When a child goes missing, you do anything and everything the police ask you to do -- because those first hours can be critical to solving the case.
But when hours turn into days and weeks, or even months and years, there's desperation and a willingness to look anywhere for answers.
John and Magi Bish needed to find their daughter, Molly, who disappeared in 2000 in the town of Warren, Mass. And they've been willing to work with or without the police to find out what happened to her.
Last winter, Correspondent Susan Spencer reported on this case from a small town that's become home to a large web of suspicion.
It is in the Walden-like setting of Warren that one of the biggest mysteries in Massachusetts began four years ago.
On the morning of June 27, 2000, Magi Bish was in the car with her 16-year-old daughter Molly on the way to Comins Pond, the local swimming hole. Just a week before, Molly had started a summer job as a lifeguard there.
They arrived just before 10 a.m. The lot was empty, except for a dump truck dropping off a load of sand.
"What she said to me is, 'I love you, Mom,' and that was the last I seen of her,'" says Magi, who watched her daughter walk toward the beach. She then waited for the dump truck to drive out before she drove away.
About 20 minutes later, Sandra Woodworth arrived at the pond with her kids. "The first-aid kit was wide open, backpack was on the bench, her towel was draped over the back of the chair, sandals were in the front, the Poland Springs water bottle was right there," says Woodworth. "But there was no Molly."
Another hour passed. Molly's boss, Parks Commissioner Ed Fett, then showed up and realized Molly wasn't there. He also noticed her sandals and the opened first-aid kit, which he closed. Then, he called the police.
Eventually, the Warren police arrived. Molly had been missing for over three hours by the time they called Magi Bish.
Police at first suspected that Molly had simply abandoned her post to go and hang out with her friends. But for people who knew Molly, that sounded almost impossible.
"She never would just leave her job. We knew it," says Magi. "We knew. And I kept saying something is very wrong."
Molly was John and Magi Bish's third and youngest child. She had just completed her junior year of high school. A varsity athlete, Molly had attended the prom with her boyfriend, Steve Lukas. And, like her older siblings, John and Heather, Molly was no stranger to work.
"This was a girl who gave up her Saturdays at 16 to go train to become a lifeguard. She took her work very seriously," says her sister, Heather. "There's not a doubt in my mind that she would have done anything to jeopardize that."
Later that afternoon, when it finally became clear to police that Molly wasn't with her boyfriend or any of her buddies, they moved on to what they considered the next logical possibility. "They were saying she drowned and I was saying there's no possible way," says her brother, John.
By late that afternoon, the Massachusetts State Police had taken over the investigation. Over the next few days, they launched a massive search, working under Worcester County District Attorney John Conte. A battalion of volunteers from the local area also helped search for Molly.
While the Boston media swarmed the story, the Bish family was lost in a never-never land of fear, grief and shock. "You're breathing but you're not alive," says Magi. "You're walking and you can't make any sense of the world that you trusted one day before."
After the biggest, most costly search in Massachusetts history, the Bish family still had no answers.
"I could read in their eyes, they wanted to bring Molly home so bad and they couldn't," says Magi. "You can lose your keys, and you can lose your glasses, but how in America do you lose your child?"
While investigators focused on local residents, John and Magi Bish were forming a theory of their own.
"I don't believe any of these people around here were involved in this. This is the work of a professional, who knew what he was doing," says John Bish.
And it wasn't just a theory. Magi Bish believes exactly 24 hours before Molly disappeared, she may have seen the man who abducted her.
Molly Bish is still a living presence for her family, years after she vanished. "I say we live between hell and hope," says her mother, Magi Bish.
Before long, the Bish family decided to throw themselves into activism, and do all they can to keep alive the hope that they'll find their daughter as well.
At one event for missing children, they even met the parents of another missing blond teenager -- Elizabeth Smart -- and began corresponding. Like the Smarts, the Bish family couldn't sit back and expect the police to do it alone.
John Bish makes regular pilgrimages to Comins Pond, and he has his own theory of what happened.
It goes back to the morning before Molly vanished, when Magi Bish saw a man sitting alone in a white car in the parking lot. She waited nervously for 20 minutes, until the man drove off. Then, Magi says, she put the incident out of her mind until the next day.
