BAY VILLAGE — There's new hope in the search for answers in one of Northeast Ohio's most high-profile kidnapping and murder cases.
Investigators are reevaluating evidence in the Amy Mihaljevic case. They say they discovered hairs found on Amy's clothing that they hope will point to the killer.
Amy was only 10 years old when she went missing from Bay Village on Oct. 27, 1989.
She was found stabbed to death in a field in Ashland County a few months later. The search for Amy's killer has continued ever since.
RELATED: Amy Mihaljevic was kidnapped in 1989, and police are still searching for her killer
Recently, an FBI lab found some hairs on evidence slides that were thought to only contain fibers from Amy's clothing. The hair doesn't match Amy or her family.
"So with the hairs that we have now, we're hoping that we can get some type of profile from there and use genealogy to solve the rest," said Bay Village Police Sgt. Edward Chapman on Wednesday.
A private lab in California is performing the tests.
Investigators are hoping the hairs from Amy's clothing will point to a killer.
"It is very exciting, but again, to temper our expectations, those hairs could really be from anybody. There are a lot of people involved in this investigation throughout the years, so it is a possibility that cross-contamination occurred. It is," Chapman said.
Chapman said that over the years, investigators have collected DNA samples from around 250 different people connected to the case.
"We get probably 300 emails, phone calls a year of people calling in to talk about this," Chapman said.
According to court records, the case includes a man whose gold Oldsmobile was spotted near where Amy's body was discovered on the day she was found. Investigators said that witnesses picked the man's picture out of a photo lineup as the person they saw Amy talking to on the day she disappeared.
We asked Chapman about it, who told us that they have a lot of suspects they are always looking at, but no one in particular has risen to a prime suspect.
In 2024, according to the Bay Village Police Department, Amy's clothing was retested, and a lab found an unknown man's DNA on it, but the amount of DNA collected was too low to be used to create a profile.
However, that DNA is separate from the hairs that the lab is testing in California.
Chapman said there is no timetable for when the lab could wrap up its work.
