Amy Sue Pagnac spent the day helping her father harvest fruit and vegetables from a farm they owned in Isanti County, Minnesota on August 5, 1989. Normally Amy’s mother and younger sister would have come along to help with the harvest, but they had other plans on this particular day. Amy and her father, Marshall Midden, arrived at the farm around noon and spent about five hours there, leaving for their Maple Grove, Minnesota home at 5:00 pm.
They were only two miles from home when Marshall decided to stop at the Holiday gas station in Osseo to use the restroom while Amy waited in his car. When he returned a few minutes later, the 13-year-old was gone. Assuming she had needed to use the ladies’ room, Marshall waited outside the door for her. There was a customer in the single-person ladies’ room, but it was an older woman; Amy was nowhere to be found.
Marshall spent about 10 minutes searching the area surrounding the gas station, but no one recalled seeing Amy get out of the car. Confused, Marshall then called his wife from a payphone outside the gas station and told her that he couldn’t find Amy. He thought perhaps she had gotten tired of waiting for him and decided to walk home, but Susan Pagnac hadn’t seen her and it was unlikely Amy could have walked all the way to her house in that short amount of time. Marshall drove home slowly, hoping to spot his daughter along the route; when he got to the house, there was still no sign of Amy. He and Susan called the police.
Maple Grove police officer Jeff Garland was dispatched to their home to take a missing person report; he arrived at 5:45 pm. It wasn’t the first time he had responded to a call from Amy’s parents; he had already been there several times that summer. According to Jeff, Amy was a frequent runaway and her parents had been frustrated by her behavior. Marshall and Susan previously told the officer that Amy was out of control and they suspected that she would run off to drink alcohol and have s*ex.
The couple told Garland that Amy had a medical condition that caused pressure on her brain and she was prone to having seizures. They also noted that she might be bipolar, though she had never been diagnosed as such and was not taking any medication. Susan worried that Amy might have had a seizure while she was waiting for her father. Amy would frequently become disoriented after having a seizure; this could have resulted in her wandering away from her father’s car.
Because Amy had been seen by Marshall for such a short time, police didn’t really believe that a seizure was to blame for her disappearance. Amy had already gotten lost three times that summer and ran away from home three times. Each time she came back on her own. The police thought Amy had just run away again; she was labeled as a juvenile runaway, so her disappearance was not looked into.
Not there flyer (image source: https://www.facebook.com/findamysuepagnac/)
As the weeks went by without seeing Amy, police seemed to rethink their initial theory that she had run away. In 1990, they talked to people who knew Amy and searched her home, but they still didn’t know where she was. Missing Children Minnesota heard about Amy’s case and helped get the word out that she had gone missing. There were a few possible sightings of Amy, but police were not able to confirm any of them.
The search for Amy’s body stopped almost right away, and it wouldn’t start up again for decades. The local news hadn’t picked up on her case, and it looked like Susan and Marshall were the only ones still looking for Amy. But behind the scenes, the police kept working on her case in secret. When the 25th anniversary of Amy’s disappearance came up in May 2014, the Maple Grove Police Department did something that made her case famous for the first time.
Police got a search warrant for Marshall and Susan’s Maple Grove home in May 2014, but they didn’t say much about the investigation. For a week, the couple had to move because police were all over the property. They started digging in the backyard of the house right away.
Their daughter Amy’s parents said they would have let the police do whatever they wanted on the property without a warrant, but they also said it didn’t make sense. The police wouldn’t say if they thought Amy’s parents were involved in her disappearance, but Susan insisted that they hadn’t done anything wrong and was glad that the police were finally taking Amy’s case seriously, even though she didn’t understand why they were focusing on their property.
The news media paid attention to the fact that police carried out a search warrant, and Amy’s case got a lot of attention for the first time. Reporters began to look into what happened when Amy went missing, and they had a lot of questions for the police. Officials wouldn’t say more, but they did say that no one saw Amy at the Holiday gas station on the day she went missing. Detectives couldn’t confirm that the teenager had even been there, and they asked anyone with information about the case to come forward and talk to them.
People in the neighborhood were shocked to see police tearing up Marshall and Susan’s backyard; many thought she had been taken by a stranger. Some people thought the police were focusing on the family because they didn’t have any other suspects because they didn’t do enough to look into the case when Amy first went missing.
The property was searched for a week by police looking for clues about Amy’s whereabouts. If they did find anything, they didn’t tell anyone about it, and no one was arrested. Susan said that it looked like the police took some paperwork from the house, but it’s not clear how this has anything to do with Amy going missing.
The next month, police searched the family’s 140-acre farm in Isanti County for four days. When they said what they were looking for or why they were searching, they didn’t say anything. Officials said they had no leads on who might have taken Amy, and the search was just one more step they were taking to find her.
Later, Susan and Marshall told reporters that they thought they were the main suspects for years, but they still said they were innocent. Susan thought it was likely that Amy had been taken for s*ex trafficking. There were rumors years ago that Amy had been seen working as a stripper or prostitute, but the police didn’t have any direct proof of this.
Amy’s case stopped being in the news for a while, and she is still missing. Detectives say they don’t know if Amy is alive or dead; they don’t have any proof that a crime was committed yet. They are still holding out hope that Amy is still alive.
Amy’s disappearance has been the subject of much speculation by amateur sleuths. Some believe that Amy got out of her father’s car, perhaps after having a seizure, and was abducted by a stranger. They are critical of police for their lax attitude when Amy was first reported missing, and even officials agree that the initial response by law enforcement was poor. If they had taken the case seriously, they might have been able to find witnesses who saw Amy at the gas station that day. At the time, they didn’t even check to see if there had been surveillance cameras there. It was an oversight that potentially hindered their investigation.
Others seem to believe that Amy’s parents were involved; many question why Marshall would bother stopping at a restroom just two miles from his home. They point out that police had been called to the home on numerous occasions, suggesting there was tension between Amy and her parents that might have ended in violence.
It’s also possible that Amy did decide to run away from home, then ran into foul play at some point after that. Her friends pointed out that she had experienced some bullying at school and often spoke of wanting to run away. It’s unlikely that a 13-year-old could survive long on her own, but there is always a chance that Amy is out there somewhere, alive and happy.
Amy Sue Pagnac was 13 years old when she went missing in 1989. She has blue eyes and brown hair, and at the time of her disappearance she was 5 feet tall and weighed 100 pounds. She was last seen wearing a light-colored T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. She has scars on her left cheek, left eyelid, and on the side of her nose. She may suffer from seizures or migraines. If you have any information about Amy, please contact the Maple Grove Police Department at 612–494–6114.
