Linda S. Nickell's sister watched her walk away from her home on Davison Road 30 years ago today, headed to a neighborhood bar called The Thrift City.
The 20-year-old with blond-red hair and green eyes went to meet a girlfriend for a beer. She never came home.
"I remember looking out the living room window and watching until I couldn't see her anymore," said Darlene Tripp, Nickell's younger sister. "It's like she just disappeared."
Tripp, 48, who now lives near Hale in Iosco County, has felt alone in the 30 years since that day, getting little help from family members, Flint police and former friends of her sister. There was virtually no media attention about Nickell's disappearance at the time; very few people seemed to even care.
The case is getting fresh attention now through the efforts of a volunteer group devoted to helping police solve cold cases of unexplained disappearances and unidentified crime victims.
State police in East Tawas have investigated a report that Nickell's body may have been buried outside the home of her late father, but neither digging nor a trained dog turned up human remains during a search in 2003.
State police Sgt. Jay Samuels said he suspects Nickell - a recreational drug user, according to Tripp - was the victim of foul play. A search of Social Security databases showed no evidence of her number being used since her disappearance, he said.
Tripp said sometimes she daydreams that her sister just dropped out of society and might some day reappear.
"I can't believe she's really still alive out there. I think she probably got to the bar and met someone, and went somewhere and someone hurt her," Tripp said.
"But in the back of my mind, I think: Could she still be alive?"
Tripp keeps a scrapbook of the few items her sister left behind, including drawings illustrating themes of peace and love.
She said she and Nickell were raised in a troubled home in rural Iosco County, growing up with alcoholic parents and without such basics as running water.,
Nickell, an 11th-grade dropout and a flower child, was too trusting of others, Tripp said. She worked at Town and Country Lanes on Miller Road in Flint Township and at C&S Red Ribbon Bar on Fenton Road in Flint, often hitchhiking to get to work and to visit Iosco County.
Nickell had left home to live with an aunt as a teenager before moving to Flint to stay with her brother and finally with Tripp and her new husband in 1976.
Flint Police Chief Gary Hagler said he wasn't familiar with the case.
Tripp said she went to Flint police after her sister turned up missing, and the department eventually took a report but did little else, figuring Nickell had run away from the area.
Tripp said she went to the old Thrift City bar and talked to people who worked with her sister, including the friend she had gone out to meet the day she disappeared. But Tripp said her work on the case produced nothing.
Police have also entered information about Nickell into a missing persons database and information about her case is listed on The Doe Network , a volunteer organization devoted to helping police solve cold cases.
Of 28 women and 18 men from Michigan listed on the site, two are from the area - Nickell and Paulette S. Jaster of Davison.
Jaster, who suffered spells of mental illness, was 25 when she was last seen in the Davison area on May 5, 1979, according to The Doe Network .
The Doe Network 's mission is to close cases by giving them exposure and having volunteers search for clues.
Tripp said she hopes someone with information will help close her sister's case.
"Somebody has to know something," she said. "Whether it will ever come out, I don't know."