You sort of look up in the heavens and go, ‘You’ve got to help me out here, Kiplyn. Give me a hint. Give me a hint where I can go' – Richard Davis

SPANISH FORK — The porch light at the home of Richard and Tamara Davis in Spanish Fork has been on day and night for 20 years.

“We’re never going to turn it off,” Richard Davis said. “We will never turn it off until we bring Kiplyn home.”

On May 2, 1995, Kiplyn went to school at Spanish Fork High School and never came home.

"It just breaks my heart that we have never got closure that something terrible happened to my child," Richard Davis said.

In the two decades since her parents last saw their red-haired daughter, time hasn't healed their pain.

“That heart-wrenching feeling we got when we couldn’t find her — when I think about it, I can still feel that,” Tamara Davis said.

When Kiplyn first went missing, the parents looked around the neighborhood, called friends and then started driving around town in search of her.

“I think I looked for Kiplyn for over four days and four nights without sleeping or eating,” Richard Davis said. “For those first two or three weeks, there wasn’t much sleep or anything. In fact, the truth is there isn’t much sleeping now.”

Over the years, Richard and Tamara Davis have never given up the hope of bringing their daughter home. And through a series of searches, investigations and court cases, they can’t believe they still don’t know where she is.

“If you would have told me 20 years ago that in 20 years we wouldn’t have found Kiplyn, I would have never believed it,” Tamara Davis said. “And here we are, still trying to find Kiplyn.”

With no social media sites like Facebook or Twitter to spread the word, the family put up missing posters all over town. Police believed Kiplyn could have been a runaway, and 17 days passed before her case got any publicity.

Though there were no solid leads, her parents kept looking. The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and the months into years.

“I’d sure like to know what she would be like today,” Richard Davis said Friday. “She wanted to teach kindergarten and she wanted a couple of kids.”

The Davis family and police had some theories, including the possible involvement of some high school classmates, but the case went cold.

Then after the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case in 2002-2003, Richard Davis asked the U.S. attorney for Utah to help his family.

In time, a grand jury began investigating, and several classmates were prosecuted for lying. Timmy Brent Olsen took a plea deal to manslaughter in 2011, but is now in the process of trying to withdraw his guilty plea.

“All he has to do is show me where Kiplyn’s body is and we will go to the Board of Pardons, and I will be his biggest advocate, and I’ll say, ‘It’s time to let this young man out,’” Richard Davis said.

But the grieving father said Olsen, who has to finish serving federal time for perjury before he can begin his sentence in Utah for manslaughter, still won't talk.

“You sort of look up in the heavens and go, ‘You’ve got to help me out here, Kiplyn. Give me a hint. Give me a hint where I can go,’” Richard Davis said.

He and his wife have placed a headstone for Kiplyn in the Spanish Fork Cemetery in hopes of one day burying her in a proper grave. Each year on May 2, they visit the spot to remember Kiplyn with flowers.

“I have my florist make a bouquet of bright, bright flowers, because that is what I think of when I think of Kiplyn — is bright and beautiful,” Tamara Davis said.

Email: spenrod@deseretnews.com