"The man had dark hair, kind of, salt-and-peppered, though he was between.. maybe 45 and 55," recalls Magi Bish. Police have released two composite sketches.
Police discovered that Magi Bish wasn't the only one who'd seen a white car in the vicinity. Other witnesses also spotted a white car – first, near a car wash at the base of Comins Pond Road. And later, at the end of a trail from the beach to the cemetery.
John Bish says the scene itself provides telling hints as to exactly what happened next, starting with that open first-aid kit: "I think this was just someone who said, 'I need a band-aid. I've cut myself. Do you have something?'"
Then, after Molly turned to open the kit, John thinks the kidnapper forced her up the cemetery trail, since her shoes were left behind. He says she'd never voluntarily have gone barefoot up that hill.
District Attorney John Conte pursued the white-car theory seriously, and his team did a cursory search of 125 white cars. But his investigators believed the abductor had to live nearby. They began interrogating local sex offenders.
At least one of those questioned, a convicted child rapist named Oscar Baillargeon, bears a striking resemblance to the sketch. He's also admitted to meeting Molly at a party. But Magi Bish had doubts: "Definitely there's resemblance, but it's, the hair wasn't..."
The sketch has become one of the most recognized drawings in Massachusetts. But police have never identified the "white car man."
"We've got over 4,000 leads in a database," says Conte. "We're looking for evidence. We don't have it."
Three years after Molly disappeared, the investigation suddenly re-ignited. A piece of Molly's clothing was discovered on a wooded hillside, five miles from the pond where she vanished. It's the first major clue in the case.
But the big break comes from a local ex-cop named Tim McGuigan, who had an obsession with an entirely different crime - the abduction of another young girl from the area.
In August 1993, Holly Piirainen, 10, went walking along a country road near her grandmother's house in Sturbridge, Mass., and simply vanished. All searchers found was one small shoe.
In the following weeks, Holly's parents, Richard and Tina, and grandmother, Maureen, went through the same ordeal the Bish family would experience seven years later. Ten weeks after she vanished, local hunters discovered Holly's remains in the woods nearby.
"The worst part of it for me was wondering who it was who did this to my daughter," says Holly's mother, Tina.
Investigators were never able to figure out who killed Holly Piirainen. But several years later, McGuigan couldn't get Holly's unsolved murder out of his mind: "I thought of the innocence of this child and her life taken away by a predator. It made me realize there's real evil out there. There's evil out there. And I wanted to do everything I could do to help her."
McGuigan started his own investigation, but he says his superiors were not sympathetic.
"What's bigger in life than getting a predator off the street before he grabs somebody else," asks McGuigan, who admits that the case began to take over his life. He started drinking heavily, his marriage fell apart, and in August 2002, he left the force and drifted from job to job.
While writing a true crime account of Holly's murder, McGuigan became increasingly fascinated with its similarities with the Molly Bish case. They were both young, blonde girls who vanished in a rural area, just a few miles apart. McGuigan now went to the Bish family asking for permission to investigate Molly's case as well.
Two weeks later, police made a startling announcement. They discovered pieces of a weather-beaten bathing suit, much like the one Molly Bish was wearing. McGuigan discovered the suit, and he says a local hunter, Ricky Beaudreau, led him to the site.
Beaudreau says he had actually seen the blue suit months earlier, but he'd forgotten about it until he crossed paths again with McGuigan. The bathing suit was sent to the laboratory and another intensive ground search began.
"We want to solve this case, and we want to find Molly, and we want to bring her back to the Bishes," says Conte.
After one more grueling week, John and Magi Bish hear the news they have been dreading: the discovery of a human bone, an upper arm bone from a person 14-20 years old.
Over the next few days, more grisly discoveries are made - including another rib and vertebrae, a total of 20 bones. Finally, on June 9, investigators confirm that the remains are those of their daughter, Molly.
"I do know that Molly's in heaven and she doesn't have to suffer anymore," says Magi Bish.
The search for Molly Bish is over, but for her family, the search for Molly's killer feels more urgent than ever.
"This recovery of Molly hasn't ended anything. It's changed the focus of the investigation. We have to find this person, or he's gonna hurt someone again," says John Bish.
Investigators begin redoubling their efforts. But while the official investigators were on that hillside hunting for evidence, McGuigan conducted his unofficial investigation five miles down the road - at the scene where Molly was abducted.
