Hope Survives a Lack of Clues in Disappearance : Mystery: Missing since March 4, Nancy Huter has been the object of an intense search by relatives and friends.

Nancy Huter has been missing for more than two months, but her father still wakes up every morning waiting for her call.

“I just live each day and hope she’ll call,” Bob Huter said. “If she’s still alive, she’s being detained. She would call, I know.”

As he spoke, the man stared at a photograph taken in February that shows his daughter on a friend’s sailboat off Santa Barbara.

“The longer it goes, the more difficult it’s going to be,” he said.

Missing since March 4, Nancy Huter has been the object of an intense search by relatives and friends who refuse to believe that the 36-year-old saleswoman and Bible study teacher from Thousand Oaks is dead.

They have conducted door-to-door inquiries in Ventura and Los Angeles counties in search of any clue that might help authorities. Her family has established a telephone hot line, offering a $25,000 reward for any information that might lead to her.

With the help of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the church to which they belong, Bob Huter and his wife, Marjorie, have distributed about 20,000 flyers nationwide. The flyers describe their daughter’s sudden disappearance.

Authorities say the case has them stumped.

One of the few clues that the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department has uncovered came from a state park employee who said he spotted Nancy Huter walking along Mulholland Highway in Los Angeles County the day she disappeared.

Missing from the white Honda Accord hatchback that Nancy Huter abandoned on the highway was her purse and a cellular telephone. Left behind was an appointment book and a briefcase. A pair of her muddy Western-style boots were found on the banks of Las Virgenes Creek.

A search of the creek failed to locate a body.

“It’s mysterious in the sense that we really don’t have any idea what happened to her,” Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dan Coons said.

Coons said a description of Nancy Huter was entered into a computer bank used to track missing people nationwide.

“Every police agency in the nation ties into that computer system,” he said. But with so few clues, there is little more that authorities can do, he added.

That is why the Sheriff’s Department has taken the unusual step of using psychics. Detective Ed Wyand said he has personally investigated visions that 10 psychics described to authorities.

“We’ve had them see her alive, and we’ve had them see her dead,” Wyand said. “One of them said her hand would be sticking out of the ground near the creek. Another one said we would find a body at another location.”

But none of the psychics were right, he said.

Nancy Huter’s friends and relatives are not waiting for a psychic to reveal her whereabouts.

Eleonora Deem, 30, of Thousand Oaks said she and her husband have several times combed the spot where Nancy Huter was last seen.

They have also spent hundreds of hours posting flyers from Thousand Oaks to Calabasas, checking dumpsters and going door-to-door asking strangers for information.

Deem keeps a stack of flyers about Nancy Huter beside her on the seat of her car. On days when she has found the flyers ripped down, she tacks them back up.

Sometimes when she gets a call from as far away as Ohio or New York, she sends a fax across the country.

Last week, while accompanying her husband on a business trip to San Antonio, Tex., she posted flyers there too.

Deem said she feels that two months is too early to give up hoping.

“I’m one of those people that believe you can never leave a stone unturned. You just never know,” she said. “I feel that she’s out there.”

Bob Huter said he and his wife, who also reside in Thousand Oaks, have talked about the possibility that their daughter is dead, but they don’t want to believe it.

Huter makes a weekly pilgrimage to the place where his daughter disappeared just in case he might find something previously overlooked.

“It’s just so puzzling when there’s a disappearance,” Huter said. “There’s no answers.”