Post by Joanna on Jun 24, 2015 23:18:57 GMT -5
Two Children Vanish in Lemmon Valley
On Sunday, June 28, 1987, 11-year-old Jennifer Martin (above) walked out of a Lemmon Valley 7-11 in Reno, Nevada, and was never seen again. At the time she vanished, the brown-haired, brown-eyed little girl was 4'6", weighed around 50 pounds, and was wearing a greyish-purple sweatshirt dress and barefoot. Her disappearance remains unsolved, but not forgotten. “There’s not a day goes by I don’t think of her many times,” says her sister Colleen.
It’s been 28 years since Colleen Martin, or anyone else, last saw her sister. A Secret Witness re-enactment produced back then shows most of what we know about that day. Around 3 in the afternoon, Jennifer left her family’s mobile home, walked the short distance to a store on Lemmon Valley Drive, bought candy and soda, walked out the door and inexplicably vanished. The walk from the 7-11 back to her home was only a few hundred feet along Surge Street and took no more than five minutes. When she failed to return after 20 minutes, her older brother went to the 7-11 to look for Jennifer, but she was nowhere to be found. “She would never in a million years get in a vehicle with someone she didn’t know or even someone she did know if she didn’t have permission to,” says Colleen Martin. “And she wasn’t shy. She had no problem telling an adult off.”
Witnesses reported seeing a white pickup in the area at the time. The vehicle was tracked down and accounted for as was a van belonging to a family member. However, a light-colored Toyota Corolla observed speeding along the road about the same time was never identified.
The alarm went out. Posters were printed. Volunteers searched the area and came up emptyhanded. So did investigators. “At this point, we’ve interviewed well over 80 people dating back to 1987 until the present,” says Rick Bjelke, a retired Reno Police detective who mans the Sheriff’s Cold Case Unit along with fellow RPD veteran Dave Jenkins. “We’re still looking for that one person who might know something more than we know ourselves.”
Years ago, hopes were briefly raised only to be crushed. A young woman at an Arizona shelter for runaways appeared to match Jennifer’s description. “We made the trip, convinced we were going to bring her home,” says Colleen Martin. But the young woman wasn’t Jennifer. What happened to Jennifer remains a mystery, one that still haunts detectives who worked the case, but have since retired. “We hear from them often,” says Bjelke. “They want an update and to know if there’s any way they can help.” Bjelke and his partner continue the search. “We’ve exhausted a lot of the leads that have been presented to us. We are excited over one that came forward recently and we’re not done with that one at this point.”
Colleen Martin continues her watch, maintaining the same phone number she had back then, the one Jennifer would know. “I just can’t move and I can’t change my phone number,” she says. “And I’m just stuck in 1987 until we know what happened. I just can’t.”
Five years before Jennifer Martin went missing, 10-year-old Anthony “Tony” Franko disappeared after last being seen little more than a block from the same Lemmon Valley 7-11. On the morning of Monday, May 8, 1983, Tony left home to walk the half-mile to Lemmon Valley Elementary School, where he was a 5th-grader. Tony, like Jennifer, had brown hair and eyes. He was 4'11", weighed 85 pounds, and on that morning he was wearing a San Francisco 49ers T-shirt, blue jeans, a blue down hooded jacket and hiking boots. He never arrived, but because school officials failed to notify his mother, he wasn’t missed until later that afternoon, when he failed to call his mother at work when he arrived home. Initially, police treated Franko as a runaway because a month earlier, he had left home and gone into the mountains after his mother punished him for making poor grades. But the day before the May 8 disappearance, Tony had won a blue ribbon for showing his pony and two rabbits at a 4-H Club show and was so proud of his ribbon that he had taken it with him the morning he went missing. Both his mother and step-father were administered polygraph tests and ruled out as suspects. The Franko case is unsolved and there is no obvious connection between the two disappearances, but “you can’t ignore it,” says Bjelke.
In 2002, Stephen Kiesle, a defrocked priest, was arrested and charged with 13 counts of child molestation during the time he worked at Santa Paula Catholic Church in Fremont, Nev., from 1968 until 1971. He immediately became a person of interest in both the cases of Jennifer Martin and Tony Franko and police, using cadaver dogs, a radar and a backhoe, searched Kiesle’s yard for evidence of the two Lemon Valley children as well as Amber Swartz-Garcia, a 7-year-old who disappeared in 1980 from her home in Pinole, Calif. However, the only item recovered was a bag filled with dirt and decomposed clothing. In 2004, Kiesle pled no contest to a felony charge of molesting a young girl in 1995 at his Truckee, Nev., vacation home. He served six years in prison and is now a registered sex offender living in Walnut Creek, Nev.
Anyone with information concerning the disappearance of Jennifer Martin or Tony Franko is asked to call the Washoe County Sheriff’s Cold Case Unit or Secret Witness at (775) 322-4900.
Sources: KOLO News, June 24, 2015; KRNV News; Reno Police Department; and The Charley Project.
