Amy Fandel

Status:

Open

Missing From:

Sterling, Alaska

Summary:

Amy Lee Fandel was a young girl who is presumed to have been abducted with her brother Scott on September 5, 1978. The Fandels lived in a cabin located in a rural, heavily wooded area off Scout Lake Road, half a mile from Sterling Highway, and south of Sterling. Scott and Amy have never been seen again.

Vital Statistics

Circumstances of Disappearance:

Amy, 8 at the time, and her older brother Scott, then 13, were reportedly last seen inside their family's cabin in Sterling, Alaska on the evening of September 4th, 1978. They had been at Good Time Charlie's, a bar/restaurant in Sterling, until approximately 10:00 p.m. that night with their mother, Margaret, and a visiting aunt, Margaret's sister Cathy Schonfelder. The women brought Scott and Amy back to their cabin at that time and then returned to the bar by themselves. Scott and Amy visited their next-door neighbors, the Lupton family, after their mother and aunt dropped them off. They were very close to the Lupton children and walked with them to school each day. At approximately 11:45 p.m., a neighbor passing by saw the lights in the Fandel's cabin. When Amy and Scott's mother and aunt returned home between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m., they noticed the lights were off. This was unusual as Amy and Scott were afraid of the dark and would keep the lights on. Margaret awoke the following morning to find the children gone, but assumed they had already left for school. That afternoon, Amy and Scott did not return home and when their close confidants, the Lupton children who lived a short walk away, came looking for them, Margaret phoned the police in a panic to report her children missing. Margaret and her sister Cathy had reportedly come home from the bar to find a pot of boiling water on the stove with a package of macaroni nearby.

Additional Details:

The front door lock did not work. (The cabin burned down several years after the Fandel children's disappearances.) Bullet casings were later found outside the cabin; it is unknown if they have anything to do with the children's disappearances. Margaret moved to Illinois after her children's disappearances. Scott's biological father also lives in Illinois. The children's maternal uncle, Terry Schonfelder, believes Amy's father, Roger D. Fandel, may be involved in her and her brother's disappearances. Roger Fandel, Margaret's former husband, left his family in January 1978 and moved to Arizona. Roger is the biological father of Amy and stepfather to Scott. After the children vanished, their mother moved to Illinois, where Scott's biological father lived. Nine months before they went missing, Roger left their mother and them behind and moved to Arizona. Amy and Scott's mother tried to contact him when they disappeared but couldn't. Amy's father took a plane to Alaska to help search for the children. Years after the children's disappearances, a woman who had been Roger's girlfriend in 1978 allegedly asked for $5,000 from Roger's uncle in exchange for her telling him the children's fates. Roger has not been charged in connection with Scott and Amy's apparent abductions, however, and neither has anyone else. Investigators considered him a suspect in the cases for many years, but no longer believe he was involved. Investigators discovered that a black sedan belonging to two carnival workers had been spotted in the area that night, speeding away from the cabin. This was considered particularly significant as the carnival workers were casual acquaintances of the Fandels, whom Margaret had allowed to spend the night once in late August. However, they claimed to have been near the cabin the night after the kids went missing and that they'd considered stopping by to visit, but had decided against it and left. The men, who worked for the Alaska State Fair, stated that they'd merely come back to Sterling to pick up their paychecks. Investigators spent thousands of hours running down hundreds of leads which led nowhere. One former Alaska State Trooper said they chased "quirks and spider web leads," but they never got any closer to finding the children. In 1984, Chuck Hagen (a retired Alaska State Trooper who'd worked on the case) got information that someone who'd lived in Haines, AK just moved to Page, AZ with two children who matched the descriptions of Scott and Amy. Hagen flew to Arizona to investigate the claims. When Hagen got to Arizona, he dug deeper and tried to determine if the children were missing Scott and Amy. Unfortunately, he soon came to the conclusion that they weren't the Fandel children. Investigators considered him a suspect in the cases for many years, but no longer believe he was involved. No evidence has been found to support any theory. Scott and Amy's cases remain unsolved.

Case Last Updated:

Sep 22, 2026