On one tragic day in 1998, a young woman went missing. For months, her family — with the help of the police — tried desperately to find her. It is now more than 24 years later without any trace of Amber Wilde.
“I never in my wildest dreams would have thought that it would be going on for this long and not having any answers,” said Laurie Ehnert, Amber Wilde’s aunt.
On September 23, 1998, 19-year-old Amber Wilde had gotten into a car accident. It was a minor accident and she was relatively unscathed. She called her family to tell them about it and let them know that she was fine. That call came at 7:16 pm and it was the last time she was known to have contacted her family.
At the time of Amber’s disappearance, she was more than four months pregnant.
“I have six grandkids now, you know, and I try to tell them a little about her,” said her aunt Laurie Ehnert. “She’s got two sisters that both have kids now and you know, they want them to know about Amber and what a special person she was.”
Then, on October 1, Amber’s car was found in the parking lot of a Roadstar Inn. Her car was a silver four-door Subaru. The FBI was able to get in contact with witnesses who recalled seeing her car in the parking lot as early as September 28. The car had been driven an additional 600 miles before it was left in that parking lot. In the purse, the police found Amber’s purse and cell phone. Interestingly, the driver’s seat was pushed all the way back. This led the police to believe that someone else had driven Amber’s car since she was only 5'5.
Throughout the years, several different investigative journalists have delved into this case. One of them was able to look into past warrants that were unsealed in 2016. The unsealed warrants revealed that a man named Matthew Schneider was the father of Amber’s unborn child. Schneider was also rumored to have been a married man at the time. For that reason, he became a person of interest in the case.
Unfortunately, Schneider has not been very cooperative with the investigators.
“At this point and time, they still haven’t provided answers to our questions about what they were doing that day and the days after,” Detective David Graf said.
Matthew Schneider has never been charged in this case and Amber Wilde has never been found.
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