MACEDON, N.Y. — For more than a quarter century, a private investigator from the Rochester area has returned to the Wayne County town where a woman was last seen before she disappeared. 

Sandra Sollie was six months pregnant at the time of her disappearance in May 1994. The case has hit a dead end. But Richard Ingraham won’t give up.

The busiest intersection in Macedon is the one where Richard Ingraham chose to stand this past May 23. For him, when the clock is ticking, the more traffic, the better.

“Twenty-eight years for her,” said Ingraham. Twenty-six for me.”

The first reference is to how long Sandra Sollie has been missing. The second is how long Ingraham, a private investigator, has been looking for her.

“I’m like a hound dog,” he said while flagging down passing cars and handing out fliers. “Once I get a sniff of something, I stay on it.”

Sollie was pregnant when she disappeared. She was last seen in the former Ames Plaza on May 23, 1994. Sollie disappeared on the same day a little girl went missing, about 12 miles away, in an unrelated case.

“They gave a lot of news to Kali Poulton, the little girl,” said Ingraham. “Of course, that’s normal. But they didn’t say much, only a couple seconds, about Sandra Sollie.”

Ingraham set out to change that. After calling the family, he took on the case for just $1. But as the years have passed, the leads have dried up.

“We’ve covered a lot of leads,” he said. “And I’ve tried to keep this thing going, to keep it alive. That’s why I’m doing this. But it’s so cold. It’s just about frozen over.”

Ingraham is now 88 years old. He knows he can’t keep up this one-man mission forever.  

“It’s just me. I’m stubborn,” he said. “I’ve always been told I’m stubborn.”

Ingraham said he gained renewed hope that Sollie’s case might be solved, when police in South Carolina made an arrest and found the remains of Brittanee Drexel, a Rochester-area teen who disappeared in Myrtle Beach in 2009.

“It raises your hopes a little,” he said. “You’re thinking you know what? It could happen.”

Despite 26 years of false hopes and dead ends, he carries on, figuring someone knows something about what happened to Sandra Sollie.  

“I don't have much support,” said Ingraham. “That’s alright, I don't need anybody. I promised I do this. That's what I'm doing.”