The Lost Daughter

48 Hours

For 25 years, Pat and Hillary Sessions searched for their missing daughter Tiffany, who vanished in 1989 during a walk near the University of Florida. In 2014, they led an excavation at a suspected site tied to serial ki

Key takeaways

Pat used marketing tactics to amplify search efforts

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Thank you all around. Are you going around? Oh, my guys. Heavenly Father, we got a simple prayer. It's really simple. Help us find Tiffany. We know without your grace, without your blessing, it won't happen. Amen. Amen. Let's go. Do it. For 25 years, Pat and Hillary Sessions have been searching for their daughter Tiffany. And in January 2014, in this forest in Gainesville, Florida, just over a mile from where Tiffany disappeared. There was another girl in 1992 who was actually found here on the site. They hope they may finally find her. I am extremely optimistic. What are you feeling going into this excavation? Are you nervous? I'm a lot more nervous than I thought I would be. I've done other searches. And this one I'm a lot more nervous about because it may not be true, but it sort of feels like a final hurrah. You know, I pushed and pushed so many people for so long. I don't know how long they'll do it. Do you think the emotion comes because maybe it's the end or maybe it's not? Yeah, I don't know. It needs to end. Everybody needs closure on this. In 1989, Tiffany Sessions was a junior studying finance at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She had dreams of running a company one day. She knew what she wanted to do. She knew where she was going to go. She was determined to make something out of herself. Tiffany had a good role model. Pat Sessions was a well-known marketing executive. for a giant real estate company in South Florida. He oversaw the creation of Weston, one of the biggest building projects in the United States. She kind of wanted to be like dad following your footsteps. I've been told that by her friends. Pat and Hillary divorced when Tiffany was just eight months old. Hillary was in the U.S. Air Force, and as she traveled around the country, she brought Tiffany with her. I was the mom. I was the dad. I was a disciplinarian, the provider. There wasn't anything that we didn't do together. And we worked as a team. You called her your masterpiece. I did. Because I only had one. I worked really hard on making sure that she was as nice on the inside as she was on the outside. Growing up, Tiffany did. didn't see a lot of her father, but in her teens, they reconnected. Pat was in his late 30s, a bachelor, living in an oceanfront home in Miami's affluent Coconut Grove. The summers were the times that we spent together in holidays. Tiffany also got to know her half-brother, Jason. My father is always a very active fun guy, so when we came together for those different times, we were always doing neat experiences going on the boat, you know, the beach, different activities like that. So, yeah, that's where we really got to know each other. Both of them were single kids, so they didn't have anybody else. They bonded together very quickly. But for Pat, missing out on so much of his daughter's childhood had taken its toll. It was a lot of catch-up, you know, and overcoming a lot of bad history between her mother and I. Tiffany was very close to both her parents. Kathleen Fresa, Tiffany's college roommate. She loved her mom, and they had a very special relationship. She spoke with her frequently, almost daily, I would say, on the phone. with her dad because she was able to renew that relationship with him. That was really very touching for her. And when Pat bought his daughter a Rolex watch, Kathleen says Tiffany never took it off. She just loved it, partly because it was a Rolex, partly because it was from her dad. So it held a really special emotional tie for her. In fact, Kathleen has never forgotten one of the last conversations she had with Tiffany. Just before she went out for that final walk. Before she walked out, Tiffany said, I'm going to take off my jewelry. She said, when I'm keeping my watch on, if somebody comes after me, they're going to have to fight me for the watch. Tiffany never returned to her apartment while on an evening walk. When Tiffany did not come back, I still had hope at that time. I just really am still. pretty hopeful and continue to believe that she will return safely. There were people in the apartment, outside the apartment, milling around, trying to figure out what we needed to do. The day after Tiffany went missing, Pat and Hillary arrived in Gainesville. I got here, and I didn't even rent a car. I did a cab because I assumed all this was going to be over relatively quickly, and Tiffany would give me a ride back to the airport. But Pat knew the situation was serious when he learned that Tiffany had left the apartment with only her watch and her Walkman. She didn't have her wallet, her driver's license, her car was there, and that was the scary part. You know, all that stuff was there. And we were all starting to get nervous as the day went on. I think there was a sense of urgency here. Jim Eckert was one of the lead investigators on the case. This young woman didn't have any, I guess, baggage, as it were. It wasn't like we had a boyfriend or some strained relationship. She was a good student. She was pretty much always on the mark. So for her not to have shown up was pretty unusual. She's a smart kid. She's resourceful. And if she's in trouble, she's going to be doing everything she can to get out of it. Pat sprang into action. He put his marketing skills to work and organized one of the largest missing person searches in Florida history. I need your help. I need the work to get out. From day one, he was so driven, he ran like a business. He really did. We're attempting to find Tiffany, and we're just investigating every lead. Pat brought in Wayne Black, a private investigator who specialized in recovering missing children. Pat had within, I think, 24 hours Tiffany's picture on the inside of every pizza box being delivered in Alachua County. If you see anything or talk to anyone or hear anything, please give us a call. Volunteers blanketed the state with flyers, put Tiffany's in the state with flyers, put Tiffany's in the last time in the last year. put Tiffany's face on billboards and answered a 1-800 hotline. Jason Sessions, just 17, also helped to get the word out. She left the house without keys, without jewelry, without makeup, and that's not Tiffany. It was amazing to me how small South Florida became and understanding who Tiffany Sessions was and what we were doing and what we were going through. All right, I really appreciate you calling, and probably somebody would be calling you back from the FBI or somebody just to kind of... My goal. was very simple. It was to make sure that everybody that I could knew what she looked like, to try and get as many people out there looking for her as I could. I'm curious whether that helped you with the emotional side of things, to be able to look at this from a business marketing point of view. Yes, because I felt useful, because I felt in control. For every 50 people that pass out a friar, one story that you all can run does a hundred times that. set up press conferences and recruited his famous friends, like football legend Dan Marino. What I'm going to try to do to help this team is to try to call on all my friends throughout the NFL. Today you can push a button and you reach a million people on Facebook. You can try to get some nationwide coverage for Tiffany to try to help her. In those days, TV was my Facebook. Politician Jeb Bush also helped out. And so did America's Most Wanted host John Walsh, whose son,