Mystery of missing teen haunts family, eludes police for three decades

Forty-eight hours before her 16th birthday, Kimberly Ann Amero vanished without a trace. It was a September night in 1985, and the Saint John, N.B., teen was at a fair in the city’s east end.

“Kim was a social butterfly, always bouncing, always energetic,” says her sister, Tammy Cormier Raynes, who was there the night Kimberly went missing but left early. “She told her friends ‘I’ll be right back,’ and we’ve never heard anything since.”

Thirty-two years after the freckled girl with dark blond hair and blue eyes was last seen, her disappearance continues to haunt her family, baffle police and dishearten residents of this tight-knit New Brunswick city.

Now, after a true-crime podcast renewed interest in the cold case, an amateur sleuth has dedicated himself to finding the teenager.

“The mystery of what happened to Kimberly continues to wear the family down,” says Joseph Worden, who has spent countless hours combing through old newspapers, property records, aerial photographs and maps. “They’ve been missing a loved one for 32 years. They’ve never been able to grieve.”

Family members say her disappearance was first treated as a runaway case and that the decades-old investigation has been marred by misplaced evidence and limited police resources.

Podcaster Jaymee Splude sums it up: “The Ameros aren’t from the right side of town. They aren’t an Irving or an Oland. No one was kicking up a stink.”

While the fate of the 15-yearold continues to elude police, investigators have tracked down promising leads over the years.

A notorious serial killer once confessed to her death but a thorough search of the Kingston Peninsula — a piece of land located between the St. John River and the Kennebecasis River where Michael Wayne McGray has said her body was buried — yielded nothing.