Missing girl's family holds hope
Authorities grim as third day passes

by Sheila McLaughlin
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Amber Garrett's family clung to hope Tuesday, but authorities feared the worst as the third day passed without any sign of the missing 10-year-old.
While the search for the Harrison fifth-grader spread to Indiana and the FBI entered the case, an air of uneasiness hung over the city.
More parents than usual were picking up their children after class at Harrison Elementary School on Broadway Street despite assurances that a 31-year-old suspect in Ambers disappearance remained in jail.
"It's just too scary. I never thought it would happen in a small town like Harrison," said Stephanie Strother, who picked up her daughter Prisca from a half-day kindergarten class.
Strother planned to return later Tuesday afternoon for her son, a first-grader who usually walks home with friends.
Clerks at the Harrison Police Department said phone lines have been swamped with calls from residents offering to search for the little girl. Clerks took names and numbers and promised to call if more help is needed.
Harrison Elementary Principal Robert Stoll said everyone is worried.
"The staff is in a state of shock. The students are very concerned about Amber's safety. They just want to see her return to school," Stoll said.

FBI asks questions
Edwin Boldt, a spokesman for the FBI office in Cincinnati, said agents arrived in Harrison at noon Tuesday to try to find anyone who knew the suspect and might have seen him with Amber.
Boldt said the FBI is offering its help because of the possibility Amber was taken out of state.
Harrison police think the girl was taken from her bed early Sunday by an acquaintance of Amber's mother, Peggy Garrett.
They said the man lured Amber's half brother, who was babysitting, away from the family's apartment with a bogus story that his mother was in trouble.
Amber's coats, shoes and eye-glasses were left behind, leading Harrison police to think foul play was involved.
Police arrested the man on a parole violation unrelated to the disappearance after searching his Harrison apartment. He is jailed at the Hamilton County Justice Center.
Less than a mile west of downtown Harrison, officers from four police departments - Harrison, Evendale, Hamilton County Park District and Dearborn County (Ind.) Sheriff's Department - trudged from noon until dark through dense thickets, fields and brushy riverbanks in West Harrison, Ind.
A smaller group had combed similar terrain in Harrison the day before without success.
Canine help on scene
When Tuesday morning passed with no sign of the child, officers called neighboring departments trying unsuccessfully to locate a police dog that specialized in fining bodies.
Harrison's police canine, Rex, had no luck Tuesday picking up any scent of Amber in a 4- to 5 mile stretch in Dearborn County on the north side of the Whitewater River.

The search is expected to resume today, depending on weather.
"Unfortunately, I don't think this is going to have a happy ending. After three days in this weather, there's not much chance of survival" Boldt said.
Peggy Garrett, who has slept less than two hours since Sunday, said she is not discouraged. She thinks her daughter is alive.
"I'm a mom, and I think I would feel the loss if she was dead," Garrett said. "I just worry about her being cold because she doesn't have a coat."
Sheriff's spokesman Frank Wickedly said police think the girl was taken from her mother's apartment after the man tricked Amber's half brother, Eric Horn, into leaving the home about 3 a.m. Sunday.
Horn, 16, was baby-sitting Amber, an 8-year-old brother, and preschool-age sister since 10:45 p.m. Saturday when Garrett went out with a girlfriend.
When Horn did not find Garrett, he went home to discover the front door open and Amber missing. He did not worry, Wickedly said, because he thought his mother had returned and taken Amber somewhere.
Though Garrett returned about 5:15 a.m. Sunday - minutes after Horn left to go to his grandparents' house to sleep - she did not realize Amber was missing until 9:15 a.m. when the other two children got up.
Neither child heard Amber leave, nor did they see anyone take her from her bed, Oust said.
Garrett, a single parent, said she first thought Amber had gone to church with a friend. But when she did not come home by 1 p.m. Sunday, the family began looking for her.
About 45 friends and relatives checked abandoned buildings, wooded areas, trash bins, cemeteries and the riverbank.
They spent Monday passing out thousands of leaflets with Amber's picture in the Harrison area. Police officers on foot and in the air combed fields, roads and riverbanks in and around Harrison.
Garrett said she reported her daughter missing abut 6 p.m. Sunday, four hours after a son went to the police station but found the doors locked and no one there.
The man lives nearby and often drove her to the grocery store, she said. He stopped at her apartment occasionally but did not interact with the children.
Oust said the man has admitted tricking Horn into leaving the apartment early Sunday but denied knowing anything about Amber's disappearance.
Garrett is sure her daughter, a fifth-grader at Harrison Elementary School, did not leave on her own. She said Amber's glasses are proof.
"She wouldn't come out of her bedroom without her glasses on. She can't see," an exhausted Garrett said at her home during a break from Monday's search.
She said Amber may be wearing blue jean overalls. The overalls are gone, and the Loretta Lynn T-shirt Amber wore to bed Saturday night was on the floor in her bedroom.
"I've checked with every friend and nobody's seen her. I just keep thinking she's gong to come to the door, so I can ground her," Garrett said.

