July 9th marks the day that any parent would dread more than any other that could come their way: the day their child went missing. For this story, in particular, the young woman in question is Courtney Struble, who went missing at the age of 13 years old, 15 years ago.

On this day in 2004, a Friday, Struble was leaving the local vet clinic and heading back to the city to collect money from a part-time job she had cleaning a friend's home and had made plans to meet some of her friends that Saturday. None of her belongings appeared to be missing, and her father reported her missing shortly after. That started an investigation that has included the EPS, RCMP, Missing Children's Society of Canada, and since 2009, the Historical Cases Unit of the RCMP.

Donna Zawislak has been the officer in charge with the Historical Cases Unit since they received the file in 2009, and has interviewed 100's of people about this specific case on its own.

"We still Courtney a victim of foul play, that she isn't out there living another life contrary to information we do get, so we are investigating it as a homicide. Through the years, we've spoken to a lot of people, we've done a lot of investigative techniques, but unfortunately, we're really not a lot closer to finding who's responsible for what happened to Courtney."

In regards to the possibility of her living her own, completely different life, the reason Zawislak brought that up is because there are often reports with historical cases, not just this one in particular, where people report seeing a missing person working somewhere or believe that a social media account is being run by someone that has disappeared.

"What our challenge is that we get information that this person is still alive, and we still check into those. We check into the tips, we got to the places they've been reported of working, we talk with people, and in the last so many years since we've had this case with Courtney, we've got a lot of tips of sightings but we've never confirmed anyone has had contact with Courtney."

Despite the age of this case, there is still a fair amount of time and staff spent working on this through the RCMP. New investigators are brought in from time to time to get a new set of eyes that might see something the other investigators prior had not considered.

One of the last pieces of information that helped make any strides in the case came a year and a half ago.

"Someone had come forward with some information about the timeline regarding Courtney. It was something we were able to check in to and it added a little piece of the puzzle, but unfortunately, it wasn't enough that it allowed us to substantially move forward with the file, but it was just that little piece."

Zawislak has called this one of the more challenging cases that she has dealt with in her time with the Historical Cases Unit. One thing that slowed the investigation down was misinformation that they were given at the start of the investigation.

"When Courtney went missing, because of her age, there were a lot of challenges that police had to face. A lot of people thought she was a runaway, they thought that nothing had happened to her, which really can slow down an investigation and because of that, because of her age, a lot of people were lying about what happened to her or where she was because people didn't want her to get in trouble with the police or her family. So because of all the false information that was being provided, the police had to follow a number of different paths."

Zawislak added that she didn't think this misinformation was provided maliciously but was more in an effort to protect Struble in the event that she had done something wrong, but hindsight is 20/20.

On a final note, Zawislak had a message for anyone who might have information towards what happened to Struble.

"If anyone has information, knows what happened, or was involved in her disappearance, we ask them to come forward. Our biggest goal is to bring Courtney home to her family, and once we find out where Courtney is, we can deal with what happened. There's a lot of reasons why people go missing and the situations that happen, but until we find out what the situation is or what actually happened, we really can't deal with it and we just want to bring some form of closure to the family."