With him is criminal profiler John Kelly, who has developed a profile of the killer: "We felt he had to be a hometown guy because of the way Comins Pond is situated. He knew which roads to take. I mean this deed was carried out in an almost perfect way until her body was found."
Kelly also believes the man wasn't a novice: "He wouldn't be as good. He wouldn't be methodical. 'Cause bear in mind this has been the perfect crime for three years. He got away with murder."
The discovery of Molly's body confirmed one of Kelly's predictions – that the killer would look for higher ground: "The reason for that is because if you go up on higher ground, doing whatever you're going to do to your victim, you can see people coming up, you can hear people coming up. So that gives you time either to escape or take off, or it gives you time to hide."
McGuigan and Kelly also visited Holly's crime scenes, and they are struck more than ever by the similarities in the cases, and the killer's profiles.
"This is obviously someone who knew the area extremely well, extremely well," says Kelly, who now believes 50-50 that these cases are connected. "I mean, this is really out of the way. I mean he obviously realized that he wasn't going to be interrupted."
Robert Armes, the man who McGuigan has kept coming back to for three years, becomes the focus of his investigation again.
Armes is a day laborer from Sturbridge who's since moved to a neighboring state. "I think that he's involved with Holly Piirainen," says McGuigan. "I'm not sure of any involvement with Molly Bish. I'm absolutely sure about Holly."
McGuigan says Armes knew the area well, and acted suspiciously after Holly's murder. He bought new boots the same day she was abducted, and then junked the car he'd been driving. "He knew about physical evidence. He wanted to get rid of physical evidence," says McGuigan.
But perhaps most striking of all is what Armes did shortly after Holly disappeared. He approached the family, volunteering to search and raise money.
In another strange move, Armes went to the press, declared himself a suspect, and denied any involvement: "I have a clear conscience. I don't need to confess to something I didn't do to have a clear conscience."
Police have never been able to determine Armes' whereabouts when the abduction took place, but they claim that he failed a lie detector test.
In the intervening years, McGuigan has taken statements from various people who know Armes, and claims to have overheard him implicate himself in the Piirainen murder.
As for the official investigation, State Police Lt. Peter Higgins says he's grateful for McGuigan's leads: "He has provided us information in the past, we've looked at it, we've worked on it, and it's proved helpful."
But so far, there just isn't sufficient credible evidence to justify an arrest. "Robert Armes knows what he did that day. He knows what he did," says McGuigan. "I'd like to talk to him."
After repeated requests for an interview, 48 Hours tracked down Armes in New Hampshire. Since moving there, Armes has been arrested numerous times on petty offenses, and pleaded guilty to assault against his own daughter.
Spencer asked Armes if she could ask him some questions about the Holly Piirainen case. He refused to answer. But McGuigan is still convinced that until Armes answers some questions, he can't be ruled out as Holly Piirainen's killer.
There's far less evidence, however, to link him to the murder of Molly Bish. Armes vaguely resembles the first composite sketch of the mysterious "white car man," and witnesses put him in the area the week of Molly's disappearance. But other than the fact that he matches elements of Kelly's profile, there's little else to suggest Armes had any involvement.
"Can we say Robert Armes is responsible? Absolutely not," says Kelly. "We need to eliminate him, and he's certainly a person of interest who needs to be eliminated."
But wherever these investigations lead, McGuigan has certainly had an effect in refocusing the police's attention on them. "Even if I'm wrong, Molly Bish is still going home," says McGuigan. "There's a lot of activity being placed on these cases right now."
Nearly four years after Molly Bish disappeared, there's a permanent task force of several detectives still investigating her murder.
Police also say they're sharing information with the neighboring county, where Holly Piirainen was killed, and still have not ruled out the possibility of a connection.
On August 2, 2003, what would have been her 20th birthday, Molly Bish was laid to rest.
Since 48 Hours first aired this story last December, Worcester County District Attorney John Conte empaneled a grand jury to hear testimony in the Molly Bish case. So far, no indictments.
Ex-cop Tim McGuigan, who turned up key evidence in the case, is among those who've testified. He's given up on getting back into law enforcement, and is working on getting his book published.
Meanwhile, Molly's parents, John and Magi Bish, have been speaking to police all across the country, hoping to improve the way they handle missing child cases.
