The brisk wind off the lake whipped sand around their ankles as Indiana
State Police Sgt. Michael Carmen and Trooper Lou Weber, followed by two rookie
patrolmen with shovels over their shoulders, huffed up the rickety wooden
stairs leading from the beach at Indiana Dunes State Park.
``There`s the old cabin,`` Weber pointed out when they reached the top of
the bluff overlooking the southern end of Lake Michigan. ``See, in the yard
--the dark-colored sand and the lawn chair with the bottom busted out. Just
like she said.``
``Okay, guys. This is where we dig,`` Carmen said. ``This is crazy. Let`s
get at it.``
Throughout that day and the next and still another, they sweated, puffed,
groaned and cursed as they kicked their shovels into the sandy soil and
overturned every inch of the yard around the isolated cabin. They could find
no indication that anyone had dug there before them. At the end of the third
day Carmen said dejectedly: ``Well, that`s it. Nothing.``
Exhausted, the
Indiana lawmen trooped back to their squad cars, tossed the shovels into the
trunks and drove off.
The unusual incident, on a shirtsleeve-sunny autumn day a dozen years ago
in the state park some 60 miles southeast of Chicago, was yet another
disappointment in the will-o`-the-wisp search for three young Illinois women
who 21 years ago this summer went for a beach-blanket outing and vanished
without a trace.
The four lawmen had gone to the park after Indiana State Police received
a letter from a spiritualist in Montana who described the cabin site--right
down to the broken lawn chair--and suggested that the young women`s bodies
would be found there. It was a vision that did not materialize, any more than
any other lead police had laboriously checked out over the years since the
mysterious disappearance of Renee Bruhl, Patricia Blough and Ann Miller.
``Do they have to be dead?`` muses Carmen, now a lieutenant, during a
recent review of the case. ``What I am saying is that people disappear all the
time. Most are eventually accounted for. But not all of them. Some are never
found.``
Three Illinois women who were never found were last seen on Saturday,
July 2, 1966, the start of the long Fourth of July weekend.
Early that morning
21-year-old Ann Miller backed her 1955 four-door Buick out of the driveway on
Rochdale Circle and drove away from her family`s home in west suburban Lombard
to keep her appointment with an unknown fate.
Her first stop was in suburban Westchester, where she picked up Patricia
Blough, 19, at her home on Drury Lane. As she was leaving the house, Blough
called over her shoulder to her mother, ``We`ll be home early, Mom, because
Renee has to make dinner for her husband.``
From there the two drove to Chicago`s West Side where 19-year-old Renee
Bruhl was waiting for them at her home in the 5800 block of West Fulton
Street.
It was barely 8 a.m., and already the day promised to be a scorcher as
the three women headed for the Dunes. On the way they stopped at a drugstore
and picked up a bottle of suntan lotion for $1.53. By the time they arrived at
the popular park at 10 a.m., it was already 88 degrees, with light winds
coming in off the lake. The thermometer would hit 90 by 11 a.m. and a
sweltering 92 by noon.
Miller, Blough and Bruhl, the only married one of the three, were among
8,600 people in 2,178 automobiles who crowded into the park that sultry
Saturday. Miller parked her 11-year-old clunker in the sprawling lot, and they
hiked the three-quarters of a mile to the beach from the park pavilion.
The young women staked out a good spot under three poplar trees and
spread their blanket on the side of a dune. Then they peeled down to their
swimsuits. Ann, a 5-foot-2-inch brunette with blue eyes, was wearing a blue
two-piece bathing suit with a red belt; Patty, 5 feet 4 inches with brown hair
and brown eyes, wore a bright yellow bikini with ruffles; and Renee, the tallest of the three at 5 feet 9 inches, with brown hair and hazel eyes, had
on a brown swimsuit with a pattern of green flowers and gold leaves.
The spot they selected was about 100 yards from the shore, and as the
beach became more crowded the three sunbathers were hardly noticed.
