APR 12, 2019
Sara Bushland still missing from Wisconsin after stepping off school bus 23 years ago
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Sara moved into the house with her mother, her stepfather Jim and his sons, Dean and David. According to Lesley, things didn’t get any easier for her younger sister. Lesley said the Lambert home wasn’t always happy, but Sara did develop a group of friends and started dating Travis Lane, a local man who was five years older than she was. Through the ups and downs, Lesley said she and Sara always stayed in touch.
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But on April 3, 1996, Sara’s life changed course.
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Around 4:00 p.m., four students saw Sara get off the bus at her usual stop. According to Washburn County Sheriff Dennis Stuart, witnesses said Sara then started walking up her family’s long driveway.
According to law enforcement and Sara’s family, she never made it to the house. Somewhere along the gravel driveway, Sara disappeared.
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After a night of phone calls to Sara’s friends and a visit to her boyfriend Travis’s apartment nearby, Marie reported her daughter missing on April 4. But in the days and weeks that followed Sara’s disappearance, Marie’s initial urgency waned.
“My mom would basically tell me that I didn’t need to worry,” Lesley, who was 17 at the time, told Dateline. “This wasn’t a big event. And I’ve since been told that she was reported without a sense of urgency. I don’t understand it. No matter how your child disappeared, it should always be urgent. But at 17 years old, I just listened.”
Lesley also told Dateline that despite her mother reporting Sara missing, investigators initially did not search for the teenager. The Washburn County Sheriff’s Department treated Sara’s disappearance as a runaway case. According to Sheriff Stuart, law enforcement conducted the first of several searches at the Lambert property in July of 1999 – more than three years after Sara disappeared. He said investigators also combed through a trash dump on the property in 1999 and dragged nearby Spring Lake in August of 2000. They found nothing of significance.
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In May of 2013, a group of more than 70 officials, made up of Washburn County officers and
Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation, searched the Lambert property once more. Again, they found nothing.
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“The case has changed hands so many times. And each new detective assumes that the last group took care of it and looked into all the evidence,” Sara’s sister Lesley told Dateline. “It’s awful. At 17 years old, I believed law enforcement was doing everything it was supposed to be doing. It affects me every single day.”
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“The Sara Bushland case is still an ongoing investigation. We constantly get leads and we are doing follow-up with it. The case has never been closed,” Sheriff Stuart told Dateline. He would not describe the nature of the leads his office has received.
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if she’s descended then where is her body?
