One of the cold cases older locals remember the most is of Jennifer Lee Martin, 37 years ago.
In the summer of 1987, at 11 years old, she left her home on Surge Street barefoot, wearing a grayish-purple sweatshirt dress, at around 3 p.m. to go to a 7-11 a few minutes away on Lemmon Drive, bought candy and a soda, and disappeared.
Her family have kept their same phone numbers, hoping one day she might call. Authorities treated the disappearance as a possible abduction, but there were no solid leads, with just a suspicious driver in a Toyota at the time, which was never located afterwards.
Jennifer was described as not being someone who would go into a stranger’s car though. Her family had recently moved to Reno from Florida, and they said she seemed to be doing well, was cautious and had no history of running away from home.
“We first moved to Reno in the 80s and lived in the trailer park that Jennifer Martin did,” Crystal Flippo-Roberts wrote Our Town Reno.
“I remember my mom was so scared when she went missing. I was in grade school and I remember kids talking about her. Although I never met her, I think about her and pray she’s found alive one day. What is being done, if anything, to find missing kids?”
“I also lived in Lemmon Valley in the late 80s, in the little trailer park across from the 7/11 she went missing from,” O.M Dawson wrote.
Dawson pointed out that another child Anthony Franko, who was 10, had also disappeared from Lemmon Valley, several years prior on the morning of May 9, 1983, when he usually walked himself to Lemmon Valley Elementary school. Witnesses say they saw him in the morning walking along Fremont Way, apparently going in the opposite direction, wearing a red 49ers t-shirt, blue jeans, a hooded jacket and hiking boots, when he was seen leaning over and talking with someone in a small rusted out sports car.
“The police treated most missing kids cases as runaways back then and they didn't really start looking for Anthony until a couple of days after he disappeared,” Dawson wrote us.
“Both of these cases have bothered me for decades. People don't just vanish into thin air.”
In the Franko case, children who knew him said they had seen him weeks after his disappearance, but they say he ran away when he saw them. A month before his disappearance, he had run away from home and left a goodbye note after he was punished for bad grades, before returning several hours later.
Last year, his mother Liza wrote him this letter: “Dear Tony, I have faith that you are still alive, but only God knows. I miss you dearly and my heart still aches after all of these years of not knowing where you are. I am trying my best and I am trying to find you. As long as I breathe, you will always be remembered & loved. I love you so much Tony.”
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released a new age progression photo to help.
Both his mother and stepfather were ruled out as suspects after taking polygraph tests.
Dawson has suspicions against the now dead Steven Smith, a former poker dealer at a local casino, who in 2001, after new DNA evidence, confessed to killing 6-year-old Lisa Marie Bonham in 1977. She had disappeared while walking to Idlewild Park.
Smith had been paroled just a year before killing Bonham after initially being sentenced to life in prison for molesting and assaulting multiple young girls in the Reno-Sparks area in 1969.
At the time, his father said he held “the parole board as responsible for what he did as I hold him. They don't need to parole predators so they can destroy another family like they did ours.''
A defrocked priest, Stephen Kiesle, was a suspect in Martin’s case in the early 2000s. He had been previously arrested and charged in 1978 with the molestation of three young girls at the Santa Paula Catholic Church in Fremont.
According to the crimewire website his yard was searched in June 2002 as authorities searched for evidence in several missing persons cases involving young children, including Martin, Franko and others.
Kiesle’s vacation home in Truckee, Nevada, was excavated the same month as part of these investigations, He was found to be living very close from another young girl that went missing in 1988, Amber Swartz, who was only seven years old at the time. Another man confessed in 2007, a month before dying in prison, that he kidnapped and killed Swartz.
Last year, Kiesle was sentenced to six years and eight months in state prison after he killed a man while driving drunk in Walnut Creek, while being named in dozens of new child sex abuse lawsuits.