Toward nightfall a young Chicago couple, Mike Yankalasa and Frances
Cicero, flagged down park ranger Bud Connor and pointed out the abandoned
blanket on the sand.
``There were three girls. They left all their belongings
on the blanket around noon and never came back,`` the couple explained. ``They
were out in the water, talking to some guy in a boat. Then they got aboard and
took off, heading west.``
``What kind of boat was it?`` asked the ranger.
``It was white with a blue inside, and it had an outboard motor. It
wasn`t real big. Maybe 14 or 16 feet long.``
``Okay. Thanks, kids. I`ll take it from here.``
Boats bearing suntanned, shiny-teethed young men regularly pulled up on
the beach, their crews trying to persuade girls to come aboard. The ranger
figured the trio had left their belongings on the blanket and had gone off on
such a lark, which might have turned into a moonlight cruise.
Blough trustingly left behind a yellow robe, a pair of sunglasses, a transistor radio, a white print towel and her wallet containing $5. Miller
left a Thermos bottle on the blanket, along with her denim shorts, shoes, a
polo shirt, white bathing cap and a comb. Bruhl left a large towel, her
shorts, blouse, cigarettes, suntan lotion, 25 cents and her pocketbook
containing about $55 in checks.
Connor picked up the blanket by its corners and took everything to the
office of Park Supt. William Svetic for safekeeping. ``They`ll come looking
for this stuff and be glad nobody ran off with it. Thanks, Bud,`` Svetic told
the ranger.
The blanket and belongings were set aside and all but forgotten as the
busy park staff coped with the teeming holiday weekend crowd. First thing
Monday, however, Svetic got a telephone call from Patty`s worried father,
Harold Blough. He was seeking information about three young women. ``They left
home around 8 o`clock Saturday and should have gotten to the park about 10,``
Blough said. ``But they never came home.``
Suspecting there might be a connection, Svetic surveyed the items left
behind on the blanket. They included a key ring with a miniature Illinois
license plate, No. 265-487. Svetic had his men check the parking lot. Sure
enough, there was a 1955 Buick with plates matching the key ring.
The park superintendent glanced at his watch. It was 8:50 a.m. as he put
in a call to Indiana State Police, who were then quartered three miles south
of the park on Indiana Hwy. 49.
At 10 a.m. on July 4 Trooper Harry Young took possession of the personal
effects, including the key ring, found on the blanket. He contacted Chicago
police and asked them to run a check on the license number of the car.
At 10:20 a.m. Chicago notified the trooper that the plates were
registered to Ann Miller of suburban Westchester. A check with Westchester
police showed that a missing-persons report had been filed on her and her two
friends by family members the night before.
A routine day in the sun for three young women had suddenly become a
serious matter for police.
First Sgt. Edward Burke, a 39-year-old state police detective regarded as
one of the best in the department, headed for the park to try to piece
together what had happened. Burke interviewed park employees, inventoried the
items left behind on the blanket and checked out the women`s car. Inside were
several items of clothing, and shoes belonging to Bruhl and Blough.
At 3:50 p.m., after satisfying himself that the three women were nowhere
in the vicinity, Burke alerted the U.S. Coast Guard and requested a search of
the southern end of Lake Michigan. The Coast Guard estimated that 5,000 to
6,000 boats had been on the lake between Chicago and Indiana Dunes State Park
(now Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore) the day the girls disappeared. The
task of singling out the craft on which they might have gone for a ride would
have been impossible.
With two days already gone before authorities were called into the case,
Burke, a 16-year police veteran, knew that each additional day would make the
mystery tougher to solve. Witnesses would become vague. The wind and weather
would obliterate possible clues in the ever-shifting sand dunes.
