The Pot Still Boiling: Scott and Amy Fandel
Scott Curtis Fandel was thirteen years old, described by people who knew him as smart and fiercely protective of his younger sister. Amy Lee Fandel was eight, remembered as sweet and easygoing. The two of them lived with their mother, Margaret Fandel, in a small two bedroom cabin in a rural, heavily wooded stretch off Scout Lake Road near Sterling, Alaska, roughly half a mile from the Sterling Highway. Their parents' marriage had ended in a difficult divorce, and their father, Roger Fandel, had relocated to Arizona in January 1978, leaving Margaret to raise both children largely on her own in one of the more remote corners of the state.
On the evening of September 4, 1978, Margaret took Scott and Amy along with her sister, Cathy Schonfelder, who was visiting from out of state, to Good Time Charlie's, a bar and restaurant in Sterling. The children ate dinner while the two women socialized. Around ten o'clock that night, Margaret and Cathy dropped Scott and Amy back home at the cabin and returned to the bar to continue their evening without them, a routine drop-off that would turn out to be the last confirmed moment either woman spent with the children while everything was still normal.
An Evening at the Neighbors', Then Home
After being dropped off, Scott and Amy walked over to the home of a neighboring family, the Luptons, who had five children of their own close in age to the Fandel kids. The two groups of children played together until around 11:45 p.m., at which point the noise level apparently grew enough that the Lupton parents decided it was time for everyone to settle down for the night, and they sent Scott and Amy back home. A neighbor later reported observing the light on inside the Fandel cabin sometime after that, seemingly confirming the children had made it home safely and were still awake inside.
When Margaret and Cathy finally returned to the cabin between two and three o'clock the following morning, the scene that greeted them immediately struck both women as deeply wrong. Every light in the cabin was off, unusual specifically because both Scott and Amy were known to be afraid of the dark and habitually left lights burning overnight rather than risk waking up in a pitch black cabin. On the kitchen counter and stove, they found a package of macaroni, an open can of tomatoes, and a pot of water that had been set to boil, evidently mid-preparation for a late meal Scott appeared to have been making for himself and his sister. The water in the pot was reportedly still hot when Margaret and Cathy found it, suggesting whatever had happened, had happened not very long before they walked back in. The beds were unmade. The children's shoes and coats were still inside the cabin. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle, nothing that pointed definitively toward violence, only an interrupted dinner and two children who were simply gone.
One additional detail would later take on considerable weight once investigators began piecing together what may have allowed someone to get inside undetected: the cabin's front door lock was reportedly broken at the time, leaving the children with no real way to secure the home behind them even if they had wanted to.
A Search That Found Almost Nothing
Search efforts began quickly once Scott and Amy's absence was confirmed, with search dogs brought in to comb the surrounding wooded terrain. The dogs found no trace of either child, no scent trail leading away from the property in any clear direction, and no physical evidence anywhere nearby suggesting where they might have gone or been taken. Investigators did recover bullet casings found outside the cabin during their search, though the significance of that discovery has never been established. It remains unclear whether the casings had any connection to the disappearance at all or whether they simply reflected the kind of ordinary rural target shooting or hunting activity common to the area, and no ballistic evidence has ever tied them conclusively to the case.
Investigators also looked into a black sedan reportedly seen speeding through the area around the time the children vanished, a vehicle eventually traced back to a group of traveling carnival workers who had previously stayed at the Fandel property at some point before the disappearance. That connection generated real interest at the time, given the combination of a recent, direct link to the household and a suspicious vehicle spotted nearby on the exact night in question, but no evidence was ever developed tying any of the carnival workers directly to what happened to Scott and Amy.
A Father Under Suspicion, Then Cleared
Margaret's brother, Terry Schonfelder, voiced early and lasting suspicion that Roger Fandel, the children's father, might have been responsible, a theory rooted partly in the timing of his recent move to Arizona and the strained state of his relationship with Margaret. Acting on those accusations, investigators went so far as to excavate the yard of Roger's own father, Herman Fandel, searching for any physical evidence connecting the family patriarch's property to the case. The excavation turned up nothing. Roger himself actually flew back to Alaska to assist directly in the search for his children, and while investigators reportedly tapped Margaret's phone line at one point during the investigation, hoping to catch any incriminating conversation, nothing that surfaced from that surveillance ever implicated her or anyone close to her either. Roger Fandel was never charged with anything connected to his children's disappearance, and investigators eventually moved away from viewing him as a serious suspect.
An unrelated, opportunistic lead also emerged during this period: a woman claiming to be Roger's ex-girlfriend reportedly offered to reveal information about the case in exchange for five thousand dollars. Nothing ever came of that offer, and whatever she claimed to know, if anything, was never substantiated or made public.
False Leads Across the Years
The case produced periodic false alarms over the years that followed, each one raising and then dashing hope for the family. In 1979, bodies discovered in California were initially considered as possible matches for Scott or Amy, only to be identified instead as two entirely different missing girls unrelated to the Fandel case. Around 1980, the Fandel family's own cabin, the literal scene of the children's disappearance, burned down, destroying whatever physical traces of that night might theoretically have remained inside it for later forensic examination. In 1984, a retired Alaska state trooper personally investigated a report of children in Arizona who reportedly matched Scott and Amy's descriptions closely enough to warrant a direct look, a lead that, like every other lead before it, ultimately proved unrelated to the actual Fandel children.
A Range of Theories, None Confirmed
Investigators and the family have circulated a range of competing theories over the decades since 1978, none of which has ever been substantiated with hard evidence. A stranger abduction theory holds that an unknown intruder entered the unsecured cabin, possibly threatening the children with a weapon or convincing them to leave under some pretext, perhaps even falsely claiming to have been sent by their own mother. Margaret's brother has floated a specifically grim variation of the family involvement theory over the years, suggesting he believes Amy may actually have survived and could be living somewhere in Alaska or California under a new identity, while Scott, in his telling, was murdered outright, a theory that has never been supported by any confirmed evidence either. A wilderness or wild animal theory, the idea that the children simply wandered off into the surrounding forest or were taken by a predator, has generally been considered unlikely by investigators, both because area wildlife would not easily have been able to access a closed cabin and because two frightened children caught in that kind of encounter would most plausibly have tried to run directly back toward the safety of their own home rather than vanish without a trace. In more recent years, amateur online researchers have floated considerably more speculative explanations as well, including theories involving unexplained aerial phenomena, reflecting how thoroughly the case's total absence of physical evidence has left room for even the most far fetched explanations to take hold in true crime communities.
Still Unsolved, Nearly Fifty Years Later
More than four and a half decades after Scott and Amy Fandel vanished from their own home in the middle of the night, the Alaska State Troopers still list the case as open, still built around the same handful of physical facts investigators had within the first twenty four hours: a broken lock, an unfinished dinner, a pot of water still warm on the stove, and two children's shoes left behind by kids who, by every account of their personalities and their fear of the dark, would never have chosen to walk out into the Alaska night willingly on their own. Age progressed images exist for both Scott and Amy, imagining what each of them might look like today if either has, against every likelihood the case has produced so far, simply been living somewhere else entirely for the better part of fifty years.
Sources
- The Charley Project: Scott Curtis Fandel
- The Charley Project: Amy Lee Fandel
- Cold Case Explorations: The Vanishing of the Fandel Children in the Last Frontier
- True Crime Diva: Scott and Amy Fandel Missing Since 1978
