AK AK - Scott, 13, & Amy Fandel, 8, Sterling, 5 Sept 1978

  • #81
Why would the uncle have a site and the mom had one as well?
 
  • #82
I was never aware the mom had one...I've only seen the uncle's.
 
  • #83
What a fascinating and sad case. It would be wonderful to have an answer but after all these years I don't think that will happen. The children were beautiful and sadly I think they are long deceased. Like others have said previously the most likely scenario is someone knew the children were alone. The person could be someone known to the family or possibly a casual acquaintance of the mother. Some stranger could have overheard in the pub that they were dropping the kids home. The newspaper article said that the children were left alone often so they were vulnerable to a predator. I don't think the father was involved as he willingly left and was not in Alaska when this occurred. It is very sad to hear that the mother has died. She wouldn't have been that old. Does anyone know when she died? I hope there will be more comment about this case. Despite the odds it would be great if there would be some answers to what happened all those years ago to Scott and Amy.
 
  • #84
Are there any pics of the kids?
 
  • #85
alaska%20scott%20fandel.jpg


alaska%20amy%20fandel.jpg
 
  • #86
beautiful kids
 
  • #87
It is sad to think that no one really knows what happened to those beautiful children. There are so many cases like this. It is terrible when there isn't a body and people can only guess. The other case where 2 children from the same family disappeared is the Lyons sisters also from the 70s.

There is a very famous case here in Australia of the 3 Beaumont children. This happened in 1966 and the 3 young children disappeared from a beach in Adelaide and have never been seen since. The Beaumont case has become almost part of Australian folklore. It used to loom large in my imagination as a child. I really wish by some miracle these cases could be solved but I think we are never really going to know for sure what happened. I think the case of Madeleine McCann is going to be the same. How very tragic it all is. We should all count our blessings.
 
  • #88
BUMPING for Scott and Amy, still missing after 34 years. :(
 
  • #89
  • #90
Does anyone know what became of those websites? Or the theory that Amy was alive and living with relatives?

IMO the theory that someone they knew took them sounds very likely. What about people who lived nearby? It seems like everyone has been talking about the bar crowd but someone who lived in a house near theirs could have been planning it for a while, noticed they were home alone and taken them. One of the reasons people have given for the bar people is that they could have seen their mother and aunt out. However, the article on Anchorage Daily News says that their mother said they were afraid in the dark and switched on all lights in the house when they were alone. So someone who lived in the area and had an eye on them would have noticed a pattern if the lights were visible.

I also think it could have been the carnival workers. That sounds like a really suspicious thing, to drive back and forth like that and pull into driveways when people approach. Who the hell does that? I wonder if their alibis were ever checked and why/how they were cleared because the article doesn't clarify that.

As to their family... I don't know, I don't think their mother did anything. She has an alibi and it sounds like she was in a bad place at the time but there is a difference between going party and hurting your own kids. Their father sounds like a very peculiar person from that article but I do think that if he had taken the kids away or if they had gone to live with him they would have made an attempt to contact their mother. Same thing with a church group. I dunno about their father's family.

I think it's a very interesting detail that the lights were all switched off, when the kids were afraid of the dark. They had the time to switch off the lights and go or whoever took them did (maybe the culprit went back? But would a culprit make a point of switching off the lights when that could have alerted people on the outside to the fact that the kids were not there? Maybe that was the point?). Unlike what some people have said, the cooking does not seem to have been completely forgotten. Interrupted yes, but the article at least says that when their mother arrived the water on the stove was warm. If they had forgotten the cooking 100% the stove would have been left on.

I wonder if it is possible that the kids went somewhere and met with foul play. Maybe Scott needed an ingredient for cooking (were all the usual ingredients lined up the counter?) or they thought they should go somewhere. Or one of them gets injured and they go to the hospital, but I think in that scenario Scott would have taken his motorcycle. I wonder if they could have tried to go see their father and met with foul play in the way, even.

Everything is my opinion of course.
 
  • #91
where in this post is there a reference to carnies?
 
  • #92
Does anyone have the URLs for the now-defunct websites by the mother and/or uncle? I'd like to look them up on the Wayback Machine--
 
  • #93
  • #94
Bumping for Amy and Scott. Now missing for 35 years. :(
 
  • #95
I can't get over the bad parenting involved here-the mom is a frequent barhop who leaves her kids alone and there is no phone in the place where they live? Not smart.
 
  • #96
Bumping.
 
  • #97
It was a bad idea...but this is the late 70's in a tiny town with no crime. The cabin door was not even locked. I mean, she likely had no reason to think something would happen. She felt they would be safe with nearby neighbors. It is what it is....if she could go back in time she would change things I'm sure. I am of the opinion it's related to the family somehow, I don't buy a stranger doing something in this case. It seems that, while looking at the caches of the old webpage, that there was a whole mess of Jerry Springer proportions going on....which coincides with the old newspaper article. Yet little tangible evidence of what really happened.
 
  • #98
I grew up in a small town with no crime. My mother would never have left a door in our house unlocked and we lived far out in the country. This mother had a history of bar hopping. Something was going to happen to her or the kids eventually.
 
  • #99
I wonder if this case could get some more publicity due to the influx of Alaskan reality TV shows? People seem to care about Alaska a lot more than they did previously.
 
  • #100
Moms are human, just like all of us. The last thing a mother wants is for something to happen to her children, and I'm sure Margaret has agonized over this every single day for the past ~40 years. Regardless of what anyone thinks about her parenting, no amount of supposed negligence will ever change the fact that whoever kidnapped these children is the one to blame.
 

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