First thing Tuesday, July 5, Burke ordered a minute search of the 2,180-
acre park and the shoreline to the east, extending all the way to Michigan
City near the Indiana-Michigan border. Coordinating the search were Svetic and
1st Sgt. Albert Hartman of the Indiana State Police. Search parties, including
42 soldier volunteers from a nearby missile base and 10 members of the Porter
County Sheriff`s Posse on horseback, plodded over the sprawling dunes, through
thick woods and across quiet meadows containing some of the finest flora in
the Midwest.
In examining the contents of Bruhl`s purse, meanwhile, detectives
discovered something that could indicate the disappearance might have been planned. The abandoned pocketbook contained an unmailed letter to her husband
of 15 months, Jeffery, a 21-year-old accounting student. The letter, written
two weeks earlier, suggested that Renee wanted to leave Jeffery, contending he
spent too much time with his friends, working on hot-rod cars. For reasons
known only to herself, she never delivered the message.
But if it was indeed a planned disappearance, would Renee have left the
letter behind to give the plot away?
Police questioned the young husband, who insisted there had been no
marital problems that he was aware of. Members of the young woman`s family
also discounted the importance of the missive, saying Renee might have been
upset when she wrote it and then thought better of passing it on to Jeff. She
might even have forgotten that she still carried it.
As darkness enshrouded the park, Burke ordered a beach buggy to patrol
the shoreline throughout the night. The reason was grimly obvious: If the
three women had drowned the previous Saturday, it would be time for their
bodies to surface and float to shore. All through the night, however, the
beach-buggy patrol saw nothing other than its own tire tracks.
On Wednesday, July 6, the search was concentrated in a six-mile stretch
of beach west of the park, extending to Ogden Dunes, an area of woods and
expensive homes. This was as the result of telephone calls from two men from
South Holland, Ill., and from an Indianapolis couple. They had been at the
park Saturday and had seen three young women enter a boat containing one man
and head west.
The man was described as well-tanned, in his early 20s, with dark, wavy
hair. He was wearing a beach jacket. The witnesses recalled that one of the
women was wearing a yellow swimsuit and positively identified photographs of
the women as the persons they had seen board the craft.
More than 100 volunteer searchers were now involved in the operation,
along with the sheriff`s mounted posse.
The search took a new turn later that day when debris from a wrecked boat
washed up along the shoreline three miles west of where the women were last
seen. Searchers found pieces of metal and Styrofoam, believed to have been
parts of three boat seats, along with oil and gasoline cans and a piece of
oil-soaked wood.
The discovery was made near the Bailly Generating Station of the Northern
Indiana Public Service Co. There is a water intake crib about a quarter of a
mile out in the lake, and police theorized a boat might have smashed into the
crib and broken up. Curiously, however, police and the Coast Guard could find
no record of any boat having been reported missing.
A Civil Air Patrol plane flew over the area in search of additional
debris but found nothing. ``As of this time we have no evidence of a
connection between the debris and the missing women,`` Burke told reporters
congregating at the scene.
The sea hunt was resumed on Thursday. Civil Air Patrol planes from Cook
County and Gary crisscrossed the lower end of the lake, as far north as a line
extending from downtown Chicago to New Buffalo, Mich. At the same time Coast
Guard cruisers were checking every boat along the Lake Michigan shore in
Illinois, Indiana and southern Michigan.
The search would continue uninterrupted for a week.
The Coast Guard dispatched 10 cutters, one airplane and one helicopter to
aid in the hunt. The Civil Air Patrol had a minimum of four planes aloft
throughout the search. Two Army helicopters also joined the air operation. Far
below, dozens of scuba divers working from an Army amphibian ``duck`` explored
the lake bottom from a point near where the women`s blanket was found to as
far west as a steel mill at Burns Ditch.
Park Supt. Svetic invited anyone with bloodhounds to bring their dogs to
the park to help in the search, and he urged owners of private cabins along
the lakeshore to check their properties for any sign of the missing
sunbathers. Members of the sheriff`s posse checked out some 250 cabins in the
area, talking to anyone they could find at home and peering through windows of
unoccupied dwellings.
