No day goes by that Magi Bish doesn't close her eyes and see his face. The stocky, mustached man in his 50s was sitting in the only other car in the parking lot when Magi dropped off her 16-year-old daughter Molly at Comins Pond, outside Warren, Mass., on June 26, 2000. Uneasy, Magi walked Molly to the secluded beach where the girl worked as a lifeguard. When she returned to her car 10 minutes later, the man was still there, smoking a cigarette in his old white sedan. "He looked right at me and stared," Magi, 50, recalls of the stranger, who drove off while she pretended to look for something on the floor of her car. "Something inside didn't feel good."
That night, Magi asked her daughter if she felt safe at the pond and warned her about the man. "Don't worry, Mom," she replied. "It's just a fisherman. I'm okay." But at 1:30 the next afternoon, police called Magi, a teacher, and told her Molly's belongings, including her shoes, were lying on the beach, but that Molly-by all accounts a responsible girl who never skipped a day of school -- had vanished. "We know Molly," says her mother, who alerted her husband, John Bish, 52, a parole officer, and rushed to the beach with Molly's older sister Heather, 24, "so our fears were immediate."
And well-founded. A search involving police dogs, helicopters and even satellite pictures of the area failed to turn up a clue. Molly's brother John, 21, a former lifeguard at the same pond, frantically checked its depths with other divers, and Warren residents walked shoulder to shoulder through the dense surrounding forests and found nothing. A year later, police, treating the case as a criminal investigation, have "a handful of suspects," including prior sex offenders, says Worcester County D.A. John Conte, who adds, "That she's alive out there is a hope. It's not based on substantial evidence."
Ironically the Bishes had moved to Warren from Detroit in 1979 after a friend's daughter was abducted and murdered. "We believed it to be safer," says John, "but predators and sex offenders come to the suburbs too."
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