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My name is Melanie Perkins-Milkaklin and I am a documentary filmmaker and

when I was nine years old my childhood friend Vanished from a public swimming pool in Lawrence, Massachusetts

on August 21, 1976.

His name was Andy Puglisi and he was 10 years old.

Hello and welcome to episode 29 of The Vanished.

I would like to thank everyone for listening and those of you who have generously contributed on

Patreon to help defray some of the production costs of the show. Tonight, I'll be discussing the 1976

disappearance of 10-year-old Andy Puglisi. As you heard, I had the pleasure of speaking with Melanie for

this episode. Melanie created a documentary about Andy called Have You Seen Andy. In 2008,

she won an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism for her work on the film.

I asked her to explain why she decided to make the film.

When Andy disappeared, I was one of hundreds of children in the housing project where we lived,

and the search only lasted for like six days. Suddenly, it was called off and we didn't know why.

I remember thinking that when I grew up, I would try to find out what happened to him.

As naive as that sounds, it's really how it started. Then I did go to school for documentary filmmaking

and after about 10 or 15 years of working on other people's films, I felt it was time to make

my own film. Having watched how hard people worked on creating films, I knew that if I was going

to create my own, it would have to be something I would want to do, whether it got picked up by a

broadcast or not, just something that I had a passion for, that I had always wanted to do.

Really, there were probably two things in my life that I felt that way about at that time.

What happened to Andy? I started off very naively, just picking up the phone and starting to make

...