Svetic made a public appeal for anyone who might have seen the three
women enter a boat to contact him at park headquarters. In all, he received
more than 100 calls. Most of the reports were quickly discounted while others
were checked out but led nowhere.
Typical of those was a call from a drugstore owner who insisted he saw
Blough in his place of business several days after the disappearance. ``She
was in here and bought a couple of those love-story magazines, three birthday
cards, a pair of earrings and three pairs of stockings,`` he told
investigators.
The near certainty that the women had gone into the water, either for a
swim or a boat ride, was emphasized by the shoes they left behind. ``So far we
have found nothing to indicate foul play,`` Sgt. Burke said on the fourth day
of the search. ``But nothing has been found to indicate what else might have
happened to them.``
Police determined that both Blough and Bruhl were strong swimmers, while
Miller was described as a ``fair`` swimmer, making it unlikely the three might
have drowned. ``Patty Blough was capable of swimming 20 to 30 miles,`` Burke<
said he`d been told.
The families of the three women could think of no one they knew who owned
a boat and stressed that the women`s interests did not lie in a nautical
direction. On the contrary, all three were horseback riding enthusiasts.
Blough owned her own horse, a thoroughbred named Hank, which at the moment was
at a track near Winnipeg, Canada, where the animal had won a race two weeks
earlier.
Probing into the backgrounds of the three women, detectives initially
could find little that might help in the investigation. Blough, who weighed
115 pounds, wore her dark brown hair in a short, soft style. She had deep
brown eyes and a dark suntan. She had attended Proviso East High School in
Hillside for two years, graduating from Proviso West in Maywood. She had
worked six months as a secretary at Sears, Roebuck & Co. before taking a
similar job with Commonwealth Edison.
It was while growing up in Wisconsin, where she spent her summers at her
parents` lake cottage, that she had developed into an expert swimmer. But
horses were her real love. Before acquiring Hank she owned a saddle horse
which she boarded in the same stable where Miller kept her horse. That was how
the two became acquainted. Miller had been employed exercising horses at the
Oak Brook Polo Club. Bruhl had been a high school classmate of Blough`s. After
graduation from Proviso West in Maywood, she completed a one-year course at a
medical-technology school in the Loop.
As the land-sea search continued Thursday, police received more calls in
response to a plea by the parents of the missing women. Various callers who
had seen their photographs in area newspapers reported having seen them in
Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin. Some of the callers who had been at the
beach the day of the disappearance said they had seen the three get into a
boat with three men. Other callers remembered it as two men. Another said there was only one man. Burke`s investigators checked out every lead.
For a time it appeared that the best lead was a lifeguard who told
investigators he had seen the women get into a boat with three men aboard. The
next day, however, he told police he did not think they were the same girls.
In the end, police considered the best lead to be the original one, from
the teenaged boy and girl who told Connors about seeing the women get into a
small boat containing one man. This story was backed up by the South Holland
and Indianapolis witnesses. Later Thursday, Coast Guardsmen located three
Michigan City men who said they had attempted unsuccessfully to pick up three
women at the beach with their boat on Saturday. They said the young women,
standing in chin-deep water, turned down their offer. ``I`m married. I can`t
go,`` one of the women explained.
This report refueled speculation that the three might have drowned after
all. Six scuba divers were sent into the chilly lake to probe the sandy
bottom. They searched Thursday evening and throughout the night to the
monotonous drone of an electric generator powering floodlights that reflected
eerily off the lake. The underwater probe continued all day Friday, but the
divers came up with nothing. ``At this point I am 90 percent sure they were
victims of accidental drowning,`` Svetic opined.
But Burke was not so sure. ``In view of the fact that all were known to
be good swimmers, I would have to consider this possibility remote,`` he said.
