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Parents hold out hope in search Daughter missing since Oct. 31 The Associated Press RIDDLE -- Marty and Christine Condon got the news via an early morning phone call on Halloween. Stephanie, their 14-year-old daughter, had vanished while baby-sitting her cousin's twins. "The babies are home but Steph is not in my house," their niece kept repeating. "Seriously, she is nowhere to be found." Gone without a trace. Without her shoes, her clothes for the next day or her purse. Since that Oct. 31 phone call, her parents have lived on a few hours of sleep each night, supplemented by coffee and adrenaline. Chills of excitement and then fear ripple through them every time the phone rings or a car drives down the road. The national missing children groups have come in. The FBI has been contacted. Police and the family suspect foul play. "There's been lots of speculation she was a runaway -- not Steph," Marty said. "Her family life and school is the number one thing." The couple's one-story red home has become what Marty, 39, calls the "command center." Any moment now, he expects his blond hair, blue-eyed daughter to walk through the front door with her usual teasing greeting: "Hi, butt-head." Steph's 10-year-old brother, Martin, fidgets with a yellow ribbon pinned on his shirt. The ribbons are a symbol of hope, sometimes worn by relatives of a prisoner of war. The Condons are a military family. Marty, a Gulf War veteran, was a 20-year cryptographer for the U.S. Navy during the Cold War. He retired from the Navy in 1997 and the Condons moved to Riddle, a small town south of Roseburg. They wanted a safe place to raise their kids. The Condons last saw their daughter at dinner on Oct. 30. Steph, who baby-sat a couple of times a month, gathered her toothbrush, her homework and a change of clothes. Their niece picked her up and planned to bring Steph back in the morning. Police have told them there were no obvious signs of entry into the home, yet the Condons and the police are convinced Steph didn't leave by herself. "Endangered Missing" is how the new color posters from The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children list Stephanie Condon, "birth 10/8/84, hair blonde, eyes blue, height 5 feet 2 inches and weight 120 pounds." "She was last seen wearing pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt. She has a very small scar above her left eye. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED," the poster reads. But there are many things the poster does not say: That the pajama bottoms are Winnie the Pooh; that the Riddle High School freshman has a 3.7 grade point average, participates in volleyball and track and wants to become a drafting engineer when she grows up. Christine, 34, tries to explain what she is going through as she sits in a small corner of Steph's twin-sized bed, clasping her hands. At times she puts her head in her lap as Marty talks about their daughter. "It goes up and down," he said. "You hear positive rumors and negative ones. We've organized a lot of search teams ourselves." They believe she's alive, although Marty is encouraging people to walk their own property in the area and call law enforcement -- without touching a thing -- if anything unusual is seen. "We're just hoping anybody knows anything," Christine said. "Even if they think it's important or not." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA