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What Happened To Cherrie Mahan?
Mahan Disappeared 20 Years Ago

February 21, 2005
Karen Welles, Target 11 Investigator
Wpxi.com

PITTSBURGH -- A child vanishes into thin air. Not one piece of evidence as to her disappearance is ever found.

It's a case that has frustrated her family and investigators and, now, 20 years later, everyone is still asking what happened to Cherrie Mahan.

It's a case that traumatized area children and scared their parents half to death. An 8-year-old girl disappeared 20 years ago and years later leads are still coming in.

Janice McKinney said, "The caring, I never will stop caring for Cherrie. And the heartache is it gets worse and worse."

Twenty years have not healed the emotional wounds of Janice McKinney. Her then 8-year-old daughter Cherrie Ann Mahan vanished on Feb. 22, 1985.

McKinney said, "The not knowing is probably the killer of all things. And guilt -- the guilt that I feel for not being there every year it just gets a little harder."

Janice and Cherrie's stepfather, Leroy, were not there when Cherrie got off her school bus about 100 yards from the family's home along Cornplanter Road in Winfield Township, Butler County.

The case received national attention. One show performed a reenactment of other children seeing Cherrie walk to a blue van with a mural of a mountain and a skier.

McKinney said, "That van fell off the face of the earth. It went into a black hole with her."

Trooper Frank Jendesky said, "Over the years we've kept pictures, numerous pictures, and registration plate numbers.

Jendesky is the third state trooper over the years to lead the investigation into the case.

Jendesky said, "The most important thing I do in my career is this case."

Just recently he followed up on sightings reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Jendesky said, "They believe they saw her somewhere working at a restaurant or at a mall in different parts of the country and we would have local departments try to narrow those down as best as we can."

Still, nothing has panned out.

Cherrie's grandmother Shirley, who paid psychics over the years to help find clues, has now lost hope of ever finding her little angel alive.

Shirley Mahan said, "I truly in my heart feel that she is dead. I think that her grandfather and her uncle are watching over her in heaven. She truly was she was a loving little girl."

That little girl would be an adult woman today.

McKinney said, "I look at them and think she's a doctor, she's a lawyer. And she has real long hair. She always wanted long hair."
Target 11's Karen Welles asked, "As a mother, in your heart do you think she's alive or dead?"

McKinney said, "As a mother, in my heart I feel and I've always felt that she was OK."

Welles asked, "Do you think it ever will be solved?"
Jendesky said, "Well, I'll always have hope it'll be solved."

McKinney said, "There is somebody out there that knows and, you know, sometimes guilt will eat you away until, you know, you have to tell someone. And I'm just hoping that maybe this will be the year."

Early in the investigation, family members were given and passed lie detector tests. Still, investigators don't know for sure if the kidnapper knew Cherrie Mahan and her family or if it was a complete stranger.

Anyone who remembers anything about the case is asked to call state police.

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Cherrie's death official, mother's memory eternal

Friday, November 06, 1998
By Dennis B. Roddy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

BUTLER -- In the 13 years since she vanished into that place where little girls are always 8 years old and mothers walk forever with huge rips in their souls, Cherrie Mahan's absence has been measured in things missed.

She was absent for what would have been her high school graduation in 1994. She wasn't there nine years ago when her brother was born. Yesterday, she missed her own death.

After waiting six years longer than law requires, Cherrie Mahan's mother walked into a courtroom and surrendered to a reality she can barely speak about. Cherrie Mahan is now, in the official books of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, dead.

"This is not over," Janice McKinney said, fairly choking on her words. "We'll always look for Cherrie. If nothing else, she'll always be in our hearts."

There long ago ceased to be any other plausible spot to look for Cherrie. After she stepped off a school bus and never made the remaining 150 yards to her house, police scoured her neighborhood in the Butler County town of Cabot.

Car tracks were photographed. They led nowhere. Fliers blanketed the region. Family friends were asked pointed questions. Janice and LeRoy McKinney, Cherrie's mother and stepfather, were given the obligatory lie detector tests.

The only certainty to emerge was that Cherrie could not be found.

Three months ago, after Janice McKinney decided to hand over to a charity for missing children the $50,000 once intended to reward the person who found Cherrie, she telephoned her lawyer, J. Stevenson Suess. Would he do some final paperwork on the case?

