Time is something most people rarely seem to have enough of, except in the case of 18-year old Lynn Schulze, who was last seen walking across the Middlebury College campus more than 4 decades ago.
Middlebury Police Officer Vegar Boe is the 6th investigator assigned to find out what happened to this bright Connecticut teenager.
"I have her picture sitting right on my desk and I see it every day," said Boe.
According to the Middlebury Police report, on December 10th, 1971, Lynne was walking with friends on the Middlebury Campus on her way to an exam.
"For some reason she leaves the group to go back to her room," said Boe.
And that's when the home sick teenager, who was just days away from going home to her family for winter break, appeared to simply vanish.
"None of it makes sense. It's not like my sister to decide no, I'm not going to do this, and just take off," said Lynne's sister Anne Schulze.
Time worked against this case from the start.
Because 6 days passed before Lynne was reported missing, before police launched their investigation and, more importantly, before they started questioning people who were the last to see her.
"The more time between the incident they saw and the time it takes for you to interview them obviously, the memory is going to start to diminish," said Boe.
While investigators tried to play catch up on a case that got a head start without them, Lynne
Schulze's family tried to make sense out of the unthinkable.
"It turned out family upside down and completely changed all of our lives," said Anne Schulze.
Once news of her disappearance began to spread, police started receiving reports from people who claimed to have seen Lynn Schulze all over Vermont, hitchhiking and getting on a bus.
The most credible sighting came from a Colchester Police officer who reported seeing Lynne on Church Street in Burlington with a group of people, fueling speculation that she simply dropped out of society.
"It was very difficult to dispel that," said Anne Schulze.
She says she doesn't buy that notion today, that her sister left on her own will, and neither does the investigator who now handles Lynne's case.
"Something violent happened to Lynn, that she was somehow taken against her will and that she was the result of foul play," said Boe.
Forty-one years later time continues to impact this case.
Any clues on the Middlebury campus have long since vanished, and Boe says many of the people who could still shed some light are no longer alive or around.
"Now I don't even have someone to talk to and that's very frustrating," said Boe.
That means that what police and Lynne's family could really use is a miracle.
"What I need is someone to come forward and say, hi I'm Lynne this is why I left," said Boe.
Despite the odds of that miracle happening, both Vegar Boe and Anne Schulze say they still hold out hope in a case with so few clues and too much time.
"Because there is an answer somewhere, there really is an answer and we hope it will be in this lifetime," said Anne Schulze.
