A group of twenty people gathered outside Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on the night of Monday, October 5, 1998. Wearing red ponchos and drenched in steady rain, the friends and family handed out fliers to thousands of fans arriving to watch the Green Bay Packers take on the Minnesota Vikings.

Taped to the fronts and backs of their ponchos were photos of 19-year-old Amber Lynn Wilde, a University of Wisconsin–Green Bay student who had been missing since September 23.

The group included Steve Wilde, Amber’s father, and her mother, Julie Ketter. Together, they directed the hooded volunteers around the perimeter of Lambeau Field, distributing 10,000 fliers to nearly 60,000 fans that night.

Since Amber’s disappearance in late September following a minor car accident, her family had done everything possible to raise awareness.

Lambeau Field was their latest effort after Amber’s car—a dark gray 1988 Subaru GL, its rear window lined with stuffed animals—was found abandoned at the Fifty-Yard Line Sports Bar across the street from the stadium on October 1. The family saw the next Packers game as a way to reach as many locals as possible.

“I know that after we’re through, we’ll have at least 10,000 more people who at least know that this is happening,” Steve said afterward.

On Wednesday, September 23, the day Amber disappeared, she called her father about a minor car accident that morning. She had hit her head on the windshield, cracking the glass and leaving a noticeable knot on her forehead. Amber told Steve she’d checked in with a nurse at UWGB’s clinic and complained of a headache, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

The next day, Steve hadn’t heard from Amber, and she wasn’t answering her phone. She also didn’t attend class that day or on Friday.

By Thursday night, growing more concerned—and suspecting she might have suffered a head injury—Steve left his home in Mayville and drove 90 minutes north to Green Bay, where Amber lived in an off-campus apartment on August Street. The apartment was locked, and her Subaru was gone. Still unable to reach her, Steve began looking for other clues.

“I got a copy of her bank statement and credit card, and nothing has been used,” Steve told The Reporter, a week later. “That’s why I’m kind of figuring it wasn’t something that was planned. I was kind of hoping something was used.”

Amber’s disappearance was unusual for many reasons. She was a diligent student who had just completed her associate’s degree at the University of Wisconsin–Washington County. Her father called her “an endless planner” who would schedule her “Friday and Saturday on Monday.”

She had transferred to UWGB to begin a pre-med program with hopes of becoming a pediatrician. Two days before she vanished, Amber had been elected to the university’s Student Senate. She’d been on campus for only three weeks when she crashed her car.

Amber was also pregnant when she disappeared. Early newspaper reports said she was four and a half months along; others claimed six. In any case, she was well into her pregnancy, though her family didn’t believe it was connected to her disappearance. She had become pregnant by a man in West Bend, but the relationship hadn’t lasted. Amber planned to raise the baby on her own.

“I think she was disappointed in herself, but six weeks ago, she was already dealing with it,” Steve told newspapers. “She had all of us helping her and supporting her. She looked at it as another new challenge—to go to school and be a mother, too.”

When Steve couldn’t find his daughter at her apartment, he contacted Green Bay police. According to a 2023 news report, officers mistakenly told him he had to wait 48 hours before filing a missing person report. On Saturday, he did—and the investigation into Amber Wilde’s disappearance officially began.

In the first week of the search, police uncovered no clues as to what might have happened to Amber. With no leads, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that she had run away or taken her own life.

Instinctively, Steve believed his daughter was alive, and perhaps in trouble. This was something he was more than willing to face.

“I don’t care what you’ve done—what you’re afraid of,” he pleaded to the public on October 1. “Just let us know where you are.”

Within days, Green Bay police received reports of possible sightings, but none could be confirmed. Amber was described as 5’5”, with reddish-brown hair and eight small hoop earrings in each ear. Her family printed thousands of fliers to distribute at toll booths and rest stops all the way down to Chicago, in case she had been traveling—by choice or not—along the busy Midwestern freeways.

Together, Steve and investigators began piecing together Amber’s last known movements. Immediately after her car accident on the morning of September 23, she was checked by a school nurse and called her father that afternoon.

