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Tuesday, May 21, 2013
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Search for missing Tupper Lake teen reaches first anniversary

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TUPPER LAKE - Monday marked one year since Colin W. Gillis was last seen, and although state police are still working the case, a top official says they don’t know where he may be.

Mr. Gillis, who would now be 19, was last seen by a motorist in the early morning hours of March 11, 2012 leaving a social gathering on Paskungameh Road in Tupper Lake and walking west near the St. Lawrence-Franklin county line in the Piercefield area.

“We’ve developed new leads; we’re revisiting old leads,” Lt. Scott Heggelke of the state police Bureau of Criminal Investigation said Monday. “Do we know where Colin is right now? Unfortunately, no.”

The BCI lieutenant added that investigators recently spoke with someone they learned had seen Mr. Gillis on the night he disappeared, but he wouldn’t comment except to say that there is “no information that has led us to make another organized search.”

Mr. Heggelke said a break in the case could come from someone who saw Mr. Gillis and has not yet come forward, perhaps believing police have obtained similar information from other sources.

“If somebody saw something that night and they haven’t called it in, they should tell us,” Mr. Heggelke said. “Don’t make any assumptions that we have the information.”

He added investigators keep in continuous contact with the family and said he spoke with Mr. Gillis’s father, John Gillis, on Monday, but declined to comment on the details of the conversation.

Mr. Gillis’s brother, Lyndon, said last year that no one knows why he left the party or why he was walking west on Route 3 — the opposite direction from his home. “That’s the million-dollar question,” Lyndon Gillis said.

Since the young man went missing, police, family, friends and strangers have searched thousand of acres — they were only able to turn up some of his personal effects on Setting Pole Dam Road. More than 300 volunteers searched for days with the aid of state police helicopters and K-9 units, state forest rangers, and Search and Rescue of the Northern Adirondacks.

“This is never a closed case; it’s always an open case and we will always investigate it,” Mr. Heggelke said.

The family is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to Colin Gillis’s safe return.

Anyone with information about him or his current whereabouts can call state police in Ray Brook at (518) 897-2000.

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