Before she had vanished, Cherrie won a $3,500 settlement from an insurance company after her arm was broken in a traffic accident. The money had been sitting in a bank, waiting for her. Janice McKinney decided the time had come to give that money to the child she can still find, her 9-year-old son Robert, the brother Cherrie never met.

It took 15 minutes for Judge Thomas Doerr to hear McKinney's petition yesterday. He duly noted the bare facts: Cherrie Mahan was born Aug. 14, 1976. On Feb. 22, 1985 she got off her bus along Cornplanter Road in the town of Cabot. After that, she has been neither seen nor heard from, despite a search that stretched across Western Pennsylvania.

With so much evidence of things not seen, Pennsylvania's law holds that, on Feb. 22, 1992 -- after the necessary seven years had elapsed -- Cherrie Mahan died.

What happened to her is anyone's guess.

"I was outside on the porch," LeRoy McKinney recalled yesterday. "I heard the bus comin' down the hollow. I heard the kids gettin' off."

LeRoy McKiney said he was about to go down the 150-yard driveway leading to their place when Janice told him: "No, it's a nice day. Let her walk."

After 10 minutes, LeRoy and Janice McKinney began to worry. He went to the bus stop. All he noticed were some tire prints and utter silence. School mates later told investigators Cherrie had gotten off the bus. In the ensuing months, the only lead anyone had was that a van with a mountain scene painted on its side had been noticed around the neighborhood. It was never found.

Years followed. Janice and LeRoy McKinney tortured themselves with thoughts of what might have happened. Eliminating suspects one by one, police questioned the McKinneys. They questioned friends, too, and some of them fell away.

"I don't know if they were mad," LeRoy McKinney explained. "They just wanted nothing to do with it."

Doerr, a thin, 42-year-old judge with thick, curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses, was noticeably shaken by his own ruling yesterday. He won't comment on any case before him, but does admit to remembering the desperate days in which a community looked for a Cherrie Mahan. His own daughter had been born just two years earlier.

"I'm sorry to see you here, ma'am," he told Janice McKinney, then closed the proceedings.

The statute under which Cherrie was declared dead takes its pedigree from colonial times, when men often went to war or into the woods to hunt and never returned. Common law, passed down from the British, held that, after seven years without any word, the spouse left behind could remarry and society could safely assume the missing one had died.

It became the basis for a popular myth still afoot today: that if a couple lives together for seven years, they are, by default, in a common-law marriage.

A judge can entertain a declaration of death in less than seven years if the missing person was involved in some perilous activity. Suess gave the example of a balloonist who tries to cross the Atlantic and isn't heard from again.

All Cherrie Mahan was doing, though, was what thousands of children do every day: getting off a school bus to walk up her driveway to home. It should have taken five minutes.

Robert McKinney, the brother born four years after Cherrie vanished, was in school yesterday, and thus not on hand to see the sister he never knew declared dead, years after she passed away.

"He doesn't understand, other than he has a very overprotective mother. This child's not going anywhere without me," Janice McKinney said.

There was never a funeral service for Cherrie Mahan, because her mother could never bring herself to do anything but continue to hope, even when hoping was the thing that hurt most, because there was no clear way to stop.

"When people die, you have a body. You kiss 'em in the face, you put them in the ground and you say goodbye," she said. "That's something I never had."

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Search for Cherrie Mahan, missing 15 years, goes on

Wednesday, May 24, 2000
By Mike Rosenwald, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The search is still on for Cherrie Mahan.

Cherrie, 8 years old at the time, disappeared 15 years ago after getting off a school bus just 150 yards from her home. Nobody has seen or heard from her since.

Her disappearance shattered the tranquility of Cabot, and has left authorities with very few, if any, clues as to where they might find her.

Now ADVO, the nation's largest direct mail marketing service company, is featuring Cherrie on its Have You Seen Me? cards again. Cherrie was the first missing child ADVO placed on its cards when it started the campaign 15 years ago. Since then, the program has helped recover one of every seven missing children featured on the cards, and it is on the brink of its 100th recovery.

Vincent Giuliano, the senior vice president of government relations for ADVO and founder of the company's missing children program, noted that there always is a mass search for a child in the frantic moments after a disappearance.