Psychic aids search for Cohen

Click on image to enlarge

Descriptions match
where body found
by MIKE PULFER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Patricia Mischell had never laid eyes on Sandy Cohen.
When they were "introduced" at her Hartwell office last Tuesday, she studied two color snapshots of him.
Suddenly, she knew more than some of his closest friends.
Patricia Mischell is a psychic, and Sandy Cohen was dead, and that's what she told a group that had approached her.
Two days later, a search party confirmed her pronouncement when it uncovered Cohen's body along River Road in Cincinnati's Lower Price Hill neighborhood. Cohen, a Covington businessman and former Covington city Commissioner, had been killed.
Friends and acquaintances of Cohen had sought help from Mischell on July 8, the same day Covington police declared him missing, Cohen had not been seen since sometime July 5.
Although Covington police did not solicit the aid of psychics -- "I understand there were several involved," said Tom Henry, a Covington police captain, they were willing to listen to the tips they offered.
"I did not talk with any of them myself," Henry said.
But he was taking notes on their descriptions of the area in which the body might be found, as reported by Cohen's friends.
"There were a lot of similarities," he said. "They all had water. They all had gravel. They all had overpasses," "I was out looking," he said.
The psychics provided the descriptions, and Henry knew the area met most of their requirements.
When everything else strikes out, you do what you can," he said. "We had followed up all our leads. . . Who am I to say this isn't valid?"
Cincinnati police Lt. William Fletcher, who has handled the Cohen case including the arrests Friday of two 22-year-old suspects refused to comment on the involvement of psychics in police work.

Gregory Allen Moore and Jimmy Messmer, both of Cincinnati have been charged with aggravated murder.
Mischell, who said she met only once with five of Cohen's "friends," said that she knew he had been killed and that she knew his body was near water, gravel, railroad tracks, a small house and the number 8.
Searchers, after two days of looking in similar spots, found his beaten and decomposed body near the Cincinnati Amtrak station which has a gravel parking lot along the Ohio River.
"Somebody said there was an 8 on a highway sign along there," said Mischell, founder of Hope Ministry and pastor at Positive Thinking Church.
Cincinnati police had found Cohen's missing car in the early afternoon Thursday, at least five hours before Cohen's acquaintances discovered the body in the same neighborhood, Fletcher said.
Mischell said she did not contact police in the Cohen case but dealt only with Lou Ryan, director of the Northern Kentucky Mental Health Association in Covington, and four other people she did not know.
Ryan refused to confirm her involvement in the case and said she had no comment on the psychic's assistance.
Larry Whalen, Cincinnati police chief, said, "We had contact with somebody (psychic) in the course of the investigation. We would refer to a person of that nature as an informant.
"There have been a couple of instances in the past in which they (psychics) have volunteered their services, and we have listened without success." but police are willing to listen.
"There are strange things that occur in this world nobody can explain," Whalen said. "To arbitrarily rule out what amounts to one more avenue of resources would be foolish."
Henry said, "I definitely believe in psychic ability. Some people choose to develop it; some don't.
"I listen to whatever anybody has to say."

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Psychic aids search for Cohen