``Nor do I think they were involved in a boating accident.``
That left just two possibilities:
-- The women staged a mysterious disappearance and deliberately ran away.
-- They had met with foul play.
Burke`s investigators learned that all three had problems in their
personal lives, but none was considered traumatic enough to run away from.
Furthermore, the fact that they had left behind their purses, shoes and
personal items elevated fears that they had indeed been victims of an
occurrence not of their own choosing.
By the end of the first week both Burke and Svetic were satisfied that
Bruhl, Blough and Miller were nowhere in the park--alive or dead. The official
search was called to a halt.
Now came the tedious nuts and bolts of police work, questioning friends,
relatives and anyone who might have known them, in an effort to come up with a
common denominator that would bring the jigsaw pieces together.
Every visitor who came to the park the weekend after the disappearance
was made aware of the search. Under Sgt. Burke`s direction, 5,000 circulars
containing pictures and descriptions of the women were distributed throughout
the park.
Patty`s 59-year-old father, Harold Blough, refused to give up. A
lieutenant colonel in the Illinois Civil Air Patrol, he carried on a personal
air search for the missing girls. Along with A.W. Hardt of west suburban
Hillside, a Civil Air Patrol major, and Detective Fred Miller of the
Westchester Police Department, Blough flew along the Lake Michigan shoreline
from Calumet Harbor to Michigan City in a Cessna 210 four-seater. They made
several passes along the beach and over wooded and summer-home areas, taking aerial photographs that Blough would pore over endlessly, looking for any sign
that might explain his daughter`s fate.
``If I can just find one small fact that will be of use to the police
. . .`` he said hopefully. ``In my heart I feel this is an abduction. My
daughter is a regular reader of the newspapers. If she were free to move, she
would have read newspaper accounts of the search for her and her friends, and
she would have come home,`` he told anyone who would listen.
``If she were running away, she would have taken more clothing and her
contact lenses, her cosmetic case and the keys for her car. Besides, she was
completely wrapped up in her horse. She would not have run out on Hank.``
That weekend Hank won $900 in a race at Winnipeg--but the winnings went
uncollected.
Renee Bruhl`s father, Joseph Slunecko, expressed confidence that the
three were still alive. He said he felt they had voluntarily left the area and
were ``too frightened`` to return after seeing all the stir caused by their
disappearance.
As the investigation progressed, Burke, too, became more and more
convinced that they had left the beach voluntarily. This did not preclude the
possibility that they might have met with foul play later.
A man from Ligonier, Ind., who had been taking movies at the beach
recalled that he had been ``panning`` the general area where the women had
been last seen. He made his films available to authorities.
From the movie film and from hundreds of interviews with other people who
had been at the beach July 2, police were able to narrow their search to two
boats, a 26- to 28-foot cabin cruiser and a 16- or 18-foot trimaran runabout.
``The smaller boat is fairly distinctive because of its three-hulled
design,`` Burke explained. ``We know it was made of fiber glass and was
operated by a man in his early 20s, well tanned, with dark wavy hair and
wearing a beach jacket.
``Three girls, wearing the same-colored bathing suits as Renee Bruhl,
Patricia Blough and Ann Miller, were seen getting into this boat. Miss Blough
--or the person we believe to have been Miss Blough--sat up front beside
the man. The other two girls sat behind.``
Burke said his investigators determined that the cabin cruiser had been
spotted by a Gary attorney and his wife about three hours after the young
women were seen getting into the small sailboat. Witnesses said the women were
seen wandering around the beach, getting something to eat and going off into
the dunes. This raised the possibility that they might have come back to the
beach in the sailboat and waited for the young man to get his friends with the
cabin cruiser, Burke explained.
