Welcome back, my dear readers, to Tea Time with a Side of Crime! It’s been a while, Hamptonian, and it’s fantastic to be back at it again. It feels like forever since I’ve sat down and worked on one of these episodes — since it’s now my senior year, I feel like I have to wrap this series up with a bang. These past two-three years have been wild, but they’ve been some of the best years of my life. Being able to share my interests with a wider audience, to spark inspiration and investigation, and to overall just express myself in a way that works for me is the greatest opportunity I could’ve ever asked for. That, and I just can’t leave you all hanging! I might still be a little rusty in the writing department, but I’m not short of cases to cover. So, without further ado, allow me to introduce today’s case.
Rather than honing in on cases we already know the ending of, I thought I’d shake it up for my senior year. These next few installments to the Tea Time franchise will be exclusively focusing on cold cases. I had such a fascinating experience investigating for the Sharkey episode back in November of 2022 that I wanted to try tackling more cases like it. After doing some deep diving, I think I found the right case to kick off this new era. I wanted to swap around the formula as, up until this point, every case I’ve covered has been a homicide. Don’t get me wrong, writing about a murder or two is standard, but where’s the spice in that? Thus, this is Tea Time’s first ever disappearance case! Enough dilly-dallying, we’ve got a missing person to find!
I: Setting the Scenery
Born on August 14th, 1976, our key person this time around is a woman named Cherrie Mahan. Disappearing at the startling age of just eight years old, Mahan would be forty-six today. Mahan was attending Winfield Elementary at the time, getting dropped off by her school bus on Cornplanter Road on February 22nd, 1985. Observers reported that, after being dropped off, a young Mahan was picked up by a blue 1976 Dodge van; the driver of said van is still undiscovered some thirty-eight years later. This was the last time that Cherrie Mahan was seen alive. After her sudden disappearance, her name soon became national news, with Mahan becoming the first child to ever be featured on the infamous “Have you seen me?” segments produced by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. To this day, nobody’s fully sure what happened to Cherrie Mahan, nor are they sure about her whereabouts.
II: Where on Earth is Cherrie Mahan?
The question now arises, as the section title states — where on Earth is Cherrie Mahan? Similarly to the case of Bill Sharkey, we don’t know all that much about what could’ve happened to Mahan. All we really know is that she’d be forty-six today. Even today, we don’t know who was driving that Dodge van, so it’s hard to really get a theory going as to what happened to that eight year old girl. There were no license plate readers nor security cameras at the time of Mahan’s disappearance, so there’s no true reliable way to track down where the van went. Mahan’s mother, Janice McKinney, proposed a few theories of her own when interviewing with TribLive. Apparently, Mahan’s father supposedly was affiliated with a biker gang that could’ve spelt trouble for a young Cherrie. It’s just hard to put together considering the fact that there’s so little out there. If there’s such small information out there, perhaps Cherrie isn’t out there either. I’d like to remain hopeful, however, and I intend to dive further into this in order to find some more details.
If you know anything about the Dodge driver, or about Cherrie Mahan’s whereabouts or happenings, please contact 724-284-8100 or anonymously contact the Pennsylvania Crime Stoppers Toll Free at 1-800-4PA-TIPS (8477).
III: Epilogue
And with that, our story comes to a tragic close. I hate to end my first episode back on such a sour note, but unfortunately, there isn’t much positive to be found in this case. As much as I hope Mahan is still alive, and I hope that her family reaches the closure they so rightfully deserve, it’s very likely that Cherrie’s long dead. However, I want to try and end things somewhat positively, so I’m going to keep looking. Perhaps, later down the road, I’ll do a sequel episode to report my later findings. As of now, Cherrie Mahan is still missing, and I’m still looking for her. I encourage you all to join me on this deep dive as, with all of us aspiring detectives working together, we just might be able to find where on Earth Cherrie Mahan is.
This has been Tea Time with a Side of Crime, where Pennsylvania’s most gruesome tales are served with a complementary cup of tea. Thanks for reading.
