Mystery Remains After 13-Year-Old Girl Vanished From A Minnesota Gas Station In 1989

A Minnesota teenager disappeared while out for the afternoon with her father over 30 years ago, and the missing girl’s family continues to plead for tips that could help crack the case wide open.

On Aug. 5, 1989, Amy Sue Pagnac, then 13, and her father, Marshall Midden, were returning to their Maple Grove home from a trip to the family farm when they stopped at a Holiday Inn gasoline station in Osceola around 4:30 p.m., according to The Charley Project.

While Midden was inside the station using the restroom, Amy vanished without a trace. Police initially believed the teenager left of her own volition since she reportedly had repeatedly run away in the past and was experiencing some problems at the time of her disappearance.

Her mother, Susan Pagnac, however, has insisted Amy “would not have stayed gone.”

“She was quite happy, she was looking forward to starting eighth grade,” she told KMSP-TV.

Investigators also theorized Amy, who had a condition that causes pressure on the brain, may have become disoriented after suffering a seizure while waiting for her father at the gas station and wandered off.

No witnesses reportedly were able to place Amy at the station that day, and both of her parents have adamantly denied they had anything to do with their daughter’s disappearance, which is currently classified as a non-family abduction.

“I have no idea where Amy is. I have only my fears,” Susan said in a 2014 interview, the Pioneer Press reported.

Susan noted at the time that no viable leads in the case have come in to police since 1992.

“It's kind of life-altering,” the mother said in the KMSP-TV interview about not knowing what happened to her daughter. “I still have trouble coming up with the right words.”

She added: “You still kind of wait for the phone call for someone to say, ‘We found her, she's coming home.’”

In 2014, police and the FBI searched the family’s Isanti County property as well as their Maple Grove home but found nothing that would further the ongoing investigation.

“They are doing something, it may not make sense to me, but they are doing something. If this is the thing they have to do to get to the next step and the next step, then we will do it,” Susan said at the time, WLS-TV reported.

Amy went missing just two months before the abduction of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in rural St. Joseph, central Minnesota, made nationwide news. In that case, a local man, Danny Heinrich, took a plea deal in 2016 and admitted he killed Wetterling. In exchange, he received a 20-year sentence on child pornography charges.

Amy, who would now be 46, has brown hair and blue eyes and was 5 feet tall and weighed around 100 pounds when she went missing. She has scars on the side of her nose as well as on her left cheek, eyelid and knee.

She was last seen wearing sweatpants, a light-colored shirt and sneakers.

Anyone with information about Amy Sue Pagnac or her whereabouts is asked to call the Maple Grove Police Department at (763) 494-6100

“I know someone out there knows something,” Susan said about her daughter’s case. “They just may not know what they know.”