A Small Town.A Missing Security Guard.A Brazen Heist.

When $220,000 worth of platinum went missing from a Pennsylvania glass factory, authorities were stumped. Then they saw the security footage.

- KATYA CENGEL

PENNY CHLEBOWY was living in the Washington, D.C., area in 1987 when she received the first phone call. A traveling saleswoman for AT&T, Penny loved her work. "It was blast," she recalls. "I mean, I was young and thin and beautiful. [I] had a really good job, drove a really nice car... Life was good." She had made it out of Bradford, Pennsylvania, a once-booming oil town that had become a blue-collar factory town where everyone knew everyone else's business. Her older sister, Cindy, had stayed in Bradford, though. So had their younger teenage brother, Al, along with their father, Dale.

But now, it seemed, Dale had vanished.

Dale Kerstetter, 50, had reported for his shift as a security guard at Corning Glass Works on Saturday, September 12, at 10:30 p.m. After he got off at 7 a.m. the next day, he was supposed to visit his girlfriend, Pamela Mays. When he didn't show up at her house, Mays called Al, who called Cindy, who called Penny. The second oldest of Kerstetter's six children, Penny was the one most like him: slight of stature but strong in personality.

"What do you mean they can't find him?" Penny asked her sister.

Then she got in her car and drove to Bradford.

The day before, when Kerstetter had arrived for work at Corning, he had talked with the guard he was replacing, Art Peterson. Peterson left a few minutes later without punching his time card. The next shift worker often punched the previous worker's time card, but Kerstetter did not do so that night. After midnight, he also did not check in every hour as was customary. (The record is unclear about how the check-in process worked at Corning, but Penny maintains someone should have known something was wrong if a guard didn't check in during his shift.)