Search continues for woman who vanished in 1979

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second in a two-part series on the 1979 disappearance of Cheryl Scherer.

Cheryl Scherer's parents were relieved when her work schedule changed.

It wasn't as if anything dangerous ever happened in a small town like Scott City, but the 6 a.m.-to-2 p.m. shift seemed safer for a young gas station attendant than the night shift she'd been working, her sister said.

"And then it happens in broad daylight," Diane Scherer-Morris said.

"It" is a mystery Capt. Jerry Bledsoe of the Scott County Sheriff's Department has been trying to solve for 35 years.

Diane Scherer-Morris speaks Sunday, April 13, 2014 at a gathering of friends and family of her sister, Cheryl Scherer, who disappeared in 1979. Her brother, Anthony Scherer, center, and husband, Ron Morris, stand nearby. (Fred Lynch)

On the morning of April 17, 1979, Scherer -- a redheaded 19-year-old with a bright smile -- vanished from the Rhodes Pump-Ur-Own-Service station in Scott City.

Bledsoe was working in Sikeston, Mo., when his supervisors asked him to deliver a photograph of the teenager to a local media outlet.

He drove to Scott City to pick up the picture, "thinking all the way I would get a call saying Cheryl had come back," Bledsoe said at a recent balloon release held in Scherer's honor.

Local possibilities

On the day of Scherer's disappearance in 1979, the only business near the Rhodes Pump-Ur-Own-Service was a grocery store that was closed because the owner's mother had died -- something an outsider would be unlikely to know.

Cheryl Scherer

"There's times you think [her assailant] might have been somebody local, because the IGA was closed, and there was a funeral," Scherer-Morris said.

Another oddity: The station where Scherer worked was half a mile from Interstate 55; its primary clientele would have been locals, Bledsoe said in a recent telephone interview.

"People traveling the interstate usually stop for gas at a station they can see from the interstate," he said.

In the late '70s, gas stations weren't big shiny stores stocked with groceries, souvenirs and umpteen flavors of cappuccino. Instead, Rhodes Pump-Ur-Own-Service was a small building with a window where customers paid for their fuel, Bledsoe said.

Customers normally did not come into the store, but Scherer might have gone outside, he said.

"She was the type of person that would have went outside of the store to help someone or get closer to them if they could not hear her through the window," Bledsoe said.

Serial killers

Authorities have not ruled out the possibility a serial killer came into town looking for a victim.

In the early 1980s, then-Sheriff Bill Ferrell interviewed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who had been in Southeast Missouri when Scherer vanished.

Lucas told Ferrell he and another serial killer, Otis Toole, had kidnapped a girl off Interstate 55 between St. Louis and Memphis, but she wasn't Scherer. Their victim did not have red hair, he said.

Lucas had no reason to lie about that -- "He seemed somewhat proud of the number of people he had killed," Bledsoe said in a recent interview -- but Ferrell has said Scherer was the only young woman reported missing on I-55 during that period.

"I am not going to say for certain that they didn't do it," Bledsoe said.

Lucas and Toole both died in prison.

Another lead surfaced in 2007, when Timothy Krajcir confessed to the murders of five women in Cape Girardeau during the late 1970s and early 1980s, but police questioned him and came up empty.

"It could have been somebody else just grabbed her, hit the interstate, went south or north -- you just don't know," Scherer-Morris said.

What didn't happen

Anthony Scherer doesn't know what happened to his sister, but he is sure he knows what didn't happen.

"Definitely she didn't run off," he said.

Bledsoe agrees.

"Once you got to know her, her family and home life, you just knew that wasn't a possibility," he said.

The circumstances of her disappearance reinforce that: She left without her purse, car or makeup.

"She wouldn't even go out to the mailbox without her makeup," said her brother-in-law, Ron Morris.

'Willing to try anything'

About a decade ago, Scherer's parents provided DNA samples to create a profile, which investigators put into a national database, and in 2009, the Scott County Sheriff's Department asked a forensics lab in the Netherlands to test a bank bag found at the scene of her disappearance in hopes of recovering DNA from it. Results of that test are pending.

In the meantime, Bledsoe continues to check out leads as they come in.

"A cistern on a farm was searched several years ago due to information we received in a lead. It was more of an idea that someone had that her body might have been in there," Bledsoe said. "It turned up nothing."

Police have taken less conventional suggestions, too, at one point even working with a psychic who had helped authorities in other investigations, Bledsoe said.

"I'm willing to try anything," he said. "I'm not going to turn anyone down that might be able to help with this case."

Hope

Bledsoe stays in touch with Scherer's family, but he doesn't tell them everything.

"It gets me excited when we get a lead in the case, and when it is a dead end, it's a sick feeling," he said. "I can't imagine what the family feels like, so now I just update them periodically and let them know if I have anything I am working on."

That's fine with them.

"We only need to know what we need to know. I truly believe that, because I remember how many times I got my hopes up," Scherer-Morris said.

They continue to hope, and they do what they can to keep Cheryl Scherer's name and story alive, she said.

"I don't consider it a cold case," Bledsoe said during the balloon release. "I work it as much as any other case."

Every time a media outlet mentions Scherer, Bledsoe receives more tips. So far, none has led him to Scherer, but he hasn't given up.

"Solving this case would make me feel better about retiring someday," he said.

epriddy@semissourian.com

388-3642

skluesner@semissourian.com

388-3648

INFOBOX:

Anyone with information about Cheryl Scherer's disappearance or whereabouts is asked to call Capt. Jerry Bledsoe of the Scott County Sheriff's Department at 573-545-3525.