The cruiser, believed to have been a 26-foot Trojan with three men
aboard, came up close to the beach in the same area where the sailboat had
been. ``One man left the cruiser and went directly to the beach and talked
with three girls,`` according to one witness, who said they fit the
description of the missing trio. ``The girls accompanied the man to the
cruiser, boarded it and it put out into the lake.``
The Gary lawyer, Robert Blatz, who observed the incident from a distance,
noted that the boat was equipped with a radio-telephone antenna but bore no
name on its stern. He said he was too far away to determine the facial
features of the three young women who boarded the craft.
Burke said there appeared to be no question, however, that the women seen
earlier aboard the trimaran were Blough, Miller and Bruhl.
Harold Blough, still pressing his own private investigation, issued
another plea for his daughter`s return and asked that anyone who might know
the identity or whereabouts of the white trimaran with a turquoise-colored
inside please come forward. ``My wife is heartbroken,`` he said. ``Every time
the telephone rings, a knife goes through her heart. She is afraid of what she
will hear. . . We want Patricia back very badly. There must be someone who can
help us.``
The air search continued, with helicopters augmenting the Civil Air
Patrol craft, but to no avail. Divers went down at the generating station`s
water intake crib three miles west of the park, on the outside chance that the
women had been sucked into the crib while swimming.
Meanwhile, a thorough background investigation indicated that all three
of the missing women had skeletons in their closets that their families did
not necessarily know about.
``Each of the girls had personal problems that could have motivated them
to stage what would appear to be a possible drowning accident,`` Burke wrote
in a log he kept on the case. His notes, along with other reports in file No.
1-33919, now kept at the state police post in Lowell, Ind., were made
available to reporters for the first time in preparation for this article.
The
earlier investigation had hinted at Bruhl`s marital problems. Through their
mutual interest in horses, Blough and Miller had come into contact with men
who had criminal arrest records, the files showed. And on the night before
they disappeared, both women had returned home near dawn.
In March of 1966--about four months before the disappearance--friends of
Blough`s observed an injury to her face that ``could have been caused by a
fist.`` When they asked about it, she confided that she was in some sort of
trouble involving ``some syndicate people`` she knew.
An acquaintance of Blough`s from Oak Park told investigators, ``Patty
told me, `I`m going to leave, and nobody will find me.` `` Blough was known to
have had a boyfriend named John Paul Jones, whom Burke described in his log as
an ex-convict and rodeo cowboy. The file noted that FBI agents had twice
interviewed Jones in California in connection with the disappearance, and he
confirmed a romantic involvement with the missing horse owner but denied any
knowledge of her fate or whereabouts.
In looking into Miller`s personal life, police said they were told by her
friends that she was three months pregnant and had talked of entering a home
for unwed mothers.
July moved into August, which faded into September--and still no word of
the missing women or any sign of the distinctive three-hulled boat they were
believed to have boarded.
In the early autumn a Pontiac, Mich., man told authorities that a girl
who had shared a seat with him on a Detroit-bound bus resembled one of the
missing women. ``When the bus arrived in Detroit, the girl was met by two others who looked very much like the other two missing ones,`` he told police.
The possible sighting gave rise to new hopes that the women had indeed
run away and were alive and well. Harold Blough would have none of it,
however. ``All three are either dead or being held someplace against their
wills,`` he insisted. ``Patricia was an adult girl who was given every
freedom. If she wanted to go somewhere, her mother and I would not object. She
did not have to run away.``
Blough continued his search. He flew scores of missions over the southern
end of Lake Michigan in his chartered planes, looking for his missing daughter
in her yellow bathing suit. He even flew down to Nassau to check out a report
--which turned out to be false--that Patty had been seen there.
On the outside chance that the three women were still alive and working
somewhere outside the area, their families printed 5,000 circulars containing
previously unpublished pictures of their daughters and sent them to friends
and relatives in other states. The flyers were also distributed by police
departments in Florida, Arizona, California and other states with major horse
tracks.
On July 2, 1968--the second anniversary of the disappearance--police
received an unconfirmed report that Blough was seen riding in a pick-up truck
pulling a horse trailer in Moneta, a small town in Fremont County in the dead
center of Wyoming. Burke dutifully contacted Wyoming authorities and asked
them to be on the lookout for the missing women.
