“My mom was an amazing mom,” Robin Horwath told Dateline. “She was just full of happiness and laughter.”
But it’s been exactly 50 years since Robin has heard her mother’s laugh. And now, for the first time, Robin is speaking out about her mother’s case.
It was October 1, 1973, when Sandra “Sandy” Horwath vanished from their home in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The 33-year-old was a divorced mother of three young girls: Tammy, Robin, and Becky. She did clerical work at the local hospital and picked up extra work at a model home for a developing neighborhood.
Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, Robin said the family relocated to Ann Arbor in 1966 while her father was pursuing his Ph.D. The couple got divorced in 1971, and the children’s father moved to nearby Rochester, Michigan, for a teaching job. Robin said her father told her that he and her mother got divorced because they had just grown apart. “There’s so many ‘what if’s’,” Robin told Dateline. “Like, if we wouldn’t have moved, if they wouldn’t have gotten divorced.”
“We definitely have memories of her,” Robin said of her mother. “Vivid memories of her just always trying to make us happy.”
She remembers one time they were driving back to Pennsylvania for the holidays and her mother wanted the girls to sleep in the car. “We’d look up in the sky and there’d be like a red dot. And she would say, ‘Oh, that’s Rudolph, so hurry up and go to sleep.’ So, you know, like ‘Santa knows you’re sleeping’ and everything.”
Robin told Dateline her mother did everything she could to make her daughters happy. “Any problems she had, like, I never felt it, you know?” she said.
Robin, who is the middle child, said that even though she was only 8 years old at the time, she remembers her mother vanishing like it was yesterday. “I remember it, like, so vivid,” she said. Robin said that on the evening of Monday, October 1, 1973, Sandy had taken her and her sisters to the mall. “There was a mall in Ann Arbor called Briarwood,” Robin said. They went shopping at Sears. When they got home that night, Sandy put them to bed.
“I remember I always wanted to sleep with her,” Robin said. “So we got home that night. She put us to bed and I remember saying, ‘Can I -- can I just please sleep with you?’ And she’s like, ‘No,’ you know, ‘Sleep in your room.’ And so we went to sleep.”
And when they woke up the next morning, their mother was missing. “I would always wake up early,” Robin said. “My grandmother would call me the early bird.”
Robin remembered that she was the first one of her sisters up that Tuesday morning. “I ran to her bedroom. She wasn’t there. And I looked out front and her car was there,” Robin said. “And I just didn’t understand where she was.” Robin said she grabbed the phone and began calling anyone she could think of.
She called the hospital to see if her mother was already at work, but they told her that Sandy had not yet come in that Tuesday morning.
She called their babysitter. “She said she hadn’t heard from her.” With Sandy gone, the babysitter came over right away to take care of the Horwath girls and get them ready for school.
Robin told Dateline she remembers how her mother’s disappearance just made no sense to her. “It’s just like -- you wake up and everything looked normal, but she was just not there,” Robin said. “It was just the weirdest thing to me that she was not there and I looked out and her car was parked in front.”
Robin also called their father, who lived about an hour away. “They made us go to school that day,” Robin said. She said she remembers rushing home from school all week, hoping her mother had returned home. “I would just rush home from school like the next three or four days and just go in and say, ‘Did she -- was she back yet?’ ‘Did she come back yet?’” Robin said. “And everybody was like, ‘No.’”
“We were just little girls,” Robin said. “We didn’t know what was going on. We just heard --. In our minds, we were like, ‘Oh, she was kidnapped.’ Like, we didn’t even know what that meant.”
Their father came to the Ann Arbor home to stay with them. Robin said it didn’t take long to figure out that their mother wouldn’t be coming home anytime soon. “I think pretty quickly, people realized she wasn’t going to come home,” Robin said. “And so we went and moved. I had to move in with my dad in Rochester, Michigan.”
Robin remembers that her maternal grandparents always emphasized to the Horwath children that Sandy would never have left them on her own accord. “Her parents always wanted us to know -- and actually everybody -- that, you know, ‘She didn’t just abandon -- she didn’t just get up and leave you girls,’” Robin said. “That was the one thing everybody tried to instill in us, that she didn’t just take off, like, ‘She loved you girls so much.’”
Robin said she and her sisters started over at a new school. But she was always wondering, “Where is my mom?”
Dateline spoke with Chris Page, Strategic Communications Manager for the Ann Arbor Police Department, who passed along information about Sandy’s case from Police Service Specialist Jamie Giordano, whose duties include working on missing person cold cases.
Giordano confirmed that Sandy was last seen on October 1, 1973. She took a phone call around 9:30 p.m. and then put her children to bed at approximately 10 p.m. Giordano also confirmed that Sandy was reported missing on October 2, by the family’s babysitter. According to the Ann Arbor Police Department, it is believed that Sandra may have last been seen wearing a “blue pullover tank top, blue dress slacks (stretch), white blazer, beige clog-style sandals,” or a house dress.
Authorities stated that once they arrived at the home, they did not see anything that was out of place, but said that “a neighbor reported hearing a noise outside the rear of her residence around 10:50 p.m. (10/1/1973) but the noise stopped, and she did not check on it,” Giordano told Dateline. They also noted that the flowerbeds outside the home were later found trampled. Both Sandy’s watch and vehicle were left behind, but her purse, checkbook and the clothing listed previously were all missing from the home.
According to Giordano, there were intense searches conducted. “Officers searched (ground and aerial) and canvassed the area near Sandy’s home and spoke with several neighbors,” she said. Investigators called cab companies in the area, checked businesses Sandy had been known to frequent, and interviewed the people in Sandy’s circle. “Several subjects were questioned and polygraphed,” Giordano said.
