CRYSTAL CITY, Mo. (AP) - It's been 25 years since high school senior Diana Braungardt left her cashier's job at an eastern Missouri mall and was never seen again.
Since her disappearance on March 11, 1987, investigators have amassed 11 binders and three boxes of paperwork. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/whb4Rz) reported that authorities have searched for links to serial killers and occasionally hear from out-of-state police seeking to identify bodies.
Still, investigators don't know what happened to the Festus High School student after she clocked out, telling co-workers at the former Venture store in the Twin City Mall in Crystal City that she needed to get home to study for a test. Authorities doubt she made it to her car, which was found in the store's parking lot.
Panic set in after the normally reliable teen didn't come home immediately after her shift ended at 10 p.m.
"She never let us wonder where she was," said her father, the Rev. Marvin Braungardt, who at the time of her disappearance was senior pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Festus, where the family lived.
He and Diana's mother began calling her friends in the middle of the night. The parents filed a missing person report with Crystal City police the next morning.
Mike Pruneau was a high school sophomore at the time and his stepmother had worked with Diana the night the 18-year-old disappeared. Now a Crystal City detective, Pruneau began investigating the case in 2003 along with Capt. Chad Helms.
In 2007, they interviewed a man from the area whose appearance matched the description of someone seen talking with Diana in the store parking lot before she went missing. Pruneau said a woman who pulled into the lot to change her baby's diaper spotted Diana and the man.
"He hasn't given us a reason to clear him," Pruneau said of the man, who was never arrested or charged and is in prison on an unrelated conviction.
Diana Braungardt would be 43 now. But hopes of her returning have faded.
"We don't expect Diana to show up at our door," her mother, Jane Braungardt, 74, said. "We know something bad happened."