Anxious Moments In Indiana And N.Y. As Search For Missing Student Spierer Turns To Landfill
SCARSDALE, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) -- After two exhausting months a new lead has been identified in the search for a missing woman from Westchester County who vanished at college.
A small army of law enforcement is combing a landfill near Indiana University, where 20-year-old Lauren Spierer was last seen alive.
Her family is also stepping up the pressure on her friends, reports CBS 2's Lou Young.
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The search for the missing student is now concentrated in a landfill about an hour drive from the Indiana University campus. There are tents, heavy equipment and more than 20 investigators prepared to sift through the trash sent from the college town the week Spierer disappeared.
Her parents have made another heartfelt plea on the website dedicated to the search, www.findlauren.com, hoping to shake loose a lead.
The sudden activity has been unnerving to Spierer's Westchester neighbors.
"I don't know that they'll ever find her. It's strange to think it's still going on after like two months," Scarsdale High School junior Stephanie Peltz said.
It has been a long, anxious summer since Robert and Charlene Spierer left their home here in Edgemont for the trip to Bloomington, Ind., and the wait to find their daughter. They believe the people who last were with Lauren know more than they're saying.
Lauren's friend and roommate, Blaire Wallach, believes the same. Young spoke with her by phone on Tuesday and she said that silence is hurtful; it mystifies her. She said she's preparing to go back to school without her best friend.
Since her disappearance on June 3 it has been a season of heartbreak, of searches in the woods, posters and retracing the final steps of night of partying during which the smiling girl seen in now-numerous photos seemed to vanish from the face of the Earth.
At the Scarsdale clothing store where Lauren Spierer worked before college, a poster asks people not to forget, but forgetting isn't an option.
"Especially because we have a lot of friends who are going off to college for the first time. For them it's such a bittersweet time anyway. This is a fear no one wants to have," resident Nicole Moser said.
At the Spierer family synagogue, the rabbi said he is preparing for the high holy days girding himself for news from Indiana.
"When I see members they say any news yet? And you know what they're referring to even though they don't mention Lauren by name but you know what they're referring to," Rabbi Stephen Klein said.
Indiana police are working with the FBI and experts in child abduction. The methodical search of the landfill could take two weeks. Investigators said the search area in the landfill remains isolated and secured. No additional garbage has been placed in that location.
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