Shattered: After public moves on, families of missing left wondering about what happened to their loved ones

When a news report says a body has been found, Suzanne Tate finds herself back 45 years, in the kitchen cooking dinner and watching her teenage brother, Reed, walk outside to feed his dogs.

It was such an ordinary moment in their loving, boisterous family. She would give anything for a do-over.

What would she have done differently had she known it would be the last time she'd see her strapping 15-year-old brother? And where is he? she wonders.

It's a question Wanda Schmitt often asks herself about her brother, Jeff. So do Ed and Mary Sorensen of their daughter, Sheree. And Stephanie Cook has spent a lifetime wondering what happened to her mom.

They are among so many others who, like them, have a person-shaped hole in their family where someone belongs. And they don't know what happened to that person.

Reed Jeppson, Sheree Warren, Jeff Nichols and Bobbi Ann Campbell are all missing, now question marks whose answers have not yet been found.

"We are like the body that cries in the Bible," says family practice physician Taylor Jeppson, who was 24 years old when his little brother, Reed, disappeared. "Can the arm say there's no need for the leg? The ear for the eye?"

The FBI and the National Crime Information Center receive more than 800,000 missing persons reports each year. Some are quickly resolved, but about 105,000 remain missing.

Kelly Jolkowski, founder of Project Jason, a nonprofit that helps families of missing people, believes it's a serious undercount. Because of their lifestyles or associations, some people have been placed in a dismal "throwaway" category that doesn't get much outside attention, though their families still search and long to know.

And most missing person cases don't get advertised, don't have a website, don't hit the news, she says.

"It's not like TV. There are not 20 cops out looking and a resolution in 20 minutes," Jolkowski says. "Because we see a story or two occasionally on the news, we think that a person or two goes missing. No, no. It's many more than that."

Jeff Nichols was just days shy of his 41st birthday when he disappeared in Salt Lake City on June 8, 2004.

Nichols was supposed to meet his ex-wife, with whom he shared custody, and their little boy, Sam. After breakfast, she was going to show him some golf clubs a friend wanted to sell. He loved golf and thought he'd probably buy them, says Nichols' sister, who lives in Madison, Wis.