Killing of Amy Mihaljevic

Amy Renee Mihaljevic, a ten-year-old elementary school student, disappeared on October 27, 1989, after walking from Bay Middle School to the Bay Square Shopping Center in Bay Village, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. According to Wikipedia's account of the case, an unknown male had telephoned Amy beforehand and arranged to meet her under the pretext of buying a gift for her mother, whom he claimed had recently been promoted. She was abducted from the shopping center. On February 8, 1990, her body was discovered in a field off County Road 1181 in Ruggles Township, rural Ashland County, Ohio. Evidence at the scene suggested her body had likely been dumped there shortly after the abduction. The Cuyahoga County coroner's findings indicated her last meal included a soy-based food, and investigators recovered yellow/gold fibers from her body. Several items belonging to Amy—her horse riding boots, a denim backpack, a binder, and turquoise horse-head earrings—were apparently taken by the killer as souvenirs. Mitochondrial DNA was recovered from the crime scene for potential comparison to suspects.

The Bay Village Police and the FBI conducted an extensive investigation involving thousands of leads and approximately 20,000 interviews, with dozens of suspects given lie-detector tests, though no one has been charged. In 2006, it emerged that other young girls in the nearby suburb of North Olmsted had received similar phone calls from an unknown male in the weeks before Amy's abduction; investigators noted that Amy and these other girls had all visited the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center, which kept a visitor logbook that may have exposed personal information. Police collected DNA from several potential suspects in December 2006, and a longtime suspect retained legal counsel by early 2007. In late 2013, investigator Phil Torsney rejoined the case; he assessed that Amy was likely transported out of Bay Village and that the murder likely occurred in Ashland County. The FBI announced a reward, later increased to $27,000, for information leading to an arrest and conviction. In 2016, hairs resembling Amy's dog's were found on a blanket and curtain near her body, suggesting they may have been used to conceal her. In 2018, investigators examined a potential link between identity thief Robert Ivan Nichols (alias Joseph Newton Chandler III) and the case.

In February 2021, authorities announced that a publicly unidentified 64-year-old man had become a person of interest after a former girlfriend alleged he was unaccountably absent from their nearby residence at the time of the abduction and later called her that night asking about news coverage. Investigators noted he had made "suspicious statements," his DNA was obtained, he failed a polygraph, and a storage facility search yielded items of interest. Two witnesses who saw the kidnapper lead Amy to his vehicle reportedly identified this man in May 2020 lineups, and his vehicle's carpeting was noted as consistent with the fibers found on Amy's body.

Amy's mother, Margaret McNulty, co-founded the Community Fund for Assisting Missing Youth to promote child safety education following her daughter's death. McNulty died in 2001.