For Ilene's parents, it has been a 25-year struggle to deal with the day-to-day emotional terror of having a missing child, while trying to find effective ways to help raise awareness about her disappearance while still taking care of life's other responsibilities. The couple has two other children, who are now fully grown, and a grandchild. They say the community response has helped them work through their pain as best they can.
But both Maddi and Mike say they feel just as frantic and distraught as they did when they first learned their daughter was missing. They desperately want answers, and those intense feelings have dominated their thoughts every day -- for the more than 9,000 days since Ilene's abduction.
"When she was first taken, the skating rink put together a fundraiser for her, and it was going to take place in five weeks. She had only been gone 24 hours, which is longer than I thought I could live through, and I remember thinking: 'There's no way she's going to be gone that long. She can't,'" Maddi recalled. "The five weeks came and went, and now here we are 25 years later."