Robin Horwath told Dateline that her father was also looked at, as he was Sandy’s ex-husband. Robin said he provided an alibi and was polygraphed. Ann Arbor PD confirmed that Sandy’s ex-husband was interviewed on “multiple occasions” and was polygraphed and is not considered a suspect or a person of interest in Sandy’s disappearance.
Jamie Giordano said that in April of 1975, the Ann Arbor Police Department was contacted by a detective with the Royal Oak Police Department in Michigan regarding a missing person case that they had been contacted about from the Seattle, Washington Police Department in which a woman disappeared under similar circumstances to Sandy’s case. “The subject they believed to be responsible for the Seattle disappearance was Gary Addison Taylor,” Giordano said. “Gary Taylor had previously been arrested by Royal Oak Police for shooting at several women,” which is why the Seattle PD had reached out.
By May of that year, Taylor had been arrested and was in custody in Houston, Texas, Giordano stated. She added that Houston detectives had received information from Taylor’s attorney that Gary Taylor had said that he had murdered and buried four people behind his former Onsted, Michigan, home. Giordano said it was three white females and one white male. Authorities went to search the Onsted home. “The bodies of two white females were found buried behind the home,” Giordano wrote. “The two females were later identified as missing from Ohio. No other bodies were found near the Onsted, MI, home.”
One of the Houston detectives told the Ann Arbor PD that Taylor had “confessed to them that he knew Sandy but denied killing her during his interview.” It is unclear exactly what the connection between Taylor and Sandy was, but according to Giordano, case documents stated that an acquaintance advised the police that he had introduced Sandy and Taylor. Robin Horwath told Dateline that she didn’t think her mother had any sort of romantic relationship with Taylor and thought they had just known one another through work at the model home. “I don’t ever remember meeting anybody that she ever dated,” Robin said. “She was a loving mother, first and foremost.”
In their 20s, the Horwath girls became more involved in trying to solve their mother’s case. It was the mid-‘90s when they got access to the police records. “We all read it and then understood more,” Robin said.
They learned that Gary Taylor had a long history of attacking women and had been connected to crimes in multiple states -- including Florida, Texas and Washington. Taylor had been acquitted of some of his crimes by reason of insanity and spent many years in and out of mental health facilities. But according to a 1975 Time article, he was not kept there indefinitely because under Michigan law “a person acquitted of a crime by reason of insanity cannot be kept indefinitely in a mental institution; he must be periodically certified mentally ill and dangerous to himself or the community.” According to Time, one of the directors of a psychiatric center Taylor was in, diagnosed his condition as a “character disorder” and not a “treatable mental illness.” According to the Ann Arbor PD, Taylor was arrested in Houston, Texas in May of 1975 and is serving a life sentence in the Washington State Penitentiary for the murder of a young woman named Vonnie Stuth in that state.
Robin Horwath told Dateline she fully believes that despite his denial, Gary Taylor had something to do with her mother’s disappearance. “It’s like I say, nobody did anything wrong but one person,” Robin said. “I just wish after all this time, he would just say he did it.”
Jamie Giordano told Dateline that the Ann Arbor PD does consider Taylor to be a person of interest in Sandy’s case. She stated that there have been “many persons of interest in Sandy’s case” but that Taylor, now 87, is the most recent one.
According to Giordano, multiple searches have been conducted over the years at the former home and property belonging to Gary Taylor in Michigan. “[Michigan State Police] tracking dogs were used to search the property. Ground behind the home was dug up,” she stated. In 2019, they also pulled DNA evidence from the home where Gary previously lived and tested it against DNA provided by the Horwath family, but did not learn anything of note. Authorities also have tried to contact Taylor as recently as 2022 for interviews about Sandy’s case, but he has refused to meet with detectives.
“The Ann Arbor Police Department will just never let this drop,” Robin Horwath said. “Like, they just want to solve this.” The AAPD is the main investigating agency in Sandy’s case, but Giordano told Dateline that they’ve had assistance from both the Michigan State Police and the FBI, who has Sandy’s poster listed on their site.
“I can’t even thank the Ann Arbor detectives enough,” Robin said, for their diligence in trying to solve Sandy’s case over the past 50 years. “They went and got DNA from us. They went and talked to the lady who owned [Taylor’s] house. Like, they just always want a resolution for us, which I just think is amazing -- that they care about my mom so much.” In fact, it was AAPD Strategic Communications Manager Chris Page who reached out to Dateline about featuring Sandy’s case.
Jamie Giordano said the Ann Arbor Police Department will keep Sandy’s case open until she is located. “Sandy’s demographic information will continue to search against unidentified human remains cases in NCIC (National Crime Information Center) and her family DNA profile will continue to search NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) until she has been located,” Giordano stated.
“I could never thank them enough for not letting this just fade away,” Robin told Dateline, just as the family’s memories of Sandy won’t fade away.
“We talk about her all the time. We have pictures of her everywhere,” Robin said. “My dad always says she looked exactly like Ava Gardner. Just thick, brown, beautiful hair and beautiful smile.”
“She was just, like, sort of, the life of the party,” Robin said. “When I was in college, I just loved dancing and I would just always be the one everybody would gravitate around. And my dad would say, like, ‘That’s how your mother was,’ like, just happy.”
And that’s how Robin remembers her mother. “We didn’t let this define us and we just live our life, I guess, in her memory,” Robin said. “She would want us to be happy. She wouldn’t want us to, like, cry all the time.”
So that’s what Robin has set out to do: Live her life in honor of her mother, and hope that maybe one day the Horwaths can lay finally her to rest.
If you have information about Sandy’s case, please reach out to the Ann Arbor Police Department Detective Bureau at 734-794-6930 or the Ann Arbor Police Department Tipline at 734-794-6939 or at tips@a2gov.org.