The nurse advised her to rest and let her family know about the incident, but saw no need for hospital care. At some point that day, Amber picked up her weekly paycheck from work, estimated to be $50 to $60. Amber last spoke to Steve around 4 p.m., and it was believed that she called one other person from her apartment just after 7 p.m. that night.

On Thursday and Friday, she missed her classes, and friends reported no contact with her for the rest of the week. By the time Steve filed a missing person report on Saturday, more than sixty hours had passed since their last conversation.

One reported sighting claimed Amber was seen in the Shawano area—about forty miles northwest of Green Bay—on Monday, September 28. Police couldn’t confirm it, but they knew the man who’d fathered Amber’s child worked in that area.

He wasn’t considered a suspect, as investigators still weren’t sure whether Amber had vanished voluntarily or met with foul play. The baby’s father, who remained unnamed in newspapers, was a construction worker with whom Amber had become “obsessive” before starting classes at UWGB.

At some point during their relationship, Amber had learned that the man was in a serious relationship with another woman; reports claimed this was his fiancée.

When Amber told the woman about her own pregnancy, the man promptly broke off his relationship with Amber and expressed that he didn’t have any desire to be in the baby’s life. Despite the tumultuous summer, Amber decided to move forward with the pregnancy. From West Bend, she relocated to Green Bay to begin the next phase of her education.

The first break in Amber’s case came on October 1, when her unlocked Subaru was found abandoned in a parking lot of a sports bar near the Packers’ stadium around 6 p.m.

Steve had just finished paying Amber’s rent for the month when he received word from Green Bay police that her car had finally been located. When he joined police at the vehicle, Steve could see that the keys were still in the ignition.

The driver’s seat was pushed farther back than Amber’s small frame likely required, and the odometer showed 600 to 900 “unaccounted-for” miles. Amber’s purse was in the trunk; her cell phone lay on the passenger seat.

The tavern’s owner, Kris Olson, told police he first noticed the car on Tuesday but hadn’t realized it was connected to the missing woman. He said it stood out because it was parked oddly, though Steve later questioned Olson’s recollection.

A puddle of antifreeze had formed beneath the vehicle, and Steve doubted it could have remained there through a heavy rainstorm on Wednesday if the car had been parked since Tuesday.

Although there was still no official theory as to why or how Amber disappeared, signs that foul play was a factor became difficult to ignore. Amber, who was well into her second trimester, now had no vehicle, keys, purse, or cell phone, and had not made any financial transactions since her last sighting.

If she were alive, she was completely untethered from her everyday life as a student at UWGB.

A forensic sweep of the Subaru produced no usable fingerprints or additional leads. On October 6, the day after the Packers game, Steve told a reporter he didn’t believe the baby’s father was involved.

“I don’t think so, at this point,” he said. “The detective has talked to him a couple of times and doesn’t see anything there.”

In mid-October, Green Bay police revealed that the case had slowed because “a particular individual isn’t talking to us,” said police Lt. Craig Van Schyndle.

The person wasn’t identified—other than being one of Amber’s friends—though Van Schyndle said that detectives had “talked to individuals who had been her boyfriend in the past, but I don’t know if any of them are her current boyfriend.”

The Wilde family began running frequent missing-person ads in local newspapers and established the Find Amber Lynn Wilde Fund to raise additional resources for her ongoing search.

They grew impatient with Green Bay police, though the department insisted at least four or five detectives were working her case every day. When one month passed, Amber’s family hired a private investigator to aid police.

Penny Bell, a Milwaukee detective, brought her trail-seeking bloodhound, Hoover, to Green Bay to look for clues near Amber’s apartment and the tavern where her car was located.

In both areas, Hoover found no scent or trail leading to evidence.  Steve Wilde and Julie Ketter kept the search alive, but by year’s end, police were no closer to answers. Steve’s first Christmas without Amber came and went—this one without a tree.

Despite the department’s continued efforts, months passed without new leads. By the end of 1998, police believed Amber had likely been the victim of homicide. Still, as Lt. Greg Urban noted, it wasn’t technically a murder case.

