What Happened to the Fandel Children?

Most parents admit they can imagine no nightmare worse than the disappearance of a child, but how do parents cope when this horror strikes twice, and two children disappear from the same family? What happened to Scott and Amy Fandel?

Sometime during the late-night hours of September 5 or the early morning hours of September 6, 1978, Scott Fandel, 13, and Amy Fandel, 8, vanished from their Sterling, Alaska home on the Kenai Peninsula, 136 miles (218.9 km) south of Anchorage. The mystery of what happened to the Fandel children has baffled police for over four decades. How can two kids disappear from their home?

At 10:30 pm on Sept. 5, 1978, Scott and Amy Fandel were safe and happy. Less than four hours later, they were gone, never to be seen again. Where did they go? What could have happened to them? Investigators spent thousands of hours running down hundreds of leads which led nowhere. One former Alaska State Trooper said they chased “quirks and spider web leads,” but they never got any closer to finding the children.

The children’s parents had recently gone through a bitter divorce. Their father, Roger Fandel, loved his kids but was unfaithful to his wife, Margaret. Margaret began drinking more alcohol as Roger strayed and finally left her. Margaret, a waitress, worked long hours to pay the bills, and when Roger moved to Arizona, the kids were often unsupervised at their home in a small cabin in the woods near Sterling, Alaska.