A 6-year-old California boy was abducted in 1951 and found last year living on the East Coast — 73 years after his disappearance.

The discovery was thanks to an AncestryDNA test, the sort sold at drugstores that have people submit saliva samples to create DNA matches that can track family history.

“These things are really making a difference in helping to find missing children,” said Alan Nanavaty, executive director of the missing children division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Biometrics, social media and artificial intelligence are among the newest technologies used by law enforcement to locate some of the estimated 460,000 children who are reported missing in the U.S. each year.

It is their hope that technological advancements could help resolve the case of Cherrie Mahan, the 8-year-old who disappeared Feb. 22, 1985, from a bus stop near her home in rural Winfield.

“With all the DNA, genetics and genealogy today, we’re hoping to get that one right lead,” state police Cpl. Max DeLuca said.

He took over the Mahan case in recent years, following in the footsteps of others who have exhausted four decades of leads. Inside DeLuca’s office at the state police station in Butler, mounds of files are devoted to the case.

As genealogy research has grown in popularity, investigators are hoping the onslaught of new data will lead to a break in the case.

“Everyone is testing their DNA today, trying to research family trees,” DeLuca said.

DNA testing wasn’t a reality in 1985 when Cherrie, a third grader in the Knoch Area School District, got off the school bus about 100 yards from her home and disappeared.

Her school photo wasn’t circulated on social media — it was splashed on milk cartons and displayed on TV shows like “Good Morning America.”

A huge deal for the early Mahan investigation was using her likeness on the first-ever “Have You Seen Me?” direct mail ads in 1985.

In the absence of Ring doorbells or surveillance cameras, authorities relied on interviews with neighbors to piece together what happened.

Their attention was directed to a van, perhaps a bright blue or green 1976 Dodge with a mural of a skier on the side, reported as lingering near the bus stop, though no link was ever formally established.

Amber Alerts wouldn’t launch until 11 years later.

“Even during those early years, an Amber Alert came out across the TV screen or on the radio,” Nanavaty said. “Now, we’re able to reach a mobile public where they are.”

Even at the gas pump, people are inundated with TV screens showing age-progression photos of Mahan and others through a new partnership, Nanavaty said.

“This is all over the country. You never know when there might be classmate or someone who knows something filling up,” he said. “The leads and tips that come in from the public are what’s going to resolve these cases.”

The advent of smartphones and social media in the early 2010s broadened the reach by untold numbers, with shares of information on Facebook, TikTok and YouTube amplifying search efforts in ways money couldn’t buy.

Still, the case continues to agonize investigators.

“There’s always hope,” Nanavaty said. “We never give up.”

Cherrie’s mother, Janice McKinney, also believes the truth will turn up.

She hosted an event Saturday to mark the 40th anniversary of Cherrie’s disappearance.

“I feel like the tips we’re getting are credible,” McKinney said of a renewed push for evidence.

A new Facebook page, Find Cherrie Mahan, has drawn dozens of submissions in just more than a month.

“The more we do with YouTube and social media, the more leads we receive,” Nanavaty said.

The Center for Missing and Exploited Children is the nation’s largest child protection organization. In the past four decades, it has received more than 5 million calls resulting in more than 426,000 missing children being recovered. Most cases — 89% — are resolved within a year, Nanavaty said.

Over the years, at least four women have come forward, believing themselves or claiming to be Mahan. All have been disproved or disappeared before police could vet their claims with genetic testing.

Closure has eluded the family. When Mahan was legally declared dead in 1998, her family placed a cherub statue in a Saxonburg cemetery, despite not having a grave.

Search-and-rescue for the digital age

Alex Minster, director of Trace Labs, describes his all-volunteer organization as the modern incarnation of classic search-and-rescue techniques.

But, instead of banding together as neighbors to comb the woods for clues, Trace Labs enlists people from around the globe — some with intelligence backgrounds, others with little more than a passion for solving puzzles — to scour the internet for clues about stubborn cases.

“Really all you need is a passion to follow your questions and pivot,” Minster said.

Members dig up evidence at periodic hackathon-like events, where teams of four compete to advance the case under a coach’s watch and earn points for doing so, or through longer-term probes run by the group’s more skilled cadre.

Trace Labs takes credit for pioneering a technique where an email address can be used to track a person’s movements, and some of its members have gone on to have careers in the intelligence field.

Findings and the methods used to reach them get condensed into roughly 10-paragraph reports for law enforcement.

The goal, Minster stressed, is not to replace law enforcement or step on its toes.

Some police departments devour the reports. Others barely acknowledge them.

The idea is to leverage the power of crowdsourcing for good.

It’s not that different, he noted, from the classic milk carton kids or “missing” posters.

Cultural shifts

Cases like Cherrie Mahan’s have stuck people’s minds, posited child safety expert Pattie Fitzgerald, in part because of the setting. At least at one time, people believed kidnappings only happened in dark alleyways and so-called inner city neighborhoods, not bucolic Winfield.

But as police technology has evolved to guard against child abductions — or at least solve ones that never get solved — so have parental attitudes.

By the time 7-year-old Megan Kanka was raped and murdered in New Jersey in 1994, parents were starting to internalize the message of “stranger danger” and passing that along to their kids.

Fitzgerald has coined the term “tricky people” to replace “stranger danger,” emphasizing how much of the sexual abuse and other trauma suffered by children happens at the hands of characters like “uncle creepy.”

Either way, she said, it’s unthinkable for some parents today to let their child get off the school bus alone.

“When parents know better, they do better,” Fitzgerald said. “Cherrie’s parents are not to blame.”

She added: “You assumed in 1985 you could walk up the hill.”

Jack Troy and Tawnya Panizzi are TribLive staff writers. Jack can be reached at jtroy@triblive.com. Reach Tawnya at tpanizzi@triblive.com.