar from a Cesarean section and pierced ears. She was dressed in a white undershirt, black sleeveless hooded jacket, dark blue warmup pants and white athletic shoes. She was also known by her …
Sunday, December 30, 2012
The Wilkinsburg teen might still be in the Pittsburgh area.
Taylor Murphy, 17, has been missing from Wilkinsburg since Sept. 20. Authorities believe she could still be in the Pittsburgh area. She is classified by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as an endangered runaway. Taylor is described as 5 feet, 4 inches tall; 140 pounds; with black hair and brown eyes; and having a tattoo on her upper arm. She will turn 18 on Jan. 23. Anyone having information about Taylor should contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 (1-800-THE-LOST) or call the Penn Hills Police Department at 412-473-3056. For more information about this and other missing person cases, visit Pennsylvania Missing Persons, NamUs, the Doe Network or the National Center for Missing …
Sunday, December 2, 2012
He's been missing from Pittsburgh since March 1993, though he was reported in New York City and possibly San Francisco a few weeks after he disappeared.
Oakland is teeming with college students on any given day as students from Carnegie Mellon, Pitt and Carlow cross back and forth between traffic as they go to and from classes. Andrew Karis was a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1993, when he disappeared on a March day. He was last seen on March 1, then, suddenly, he was missing from among those crowds of students. Also known by the nicknames Andy, Drew and Sparky, he was last seen on campus on March 1 that year. When he was reported missing, authorities tracked his credit card and telephone records, and determined that he might have purchased a Greyhound bus ticket to New York City. He was 19 years old at the time of his disappearance and would be 39 …
Sunday, November 25, 2012
These cases in the Pittsburgh area did not have a happy ending but finding those missing persons might have brought closure to families.
As early as this July, people in the law enforcement community knew that the remains of Amanda Sue Myers of Pittsburgh had been identified through DNA comparison. However, it was only last week when Pittsburgh police finally released the news. In July, two separate sources told Patch that Amanda had been identified but that police wanted to hold off on releasing information until some interviews had been conducted. Amanda, who was 22 at the time of her death, was last seen in Pittsburgh at the end of 1999 but may have been in Florida and Tennessee as late as April 2000. She was not reported missing until 2007, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. Known unofficially as Homestead Jane Doe, Amanda was found deceased on Oct…
Sunday, November 11, 2012
The mother said her daughter had been abducted on the South Side but, later, the mother's boyfriend confessed to burying the toddler in Brookline.
The image of a little girl on a grocery shopping trip with her mother—then suddenly gone. That was happened the day of March 9, 1982 when Melody Childs Thomas told police that her daughter, Nicole Lynn Bryner, 3, had been abducted from a shopping cart at the Giant Eagle supermarket on the South Side of Pittsburgh. Though there were extensive searches, no trace of Nicole was ever found. Then, in 1986, Timothy Widman, Childs' boyfriend at the time, allegedly confessed he had punched Bryner and accidentally killed her. He told police that he and Childs' buried the body in a wooded area along Timberland Road in Brookline. Police searched unsuccessfully for the body. Without it, prosecutors could not pursue the case. But in 1988, a Superior …
Monday, October 15, 2012
A woman's body was discovered in the river at Fox Chapel in 2003, but she has never been identified.
The Allegheny River is pretty in the fall—the colors of the leaves reflect off the water and when the sky is blue, it can look like a picture postcard. But sometimes all that's pretty from a distance isn't as beautiful up close and under the surface. Sometimes the Allegheny River carries litter, tree limbs and other debris from far upstream. A worker saw something in the middle of the river channel off Old Freeport Road, near the Fox Chapel Yacht Club in O'Hara Township, on Oct. 23, 2003 that at night looked like garbage. The next day, at approximately 10 a.m., the (debris) came closer to shore. At that point, a worker suspected that it might be a body and called 911. A woman's body, wrapped in a blue blanket and bound with duct tape, was …
Monday, October 8, 2012
The newborn infant was left near a Hazelwood church—his mother never found.
Easter Sunday is the day Christians observe Christ's triumph over death and the renewal of life for all beings. That day of celebration turned dark just before Easter services April 7, 1996 at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Hazelwood. Two church members discovered the body of a newborn infant in an alley between the church and the adjacent property at Mansion Street and Gate Lodge Way. The baby boy seemed to have been swaddled in a pink towel but rolled out of it at some point during the chilly April night when the thermometer registered a low of 26 degrees. He was unclothed, next to the towel, when they discovered him frozen to death. Dr. Cyril Wecht, then Allegheny County coroner, ruled that the child died …
Sunday, September 16, 2012
This Blair County girl disappeared as she walked to school in 1965.
Editor's note: Patch's Unsolved Cases generally features cases from southwestern Pennsylvania. On a trip this summer, I passed right by the small town of Tyrone, just north of Altoona. Tyrone, to me, has always meant Kathy Shea. Her face, which appeared in newspapers and on TV at the time of her 1965 disappearance, has haunted me since I was a child because she was just a few years younger than me. As I looked over at Tyrone from the new highway, I knew I had to share her story. It's a tale that's happened too many times—a young girl on her way to or from school vanishes into thin air. And that is the story of Kathleen Ann Shea of Tyrone, PA, who was 6 years old when she disappeared on March 18, 1965. She was last seen traveling north …
