According to court papers, Kach vanished on Feb. 10, 1996. Her frantic father searched for her, notified police, and posted her name everywhere he could. The state Division of Youth and Family Services opened an investigation into her disappearance, and years later, the name and picture, a photograph of a wan young girl with sandy colored hair, remained in police files and as a flickering image on web sites dedicated to the search for missing children.
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| Tanya Kach |
Her father, who remarried, reportedly never gave up hope that he would someday be reunited with her.
It never dawned on him that all the while, she was less than two miles away.
At first, according to Kach's account to investigators, her sojourn with Hose was a kind of adventure. He was, by all accounts, a handsome and among some a well liked, and even respected man, though there were those, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune Review who found the man and his penchant for dousing himself with cologne to be odd.
The way she described it, Hose was savvy enough to realize that regardless of how unloved Kach might have felt, her father would be searching for her, and so would the authorities. It was, authorities allege, Hose's idea that the young girl with the mousy colored hair should change her appearance.
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| Judy Sokol |
And he knew just the person for the job, authorities have alleged. Her name was Judith Sokol, a local hairdresser, and Hose brought Kach to her, asking, authorities charge, that she alter the girl's appearance. It was done, police and prosecutors say, with a cut and dye job.
But that was not the only role Sokol played, according to authorities. The way Kach described it to investigators it was Sokol who facilitated Hose's sexual conquest of the girl.
Kach told investigators that on several occasions after she left home, she and Hose would sneak over to Sokol's house and spend the night there. "In fact, this was the location that (they) first...engaged in vaginal intercourse." Authorities note that Sokol ended her affiliation with Hose and Kach a short time later, after investigators from the state Division of Children and Youth Services approached her to ask a few questions about the missing child. There is no indication, authorities have suggested, that Sokol cooperated with the investigators at the time.
If there was a slightly adventurous flavor to those early encounters, at least in the mind of a confused and impressionable young girl, that soon gave way to something that even to her seemed dark and oppressive.
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