Deanie Peters' mom: There's no closure

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) -- Mary Peters made a televised plea just days after her daughter, Deanie, disappeared.

"We just want you to come home, Deanie. Please."

Twenty-nine years later, she still waits.

"I don't think you ever get over it; you kind of move on," she told 24 Hour News 8 in her first televised interview since the days after the disappearance.

"There's certain times of the year it's worse than others, like now, because it's coming up on the anniversary of her disappearance -- of 29 years.

"So, I don't think you ever get over it, because there's no closure here."

Mary Peters watched her daughter walk across a school gymnasium -- for the last time -- on Feb. 5, 1981.

Deanie, an eighth-grader at Forest Hills Central Middle Schools, was there to watch her 6-year-old brother wrestle. She was supposed to babysit that evening. They were getting ready to leave the gym.

"She asked if she could go to the restroom first, and she walked across the gym floor and never came back," Mary Peters said.

The disappearance led to searches and fears -- false accusations and failures. But there was no resolution.

It wasn't long before Mary and her husband, John Peters -- Deanie's stepfather -- moved with their son to Arizona. They have saved some of Deanie's stuffed animals and photographs.

"It's not a shrine," Mary Peters said. "I don't believe in that, but there are a lot of things we have in the room that are hers."

The passage of time has helped -- a little. Their son is now 35.

"It helps heal the wounds a little bit because you have to move on, plus, you had our son who was 6 years old at the time, and you had to move on for him," she said.

Then, in March 2008, the Kent Metro Cold Case Team reopened the investigation -- with five detectives working full time, traveling to seven states, putting in 10,000 hours and interviewing 300 people.

Mary Peters had complained several years ago after a conflict within the Kent County Sheriff's Department led cold case investigator Eugene Debbaudt to quit the job before tackling her daughter's disappearance.

Debbaudt, a retired FBI agent, recently had solved the 1993 murder of millionaire businessman Robert Fryling. He complained that some former Kent detectives were uncooperative.

"It took a long time for them to get there, but we certainly do appreciate and thank everybody that's worked on this case -- I mean, the police, the sheriff, the state police, the detectives," Mary Peters said.

The new team has updated the Peters family on the progress, and recently, there has been progress.

"We would hope and pray that somebody would come forward that knows anything, even if it may be something they think is very trivial," John Peters, Deanie's stepfather, told 24 Hour News 8.

In the meantime, the Peters family is preparing for a dark anniversary on Friday -- and for the phone calls from those who mark it with them.

"The phone calls, they always come at the wrong time," Mary Peters said. "They do."