Ruth doesn't come home.

And after a couple hours, her sister looks at the window and she sees the snow kind of falling on the Hudson and she starts to get worried.

Then the hours started to pile, one upon another and she still doesn't come home.

At this point they call their father, who's away at a business trip. They cable him and they say Ruth is missing and he comes home immediately.

On the day before Valentine's Day, in 1917, 18-year-old Ruth Krueger disappeared.

So Ruth was very well liked in her high school and very well liked in the church. She had no boyfriend and back then the term was she had no attachment.

And so when she disappeared it was completely out of the blue, something completely out of her normal pattern of behavior.

Ruth's father and her two sisters all went out looking for her. Trying to imagine all of the places she might go in a day. The bank, the stationary store, and the motorcycle shop, Metropolitan Motorcycles, where the mechanic had a side business sharpening ice skates.

Ruth's sister Helen knocked on the door.

There was a man there, an Italian man named Alfredo Coci. He said, yes, there was someone who looked like that.

Kind of looked like you, he said, about your size and she came in, she dropped off her skates. I sharpened them, she came back, she paid for them and she was gone.

We're hearing that Ruth Krueger from Professor Brad Ricca. On February 16th, a New York Times headline read, pretty girl skater, strangely missing.

A neighborhood women's group jumped into action. They distributed missing person flyers with Ruth's picture. They asked movie theaters to project Ruth's photograph on the screen before movies began.

At that time, the big movie was Charlie Chaplin's easy street. The NYPD commissioner ordered all available detectives to join the search.

The police have no clue to go on. As the days start to go on, then you start getting things in the newspapers that say, well maybe she ran off with a boyfriend.

Maybe she had some sort of secret life that no one knew about. In 1917, this is scandalous news of the highest order. This really made her father angry.

He doubled down by hiring private detectives to look for his daughter.

But they say there are no clues and there's no way to pursue a case in which she left of her own accord with someone else so there's no reason to pursue it.

Newspapers reported that there were no leads. The police felt the case was unsolvable. The family held a press conference.

Ruth Krueger's father criticized the mayor of New York, the police commissioner, and the NYPD.

He says they have not done their job. My Ruth was a good girl and people start to notice that in the back of their kind of entourage of family, there's a woman, a middle aged woman who's cloaked in black.

And this woman steps up and she announces herself as the lead investigator on the case.

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