In this week's edition of "The Missing," we revisit the mysterious disappearance of Cynthia Louise Day, a 38-year-old resident of East St. Louis, Illinois, who went missing on Aug. 10, 1990.
"I was 18-years-old and fresh out of high school when my mom disappeared," Cynthia's daughter, Melody, said in a telephone interview with Investigation Discovery. "On the day she went missing my sister, Kimberly, had just come home from the hospital with her son. My mom was excited, so my sister and I went over to her house so she could get to know her new grandbaby. My mom took him around and proudly introduced him to all the neighbors. We had a good time. We did not know it when we left, but that would prove to be the last time that we ever saw her."
Approximately one week later, Melody and Kimberly became concerned because they had not heard from their mother. It was unlike her to stay out of contact for such a long period of time, so the girls decided to go check on her. To their surprise, their mother, along with her boyfriend of seven years, had vanished. In addition, all of their possessions were also gone.
"My mother was into beauty and fashion and everything – clothes, makeup, perfumes – was all gone" Melody said, adding, "We did not even find a single toothbrush."
Both girls were young at the time and neither of them had any idea what to do, so they went to the East St. Louis Police Department and filed a missing person report. It was their hope that the police, people they felt were skilled and knowledgeable in missing person cases, would be able to uncover the mystery of their mother's disappearance.
"With each year that passed by, I just assumed that the police were investigating the case," Melody said. "I would call them whenever I heard they had found a body and would check to see if it was my mom, but they always said it was not her. Then, in 2004, when I needed a police report to get the website going and all this stuff, I discovered that they had never even opened a case. We resolved the issue but from that day forward I decided to do everything in my power to find out what happened to my mother."
As part of her own investigation, Melody went back to the neighborhood where her mother had lived and discovered that many of her mom's old neighbors suspected that Cynthia's boyfriend had something to do with her disappearance. This was something that Cynthia's daughters had also considered because, according to Melody, their mother had allegedly voiced her unhappiness about the relationship the last time they spoke. In addition, there was another incident that had occurred prior to Cynthia's disappearance, which her daughters found troubling.
"Sometime before they went missing, my uncle Wayne supposedly shot himself in front of my mom and her boyfriend," Melody said. "The entire thing is strange and my family is convinced that Wayne did not commit suicide. We think that something happened to him and that my mom witnessed it."
