Vanished: Missing Girls Mystery

Jan. 16 -- Three days after 7-year-old Amber Swartz disappeared from her Pinole, Calif., yard in June 1988, a stranger came by to tell her mother that he had been searching the nearby woods for the little girl.

"'I wanted to be the one to save her,'" Kim Swartz remembers the man saying. "'I wanted to be the one to bring her home to you.'"

When Swartz heard him say that they were "looking for a dead body," the grieving mother wanted nothing to do with the man, who said his name was Tim Bindner. But he wasn't easy to ignore. Bindner would continue to call her for years, offering help in the search for her little girl.

Five months later, another little girl, 9-year-old Michaela Garecht, disappeared in Hayward, a nearby town. Bindner showed up again, asking Michaela's mother if he could help find her daughter. Michaela had been abducted while buying candy with a friend, who heard a muffled cry and turned around to see her friend being kidnapped by a white male.

"He said that he wanted to go out and look for Michaela," said Sharon Murch, Michaela's mother. "He brought a map and showed us where he wanted to go."

Amber and Michaela were not the first young girls to disappear from towns along Interstate 80, which goes through the communities of San Francisco's East Bay.

Angela Bugay, 5, disappeared from Antioch in November 1983, and Tara Cossey, 11, disappeared from San Pablo in June 1978.

And the heartbreaking losses continued. In January 1989, Ilene Misheloff, 13, vanished in mid-afternoon near the town of Dublin. Two years later, 4-year-old Nikki Campbell vanished from Fairfield.

The disappearances of little girls in the East Bay area left law enforcement officers puzzled. "It was just taunting the investigators, taunting the public, taunting the families," said Linda Goldston, a reporter for The Mercury News who covered the cases for years. "You just felt there was a master killer, it was a master suspect at work."

Were the continuing disappearances along I-80 unrelated tragedies, or the work of one person? Investigators began to search for clues that might link some of the cases.