Find Amy Mihaljevic's killer

After 35 years, it seems as if the Bay Village police might not believe they will ever solve the Amy Mihaljevic homicide. The email address police use for receiving tips from the public has been inoperable for months. If it was a priority, the problem would have been fixed by now. The one chance — the 1-million-in-one chance — that someone with information might try to contact police using the email address they provide for tips — should be enough for the department's IT team to fix this problem, immediately. It should be enough to make it a priority to get it fixed. Listing bad email addresses for police is a problem in itself, but it's especially sloppy when it involves the most well known unsolved homicide case in the state. We don't doubt that the Bay Village police had every intention — at one time — of finding the 10-year-old's killer. Amy Mihaljevic was lured from a shopping center in the city by a man, according to witnesses, and was never seen alive again. Her body was discovered in a cornfield outside not far from the roadway in rural Ashland County a few months after she disappeared. Witnesses provided police with a description of the man Amy left with, and an artist provided a sketch of the suspect shortly after she was reported missing. The flyer police prepared is still used in efforts to bring the man to justice Mihaljevic Last year, a Huron County man was arrested for allegedly assaulting a woman, who reported the assailant to the Huron County sheriff's office. The woman became convinced — through circumstantial information about the man — that he might be the person who killed Amy Mihaljevic. In addition, her alleged assailant fit the suspect's description, and he was a dead-on match for the suspect as depicted in the sketch, although 35 years older. She said she told Bay Village police about her suspicions. The Bay Village police, when asked about the man possibly being a suspect in Mihaljevic's death, were as enthusiastic about it as an email address the rejects incoming messages. Lots of people look like the suspect, a detective said, and the woman's assault in Huron County was much different than what happened to Mihaljevic, he said. We're not trained detectives, but our email addresses work just fine. The woman's suspicions were credible enough. The Bay Village police, in our view, need to quit paying lip service and investigate what she told them.