On September 4th 1979, Melinda Creech was 13 years old. She and a male friend around her age were caught stealing a motorcycle, and she was sent to Blake House, a juvenile detention center for girls in Indiana. It was the last time anyone in her family saw her. Or so they say.
You see, about two months after she was put there, a detective arrived at Blake House to interrogate Melinda. But Melinda wasn’t there. No one knew where she was. In her file, she was listed as having “ran away”, but it was unclear if she had ran away from the detention center or if she had been sent home and ran away from there. The information available about this is so little and confusing, that’s pretty much all I can tell you.
Now comes the weirder part. In 1994, Melinda’s mother Shirley gathered the rest of her now grown children and told them that police had found their sister’s remains. Melinda was dead, she assured them, even though there wasn’t any attempt at a funeral.
But Shirley was lying, as the Creech siblings discovered almost a decade later, in 2003, when the mother, described as an abusive parent, passed away. Among her belongings they found reports that stated the remains Shirley had said were positively Melinda had been ruled out as being hers with dental records. Even more baffling, the reports were from 1990, 4 years before she told the others about it.
Melinda was still out there, dead or alive. The case was reopened a year later, but nothing has been discovered and Melinda’s fate remains a mystery.