“It changes to a homicide if we locate a body identified as Amber Wilde,” he said. “This is still a missing persons case.”

In January 1999, the search for Amber moved to West Bend, where she had been a student the year before transferring to Green Bay. Investigators said there were “specific people” they wanted to talk to, but kept most details private.

By April, nearly seven months later, Amber’s family still had no answers. It remained unclear whether she had disappeared voluntarily or was suffering lingering effects from her head injury.

“I don’t know if I should be grieving because my daughter is dead,” Amber’s mother wrote to The Reporter on April 16, “or angry because she has walked away from her life and her responsibilities, or scared to death that she may be wandering, not knowing who or where she is.” 

A year later, in September 1999, those questions remained, haunting Amber’s friends, family, and community. A candlelight vigil gathered some 85 people at Fireman’s Park in Campbellsport, where Amber graduated high school in 1997, in memory of the still-missing woman. 

One of Amber’s aunts, Laurie Ehnert, read a poem Amber had written. Another aunt, Jenna Wood, led the crowd in prayer. After a year filled with uncertainty and silence, the vigil marked perhaps the first public acknowledgment that Amber’s absence might be permanent.

In April 2001, investigators began an intense four-day search of a construction site west of Shawano, where Amber had once been allegedly sighted after she was reported missing. Acting on recent interviews and information, police secured a search warrant and began excavating, digging through hundreds of yards of soil in hopes of finding human remains or any trace of evidence.

After four days of hauling hundreds of yards of soil, police found no remains or relevant evidence. Green Bay Police Lt. Bill Galvin reiterated to the public that this was part of the investigation process, however frustrating, and that detectives were still actively working on Amber’s case as it moved into its third year. 

By September 2013, fifteen years had passed since Amber Wilde disappeared. What began as a missing-person case had long since gone cold, leaving Wisconsin authorities without answers.

Police held a news conference to bring the case back into public view, hoping someone—somewhere—would finally come forward. They had no resolution, they said, but they hadn’t forgotten what justice for Amber meant to her family and community.

“Like she has never been forgotten by her family, she has also never been forgotten by the officers and detectives involved in trying to solve her case,” said Detective Lee Kingston. “We have a lot of information … we have a lot of theories. We just need a little help.” 

The following November, investigators obtained a search warrant for 30 acres of land in Portage County, west of Green Bay, but the search again turned up no evidence. Police confirmed they had a “person of interest” in the case but did not name the individual publicly.

By May 2016—nearly twenty years after Amber's disappearance—police were confident she had been killed and were treating her case as a "first-degree intentional homicide."

Court documents revealed that investigators had uncovered a diary and other evidence shedding new light on the final months of Amber's life.

According to the diary, Amber met the father of her baby after a party in May 1998. When she discovered she was pregnant, he and his parents pressured her to have an abortion—something she refused to do.

When Amber later learned that the man was engaged, she informed his fiancée about the pregnancy. When police questioned the father, he denied that he and Amber had a sexual relationship, and detectives noted that he "showed no concern for Amber being missing."

A friend of the father's later told police that the man felt guilty for having sex with Amber, leading police to believe that he wasn't telling the entire truth about their relationship.

In May 2015, police requested phone records from the father, and after compiling evidence dating back to 1998, believed they had a strong case for Amber's disappearance being one of intentional homicide. 

When news broke that the father of Amber's baby was considered a suspect, it came as little surprise to her family. "I believed it from things Amber had told me," said her aunt, Laurie Ehnert. "I had my suspicions about this from day one after she went missing."

Despite having a clear suspect and motive, prosecutors have yet to bring charges against the person of interest. In 2023, a news article confirmed that the father had been the uncooperative person in the early days of the investigation.

"We have a lot of questions that are still unanswered," said Green Bay Detective David Graf. "Could he be able to answer them today? I hope so. That's up to him."

Today, Amber Wilde's disappearance remains unsolved, and the investigation is still active. Her remains have never been found, but her family continues to search for closure.

"She's still missed as much as she was from day one," said her aunt, Laurie Ehnert. "We're just hoping that someday we'll get answers."

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