On September 7, 1983, seven-year-old Lea Kimball disappeared after leaving her school bus in rural King County, Washington. She was still missing two years later, when 12-year-old Brenda Gere vanished in strikingly similar circumstances from Clearview, in neighboring Snohomish County. Gere apparently made it home, where her school books were found, but her fate remains a mystery, with no trace of the girl discovered to this day. Lea Kimball's case officially became a homicide on March 7, 1986, when her skeletal remains were found near Ellensburg, in the eastern part of the state. No suspect has been named in that slaying, or in Barbara Gere's disappearance, but authorities are confident of a connection in the crimes, based upon similarities in the two cases.