"But who is looking for Cherrie now?" he asked. "If there is some new piece of information, if there's something we can do now to remind people that this girl is missing, that she's still missing, and that there's other children missing, we need to do this."

In the new mass mailing, which goes out this week, the image of Cherrie as an 8-year-old will be next to a computer-enhanced image of her at 23.

"If we can find one person who knows something, maybe we can bring Cherrie home," Giuliano said.

Two years ago, in an effort to get a small amount of money from an insurance settlement, Cherrie's mother, Janice McKinney, walked into a courtroom and had her daughter declared dead. The money was turned over to a national organization that seeks missing children.

"This is not over," McKinney said at the time. "We'll always look for Cherrie."

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Family still searching for answers about missing girl
By Liz Hayes
TRIBUNE-REVIEW NEWS SERVICE
Tuesday, February 22, 2005


Shirley Mahan wants one wish granted before she dies: to learn what happened to her granddaughter who disappeared 20 years ago while walking home from her school bus stop.
"If I just knew if she was dead or alive, it would help," said Mahan, 77, of Clinton, Butler County.

Cherrie Mahan was 8 years old when she disappeared on Feb. 22, 1985.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of her disappearance. Her family knows about as much now of her whereabouts as they did that afternoon.

"I just wish I had some closure," Shirley Mahan said. "But I don't."

Relatives concede that Cherrie likely is dead but vowed they won't stop looking for her or hoping she's alive.

Mahan said she's dealt with the deaths of many family members -- including her father, a son and her husband -- but hasn't been able to come to terms with Cherrie's loss.

"Sometimes I wish I could sit on a couch and pull a blanket over my head and just not wake up," Mahan said.

Janice McKinney, Shirley Mahan's daughter and Cherrie's mother, said she keeps hoping someone will confess or give police the clue that solves the case.

"Somebody out there knows something," McKinney said. "They might not even know they know it."

McKinney said she wishes she'd driven her daughter home from the bus stop that day, rather than let her walk.

Cherrie's stepfather, Leroy McKinney, usually drove her the 50 yards from the bus stop at Cornplanter and Winfield roads in Winfield to the family's mobile home at the end of a steep, wooded driveway. The home was not visible from the road. But that day they decided to let Cherrie walk.

"Every day I feel more and more guilty for not picking her up," Janice McKinney said. "That's a lot of guilt to carry around for 20 years."

The McKinneys contacted police within an hour, and hundreds of volunteers combed the woods and searched roadsides for a sign of Cherrie.

Other children from the bus and a mother who picked up several youngsters at her bus stop recalled seeing a blue or green van with a large mural that featured a skier and a snowy mountain scene. The van's description soon was circulated regionally and nationally, although police were never certain it was connected to her disappearance.

The van, like Cherrie, never was found.

"There've been hundreds and hundreds of vans that have been photographed and history checked," said Butler State Police Trooper Frank Jendesky, who is in charge of Cherrie's case.

Jendesky said the case remains open and he periodically checks out reported sightings. He sends out releases on the anniversary of her disappearance to keep the case in the public eye.

"We just pray that we'll get a break," he said. "It's really a bizarre case."

Cherrie's mother and grandmother, along with some family and friends, met at Saxonburg Memorial United Presbyterian Church on Sunday to celebrate Cherrie's life.

"She was such a loving little girl when she lived with us," said Shirley Mahan, recalling when her daughter and granddaughter lived with her in Clinton.

Mahan remembered the Cabbage Patch Kid doll she gave Cherrie.

"She carried it with her everywhere she went," Mahan said.

McKinney had a judge declare Cherrie legally dead in 1998 so money from a car accident settlement could be placed in a trust for McKinney's son Robert, now 15. Generally, a missing person can be declared dead seven years after disappearing; McKinney waited 13 years for the declaration.

"The not knowing is the worst thing," McKinney said. "I just don't know if she's dead or alive."

McKinney, who now lives in Mars, said she planted a tree at her workplace and places an angel statue near it to commemorate her daughter.

Mahan said she erected a cherub statue in a Saxonburg cemetery, but Cherrie doesn't have a grave or a gravestone there.

Until the family knows she's dead, Mahan isn't certain she'll ever have one.

"I just feel that I've prayed and prayed, and so many people tell me they've prayed for her," Mahan said. "If we get so many prayers, why don't we know?"