In the summer of 1988, they stopped sending checks and Mills, familiar with the sterling reputation of Allen's Boston firm, Management Consultants, hired Allen to probe her disappearance. In fifty years in business, Allen's firm had never failed to find a missing person, Mills knew, and in his two decades in the business, Allen had maintained that winning streak. If anybody could find out what happened to Cam Lyman, Allen was the man, Mills figured.

Hopkinton Police Department

chapter continues

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Allen wasn't going to get much help from the authorities. If O'Neil had seemed unconcerned about Lyman's whereabouts, the local cops seemed to care even less. When — more than a year after anyone had seen her — Lyman's family finally filed the missing person report that O'Neil had never bothered to, then-Police Chief George Weeden launched a perfunctory investigation, then quickly dropped it, later telling reporters for the local papers that he simply had no evidence that a crime had been committed.

The family had no evidence either, but by that point they sure as hell had a hunch, Mills would later say. "We knew that Cam had been murdered,' Mills had said. "We just knew it."

Ted Lyman, Cam's brother

The family was willing to spend whatever it took to find out for sure, and no one was more adamant, Allen later said, than Cam's older brother, Ted Lyman. Walking out of one of his first meetings with Lyman, Allen was struck by the fact that after years of largely letting his sister go her own way, "as soon as it was apparent that something was wrong, he was very anxious to get the police involved and to turn it into a criminal investigation."

But there was little taste for that, at least as far as the local officials were concerned. George Weeden, who was then Hopkinton Police Chief launched a perfunctory investigation and the gave the old Lyman house the once over, but when nothing turned up immediately, he effectively dropped the investigation, telling reporters for the local newspaper that he had no evidence that a crime had been committed. State and federal authorities weren't much keener to wade into the case.

It would be another decade before evidence of a crime, real evidence, would surface, and by that point, Ted Lyman had died and Charlie Allen would have put in $30,000 worth of sweat and shoe leather with as much as $60,000 more in work done gratis, simply because he couldn't shake his obsession with the case. As he later described it, "there are elements of this that are very captivating. You can put it aside for a while but it comes right back. You think of something and you're back with it again."

Despite his best efforts, though, Allen had come up empty.

It wasn't for lack of trying.

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