Diamond and Tionda Bradley
Can you help find them?
Cedric Bailey, Special Victims Unit detective, was working the night shift at Area 1 headquarters July 6, 2001, when a call came from downtown.
Two young girls were missing.
"Who's up?" a sergeant asked.
It was Bailey, 52, an 18-year Chicago Police Department veteran.
"It came in as an 'immediate action,' " he said.
Problem was, Diamond and Tionda Bradley had been seen last at 6 a.m., reportedly left alone by their mother as she went off to work.
"It was 9 o'clock at night when I got it. I was a little upset about the time in between," he said.
Bailey headed out to the 3500 block of South Cottage Grove, his initial investigation leading to a worldwide manhunt by police and the FBI.
To this day, there's been no trace of Diamond, 3, and Tionda, 10.
"We have other cases like that. They're what we call the mysteries," said Cmdr. Robert Hargesheimer of the police Missing Persons Section.
So the Bradley family continues to wait, and each year they mark the passage of time.
"I'm not giving up hope," the girls' mother, Tracey Bradley, said this past summer when she and family members marched to a park near the apartment where the girls vanished, releasing pink and purple balloons in their memory.
Bailey, the first detective on the scene in 2001, said Bradley has reason to hope.
"I still believe they're alive," he said. "Usually, you find something -- clothing, shoes, bones -- that indicates otherwise. This case just kept bringing us back where we started."
Jerry Nance of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is among those still involved with the case.
"Most of the cases we solve, unfortunately, the child is found deceased," said Nance, head of the group's forensics assistance unit. "But we do have a small percentage found alive, even after 20 years. It's not unsolvable. Somebody out there knows a piece of information about these girls."