Kevin Mahoney has been missing for 12 years - nearly half as long as he'd been alive on Oct. 2, 1993.
That was the day he left a friend's house and disappeared.
Fargo police issued a statement Wednesday once again appealing for leads in one of the city's oldest missing-persons cases.
Detective Jim LeDoux calls it "one of those kind of cold-case files where we have no idea what happened. ... According to the family and all, he wasn't the type who'd just fall off the face of the earth without saying something."
On the day he disappeared, Mahoney, 25, left the home of his friend Ben Kukowski to walk to the home of his brother in south Moorhead.
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But Mahoney never arrived. After not hearing from him for a couple of days, his sister, Michele Eisenpeter of Dilworth, stopped by Kukowski's house and was told Mahoney had left. The family then contacted police.
Shortly after Mahoney's disappearance, police investigated a rumor that Mahoney was in a fight with a Detroit Lakes, Minn., man. And about a month later, a woman claimed she spotted him at Rick's Bar in Fargo. Neither lead panned out.
His mother, Judy Simonson, Dilworth, fears the worst. "My (son) was murdered, because he would never leave anybody hanging."
Because he lived with his mother, Mahoney always called when he was going to be late coming home so she wouldn't lock him out, Simonson said.
LeDoux said tips occasionally come in when bones are found somewhere that could be Mahoney's. But it's difficult to match them with Mahoney because investigators have no adult dental records. DNA samples have been taken from relatives, but haven't yet been matched with any found remains, he said.
LeDoux said some of those questioned at the time of the disappearance have taken lie-detector tests and all have passed. Many people interviewed have since moved and can't be found so detectives can speak to them again, he said.
"We need a real serious break here, somehow," he said.
"We just wish somebody would come forward that knows" what happened, Simonson said. "I know somebody knows something. It's so hard. We have no closure."
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Readers can reach Forum reporter Tom Pantera at (701) 241-5541
