Ambush suspected after man, daughter vanish
August 6, 2009 -- Updated 2120 GMT (0520 HKT
(CNN) -- Late last month, Michelle Russell somberly walked on a Maui beach in Hawaii to mark her daughter Sarah Skiba's 20th birthday.
Sarah Skiba visited her father, Paul Skiba, every other weekend.
For Russell, who last saw Sarah more than a decade ago, when she was just 9 years old, some images will never fade with the passage of time.
Russell especially recalls the cold Friday morning in February 1999 when she dropped Sarah off at a bus stop in Westminster, Colorado, for her ride to school.
"She loved to go to school," Russell said, remembering that Sarah ran for the bus and slipped on ice.
"She skinned her wrist at the bottom of her hand, and she was crying," Russell said. "I had a first aid kit and gave her a Band-Aid."
After school that day, Sarah's father, Paul Skiba, met Sarah to spend the weekend together, a visitation arrangement in place since Russell and Skiba divorced several years earlier.
"Her father picked her up at 3:30 p.m.," Russell said. "She visited her father every other weekend."
On Sunday, Sarah joined her father -- who owned a moving company -- and his employee Lorenzo Chivers as they went to a moving job. Watch a report about the case »
"We know they had two moving jobs that day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon," said Thornton Police Department Sgt. Pat Long, the original investigator on the case.
The second job was for a man who lived in Morrison, Colorado.
The girl, her father and Chivers left Morrison between 5 and 5:30 p.m. to return the moving truck to the Westminster parking lot where Skiba stored his vehicles, Long says.
On the way, a 12-year-old relative of Paul Skiba's girlfriend, Theresa Donovan, received a call from Sarah.
The girl said they were on their way to return the truck and would then come home.
But Sarah and her father never made it back to the house he and Donovan shared.
Michelle Russell later called police, who initially thought it was a parental abduction, even though Chivers was also missing.
"It was almost three weeks after that that I became involved," Long said. "I think we lost some key evidence during the initial time that passed at the scene."
Paul Skiba's family and friends went to his truck storage lot one week after the girl and the two men went missing and grew suspicious when they found what they believed were two bullet holes in the exteriors of Skiba's moving trucks, Long said.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/08/06/cold.case.sarah.skiba/index.html
