Seeking Justice: Teen still missing decades after disappearing from Fairview Park gas station

CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) -For more than four decades, a teenager’s disappearance has remained a mystery. What happened to Yvonne Regler? Could she have been abducted in broad daylight on a busy street without anyone even noticing?

Now there is new hope this case can be solved.

19 Investigates learned a team of cold cases experts are now taking a look at her case along with local investigators.

The last day she was seen

Yvonne Regler vanished on a cloudy summer day in 1977.

“She is perpetually 17. She’d be 64 today and she is not aged from August 8th, 1977,” Shepard said.

The North Olmsted teen had a change in routine the day she went missing.

She wound up working at a different gas station that day on Lorain Road in Fairview Park, all by herself.

“So there was one working pump and she’d be pumping the gas,” Shepard said.

Yvonne planned on going to a memorial service for a friend’s father later in the day, but she never made it.

Chief Shepard broke down part of the timeline of that day for us.

At 1 p.m., Yvonne spoke to her friend over the phone.

“And she made a comment about how a car had come through, activated the bell system that says there’s a car there and then drove away. She continued a phone conversation, but then the car came back,” he said.

She hung up and told her friend she’d call back.

Next around 1:30 p.m., Chief Shepard said a woman showed up.

“A woman purchased gas with a credit card, and Yvonne pumped that gas and you see her initials,” he said.

Sometime after that and between 2 p.m., other customers stopped by the gas station.

“People showed up to use, to purchase gas or do some work there and found the gas station empty,” Shepard said.

Around 2:45 p.m., a co-worker showed up.

That’s when Yvonne was supposed to finish her shift, but she wasn’t there.

Missing persons case

Days and weeks passed by, and Yvonne was still missing.

We asked Chief Shepard whether there were any signs of foul play or if it appeared to be a possible abduction from the beginning.

“So initially, our agency thought maybe she’d run away. All her personal property, her purse, her books, her lunch were in the gas station itself. There was still cash in the in the cash register. So there really wasn’t a robbery,” Shepard said.

The tips started rolling in to the police station.

One woman even called saying she saw Yvonne on the cover of a magazine.

“Some people saw her getting on an airplane, going to Miami. Some people saw her waiting tables at a restaurant and on the east side of Cleveland, “he said.

As years passed, the leads started drying up.

There was no physical evidence or surveillance video in the case, which wasn’t as common at the time.

Eventually the case went cold.

But police have never given up on finding answers.

Over the years, Chief Shepard said they have worked on the case with the FBI, Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

“Investigators worked on this case, and they did everything they could to bring this to, try to bring this to a conclusion to find out what happened to her,” Shepard said.

“And you know, sadly, some of those original investigators have passed away and I talked to them before they passed. And this case has haunted them to their dying moments because they want to find out what happened to Yvonne. They would like to bring closure to the family. They would like to bring someone to justice if someone’s responsible for this,” he said.

Age progressions from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children show what she may look like in more recent years.

Yvonne would be 64 years old today.

More resources on the case

Over the last few years, the U.S. Marshals Service stepped in to help.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Vinny Piccoli leads their Missing Child Unit, working on recent cases like Amber alerts and cold cases like Yvonne’s.

“Sometimes it helps having a fresh set of eyes on the case file that can offer different input, different things, different avenues that may not have been looked at,” he said.

U.S. Marshals have combed through Yvonne’s case file and pursued leads with a network of resources across the country.

We asked how important it is to solve a cold case.

“To be able to bring closure to the family and justice to the family. That’s the main reason why, you know, these cold cases need to be solved,” Piccoli said.

Out of nearly 1,000 thousand tips, every single one has been vetted by investigators.

“We’ve looked at the serial killers, Samuel Little, who grew up in Lorain. Rodney Alcala, who was the dating game killer,” said Chief Shepard.

“We looked at friends, we looked at family members. We interviewed, literally, 50, 60 people,” he said.

Police even searched the Metroparks nearby and looked at Jane Doe cases across the country. Some leads still haven’t been ruled out.

In 2016, there was a person of interest in Yvonne’s case.

“So, they’re still a person of interest,” Shepard said.

“What I said in 2016, and it’s true today, we don’t have Yvonne,” he said.

Based on the evidence they do have, both Chief Shepard and Deputy U.S. Marshal Piccoli believe Yvonne was abducted.

“From just my my personal opinion, I think it was more of like a stranger abduction from that gas station. Because she wasn’t supposed to be there that day. She was supposed to be an entirely different location and got switched there last minute,” Piccoli said.

“So I know she had talked to a couple friends on the phone, so it’s possible that it was someone she knew, but it appears more of like a stranger abduction than anything,” he said.

Fresh eyes on the case

Now there is another chance to solve this mystery.

Fairview Park Police and U.S. Marshals just presented Yvonne’s case to an elite team of cold case experts from across the country at the Vidocq Society in Philadelphia.

They’ll analyze her case file and give local investigators a game plan to move forward.

“At the end of the day, you keep going and you hope that, you know, there’s that one tip or one lead that comes in or one investigative endeavor that you do that leads to that, that case being resolved,” Piccoli said.

“And as long as there’s one person that remembers Yvonne, that case is alive and she’s alive in their minds. And that’s why it’s important,” Shepard said.

Call with information

If you have any information about Yvonne Regler’s disappearance, call Fairview Park Police at 440-356-4415.

You can also contact the Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task Force at 1-866-4-WANTED or submit a tip online here.

And tipsters can also remain anonymous by contacting Cuyahoga County Crime Stoppers at 216-252-7463 or submit tips online here.