Modern technology might have helped find Scherer

A small white car stops at a small-town gas station on an April morning.

The station attendant, a young woman with long, bright red hair, stands just outside the office door.

Two men get out of the car; another remains inside.

Minutes later, the woman vanishes.

If such a scene occurred in 2014, security cameras likely would capture the details.

"I would say convenience stores, probably 100 percent of them" have surveillance cameras, Cpl. Clark Parrott of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said in a recent interview.

That wasn't the case in 1979, when two witnesses reported seeing three men and a white Ford compact at the Rhodes Pump-Ur-Own-Service station in Scott City minutes before the attendant, 19-year-old Cheryl Scherer, disappeared.

"The description is not much to go on," then-Sheriff Bill Ferrell said in 1980. "You could drive by there any time of the day and see a car with two men outside and the attendant at the door."

Social media

Surveillance videos aren't the only tool police have gained in the past 35 years.

If a woman went missing today, news of her disappearance could make it around the world before she could make it out of the county.

"Social media is so instantaneous and can be reached to so many people so quickly, where in years past, even with regular media outlets, with newspapers and television and radio, you may have to wait until the five o'clock news, until the evening newspaper," said Darin Hickey, public information officer for the Cape Girardeau Police Department. " ... We can get so much information out there quicker than we could even five and 10 years ago."

In 1979, Scherer's family mailed fliers to law enforcement agencies in hopes of finding her, and people who knew truck drivers asked them to pass the word to other truckers to keep an eye out, her sister said.

"Our way of reaching out back then: On a Friday night, I think everybody gathered at the house, and they had fliers that had pictures on them, and [we were] stuffing envelopes," Diane Scherer-Morris said. " ... It's nothing like it is now."

In addition to helping distribute information, the Internet can give investigators a look at the missing person's plans, relationships and recent communications -- for instance, they might read her email or look at any private messages she has exchanged with others on Facebook or Twitter, Hickey said.

"There has to be an ongoing investigation, and the courts do have to get involved ... but yes, we can get hold of those for investigative purposes," he said.

Cellphones

A young woman in 2014 likely would have a cellphone. If she carried it with her when she disappeared, investigators could follow its signal to figure out her general direction of travel, Hickey said.

"We can ping a phone pretty quick. It does take a little administrative action to be done," he said. " ... When pinging of phones is done in the case of missing persons, it's done every so often. It's done to give us a route."

Cpl. Clark Parrott of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said other phone records also might provide clues.

For instance, investigators could use cellphone records to generate a list of people to interview -- friends, family and perhaps suspects who had communicated with the woman recently, Parrott said.

"You can widen that net out a little bit, whereas before, you had to go to Ma Bell or AT&T" to check records for the person's home phone and any pay phones in the area, he said. " ... Now we have investigators that that's all they do is go back and re-create the last 24 or 36 hours of somebody's life."

Candid camera

In addition to convenience stores, other businesses, ATMs, stoplights and even private residences may be monitored with cameras, Hickey said.

Investigators could use a combination of images from those cameras to determine where a missing person went and who was with her, he said.

Over the past 20 years, cellphones have evolved into multipurpose tools that can record video, take photographs and transmit data via the Internet.

"First thing [when] anything happens anymore, people whip out a phone and start recording," Parrott said.

As a result, it's possible a missing person could turn up in an unrelated video or photograph, he said.

"You see that on the news or whatever where ... there's a picture in the background, and somebody says, 'I know who that is,'" Parrott said.

DNA

In 1979, crime-scene investigators dusted the gas station's cash register for fingerprints, but DNA testing would not exist as an investigative tool for several more years.

About 10 years ago, Cpl. Jerry Bledsoe of the Scott County Sheriff's Department got Scherer's parents to provide DNA samples so scientists could create a profile of their daughter, which then was entered into a national database.

Ferrell has said the DNA profile may not be much help, however.

Because the technology was not available at the time of Scherer's disappearance, officers would not have collected samples from any unidentified bodies that turned up back then, he told the Southeast Missourian in 2004; thus, she could have died and been buried as a Jane Doe.

More promising is a recent technology that allows investigators to analyze traces of DNA left on objects a suspect has handled.

When Scherer disappeared, officers found a bank bag at the scene with $480 missing from it.

In 2009, the Scott County Sheriff's Department sent the bag to a forensics lab in the Netherlands in hopes of recovering DNA from the bag. Results still are pending.

Parrott said DNA testing comes in handy, especially as a means of eliminating possible suspects, but it isn't the only way to solve a case.

"It is a big deal, but it's not the end-all, the be-all. Most of our cases are solved by just good police work," he said.

Scott County Signal editor Samantha Kluesner contributed to this story.

epriddy@semissourian.com

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Pertinent address:

Scott City, Mo.