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On the evening of Wednesday, September 23, 1998, Amber Lynn Wilde picked up the phone in her apartment on August Street in Green Bay, Wisconsin and made a call. The time was 7:16 p.m. Earlier that same day she had been in a minor car accident near the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay campus, striking her head against the windshield and complaining afterward of a headache. She was 19 years old, a transfer student, and she was pregnant. That phone call is the last confirmed contact anyone had with her. No one has seen or heard from Amber Wilde since.

The FBI's national ViCAP alert reduces the case to its essentials: Amber Lynn Wilde, a 19-year-old University of Wisconsin-Green Bay student, was last known to be in contact on September 23, 1998, when she placed a call from her August Street apartment at 7:16 p.m. She was pregnant, with a due date in February 1999. Her vehicle, a 1988 silver Subaru, was later found in a parking lot near Lambeau Field.

Who she was

Amber Lynn Wilde was born March 26, 1979. At 19 she had recently transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where advocacy profiles describe her as a scholarship student studying pre-medicine. The official NamUs record lists her as a white woman, about 5 feet 5 or 6 inches tall, roughly 135 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. She wore glasses, and she had eight small gold hoop earrings in each ear, the kind of specific detail that stays with the people who knew her. She was several months pregnant when she disappeared, with a due date in February 1999. How far along she was is one of the small facts the record never settled: the Charley Project puts it at about four months, while NamUs and Wisconsin missing-persons profiles say roughly six. The one fixed point is that February 1999 due date.

The last day

The morning after that 7:16 p.m. call, on September 24, Wilde missed a 1:00 p.m. class and an eye-doctor appointment and stopped answering her father's phone calls. Worried, her father drove to Green Bay and found her apartment at 2000 August Street locked and empty. He reported her missing to the Green Bay Police Department, which opened case number 98-059126 on September 26, 1998.

The Subaru near Lambeau

Then her car turned up, and it is the part of this case that has never stopped bothering the people who work it. On or about October 1, 1998, a week to eight days after she vanished, Wilde's 1988 silver Subaru GL was found in the parking lot shared by the 50 Yard Line Sports Bar and the Roadstar Inn, just off Lombardi Access Road near Lambeau Field. Witnesses believed it had been sitting there since roughly September 28. It was unmistakably hers: a brown stuffed monkey hung from the rearview mirror, stuffed animals sat in the rear window, and a University of Wisconsin decal stretched across the back glass, all of it visible in the photographs investigators later circulated.

Inside, nothing fit. The car was unlocked with the keys still in the ignition, her purse and her cell phone were locked in the trunk, and the driver's seat was pushed all the way back, far past where a woman of about 5 feet 5 inches would set it to reach the pedals. Someone taller had driven that car last. The odometer told the same story of missing time, showing several hundred miles that no one could account for. WBAY's reporting put the figure at roughly 600 unexplained miles; volunteer case databases cite closer to 900. Either way, the Subaru had been somewhere in the days after Amber Wilde stopped answering her phone, and it came back with the seat wrong and her belongings sealed in the trunk.

The investigation

For years the file sat as a missing-person case. That changed in May 2016, when a Brown County judge unsealed a set of search warrants. The unsealed documents reclassified the matter as a first-degree intentional homicide investigation. No remains had been found, and none have been found since, so the homicide label is the investigators' classification, drawn from those warrants, and not a coroner's finding.

The warrants and the detectives named the father of Wilde's unborn child, Matthew Schneider, as the primary person of interest. Green Bay detective Lee Kingston described him as "our primary person that we focused on for pretty much the entire time." Schneider has never been arrested and has never been charged. According to the court documents, investigators alleged a motive: that Schneider was upset about the pregnancy, wanted Wilde to have an abortion, and that she refused. Reporting also framed it around exposure, because Schneider was engaged to another woman, and Wilde had told his fiancee and his parents about the pregnancy roughly a month before she vanished. Phone records reportedly documented dozens of conversations between the two, about 60 by one account, even though Schneider initially told police he barely knew her. When the Associated Press covered the unsealed documents, it declined to print his name because he had not been charged. The name comes from CBS 58 and WBAY, which did report it, and it belongs here only with the same caution those outlets used: a person of interest, never charged, never arrested.

Cold-case detectives took the file over around 2013, and the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit reviewed the case and assisted with out-of-state interviews. On February 1, 2017, the FBI issued the national ViCAP alert. Investigators have run multiple searches for Wilde's remains and come up empty, and they have said publicly that they suspect foul play and believe more than one person was involved. In 2018, Detective Kingston told WBAY the case was agonizingly close, saying investigators "remain so close.. so close" and needed only "a little bit more." His colleague Dave Graf put the obstacle plainly: "I can't make somebody talk to us."

The theories

No one has been charged, so everything in this section is a theory. What investigators have said on the record is that they treat the case as a homicide and believe more than one person had a hand in it. Beyond that, the published theories run the same facts through different angles. The central one follows the warrants: that the person closest to the pregnancy had a motive to make it go away. That remains an allegation in an affidavit rather than a proven fact, and the man at its center has never been charged. A second man, described only as an associate, has been referenced in connection with the belief that more than one person was involved; he has not been charged either, and he is not named here. A separate theory, tied to a report that Schneider worked as a highway laborer, holds that Wilde's remains were buried along Highway 29, which was under construction in 1998. It is speculation. No search has ever recovered her, there or anywhere else.

Where it stands

As of the most recent anniversary coverage, the case is exactly where it has been for years: unsolved. No remains have been found, no one has been arrested, and no one has been charged. The Green Bay Police Department continues to work it as a homicide, and detectives have said more than once that they believe someone out there knows what happened to Amber Wilde and simply will not say it.

Case: Amber Lynn Wilde
Age: 19 (born March 26, 1979)
Missing since: September 23, 1998, Green Bay, Wisconsin
Last contact: a 7:16 p.m. phone call from her August Street apartment
Vehicle: 1988 silver Subaru GL, found near Lambeau Field with the driver's seat pushed back and her purse and phone locked in the trunk
Case number: Green Bay PD 98-059126
Status: unsolved; investigated as a homicide since 2016; no remains recovered

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Green Bay Police Department at 920-448-3200 or Green Bay Area Crime Stoppers at 920-432-STOP (7867).