Amy Mihaljevic

Amy Renee Mihaljevic was a ten-year-old fifth grader from Bay Village, an affluent suburb of Cleveland on the shore of Lake Erie, Ohio. In the weeks before her death she received several telephone calls from an unknown man who claimed to work with her mother, who had recently been promoted. The caller asked Amy to help him pick out a present to celebrate the promotion and arranged to meet her after school. On the afternoon of Friday, October 27, 1989, Amy left Bay Middle School and walked to the nearby Bay Square Shopping Center. Eyewitnesses reported seeing her talking with a white man estimated to be in his thirties, and she was last seen walking with him through the parking lot before she vanished.

A massive search and one of the largest investigations in Ohio history followed, drawing in the Bay Village police and the FBI. On February 8, 1990, more than three months after she disappeared, a jogger discovered Amy's body in a farm field off County Road 1181 in Ruggles Township, in rural Ashland County, roughly fifty miles from her home. She had been stabbed to death. Investigators eventually conducted tens of thousands of interviews and collected DNA from some 250 people connected to Amy or the case, yet no charges were ever filed.

The case grew more chilling in 2006, when authorities revealed that other young girls in the area had received phone calls strikingly similar to those Amy got, from a man claiming to work with their mothers and wanting help buying a gift. Investigators came to believe the offender may have obtained victims' information from a visitor logbook at the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center. Over the years several people have been named as persons of interest, and witnesses and polygraph examinations have been used to test suspects, but no one has been definitively linked to the crime and the killer's identity remains unknown.

Decades on, the murder of Amy Mihaljevic is still an active investigation and one of Ohio's most notorious cold cases. In 2024, investigators announced they had recovered male nuclear DNA from Amy's sweatpants that they consider promising, and hairs from other evidence have been sent to specialized laboratories in California for advanced testing, with authorities hopeful that emerging forensic technology may finally produce a usable profile. The FBI and Bay Village police continue to seek the public's help identifying items linked to the case, including a distinctive blanket and curtain, and Amy's missing turquoise horse-head earrings. A reward remains available, and detectives believe the person who called Amy pretending to know her mother, and then killed her, may still be alive. Anyone with information is urged to contact the FBI's Cleveland office or the Bay Village Police Department.