The case remains open to this day; open but inactive. Sgt. Burke retired
in 1971 after 21 years as an Indiana State Police officer. He spent the next
four years working for the U.S. government as a police adviser in South
Vietnam and was among the last Americans evacuated by helicopter from Saigon in 1975. From there he went to Saudi Arabia as security chief for the King
Faisal Medical Center in Riyadh.
Harold Blough, the father who refused to give up, retired and moved to
Florida but kept the communication lines open to Burke in Saudi Arabia,
exchanging theories about the baffling case.
After Burke retired, the case was assigned to Sgt. Carmen. He and Trooper
Weber thoroughly familiarized themselves with the disappearance. ``It was
around 1975, when Lou and I were going through the paperwork on the
investigation, when we found this letter from the psychic,`` recalls Carmen,
now commander of the Redkey Post in east-central Indiana.
The Montana spiritualist wrote: ``I visualize a cabin on Lake Michigan,
not too far from where the girls` beach blanket was found. There is dark-
colored sand. There are rickety wooden stairs leading up from the beach to the
cabin on a bluff, with a lawn chair outside with its bottom out.`` The
medium`s letter went on to say the women`s bodies were buried there.
``It piqued our curiosity. There was no indication in the file that anyone had looked into that aspect. The cabin described in the letter probably
fit the location of several places, but we felt the Indiana State Police owed
it to the families to investigate,`` Carmen says.
Weber agrees. ``At this point, hey, even a letter from a psychic is worth
taking a look at.`` Weber headed for the Dunes, driving his police cruiser as
far as the narrow roads would take him near Beverly Shores. Then he hiked the
rest of the way into the Dunes and eventually came upon the old cabin. Nestled
in a small cove flanked by wooded dunes, it was less than two miles east of
the spot where the young women had spread their beach blanket.
``I thought to myself that if a crime had been committed, this would be a
great place for it,`` he recalls. ``No one could see into the cove from the
beach, only from a boat on the lake. It was that secluded.`` Excited, he raced
back to headquarters and told Carmen of his find.
Returning to the cove with Weber and the two troopers, Carmen recalls his
initial impression: ``It was an eerie coincidence. There was the dark sand, an
old cabin with rickety stairs and a lawn chair with the bottom broken out.``
Flushed with excitement over the possibility that they had stumbled onto
something, he, Weber and the two troopers dug up the entire yard, but the only
thing they got over the three days was a good sweat.
Investigators are no closer today to determining what happened to Patty
Blough, Ann Miller and Renee Bruhl than they were 21 years ago when their
personal belongings were discovered on the abandoned beach blanket. The fact
that the troopers` shovels came up empty on that eerie visit to the secluded
cabin does not mean that there is not, or was not, something there, Weber
says. ``Over the years the shifting dunes could have added 30 feet of sand to
the area or, for that matter, drawn the sandy cover away from a possible
burial spot, exposing it to animals,`` he explains.
Those who have worked on the case have several theories as to the fate of
the three young women:
-- They were involved in a horrible boating accident that left no
physical trace of anyone aboard.
-- They were victims of an abduction that turned to murder aboard the
boat.
-- Death, possibly murder, occurred after they left the boat in a bizarre
climax to what had been planned as a ``voluntary`` disappearance.
-- Miller`s pregnancy might have led to an abortion death, and her two
friends were slain to keep them from talking.
Burke, who retired to Florida, says that hardly a day goes by that he
does not think about the case. ``It nags at me. I feel sure some day the
answer will surface. Perhaps a suspect caught by police in another crime will
admit this one,`` he says.
``If violence occurred, it involved all three together,`` he suggests.
``I am certain at least one of them would have made contact with her
family. One of them would have felt the need to get back in touch.``