FLORIDA — Next month will mark 37 years since Tiffany Sessions, a University of Florida student, vanished. Her family has never stopped searching for answers and fighting for justice.

What You Need To Know

Tiffany Sessions, a finance major at UF, went missing on Feb. 9, 1989

Investigators believe she was abducted, but her body has yet to be found

Sessions’ mother, and the parents of Jennifer Kesse, urged lawmakers to pass a bill requiring local law enforcement to support missing persons cases

Since its passage in 2008, Sessions’ mother says it has saved at least 2,000 Floridians through silver, purple and blue alerts

SEE ALSO: ‘We Are The Essentials’ helps find the missing

It’s been a long time since 80-year-old Hilary Sessions has seen her daughter, but she’ll never forget her independent, precocious 20-year-old, Tiffany.

“She was ready to do something new. She was ready to be a college student, ‘Oh mom,’” said Sessions.

Tiffany Sessions (left) and her mother, Hilary Sessions, at her high school graduation in 1986. (Courtesy of Hilary Sessions)

Enrolled as a finance major at UF, Tiffany lived in an off-campus Gainesville apartment. She went out on her usual walk on the afternoon of Feb. 9, 1989. Usually she’d exercise with her roommate, but not that day.

“Then, about 9 o’clock, the phone rang. ‘Hello?’ It was Tiffy’s roommate. And the first thing she said was, ‘Ms. Sessions, I think we have a problem,’” Sessions said.

Tiffany never returned home. Hilary says, at first, investigators didn’t take the situation seriously enough. At the time, there was no standard operating procedure for missing persons cases in Florida.

“Initially, they said, ‘Oh, she’s a college student, she’s out with her friends,’ That’s not Tiffy,” said Sessions. “I just kept saying, ‘She’s got to come home, she’s got to come home. And I was praying that everything was going to be OK, so whatever’s happening, she’ll come back and explain what is happening,’ Nothing happened.”

Tiffany Sessions, a finance major at UF, went missing on Feb. 9, 1989. (Courtesy of Hilary Sessions)

As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, answers were no more apparent than on the first day she disappeared.

When the years turned into decades, Hilary’s fight for Tiffany turned to Tallahassee.

“We’re concerned with the fact that there are no national mandatory legislation, bills, in place right now to protect kids,” Sessions said in an interview with Spectrum Bay News 9 in February 1999.

Hilary and the parents of Jennifer Kesse say that when their daughter went missing, law enforcement didn’t initially search for them. They were over 18, technically adults, so the families began lobbying legislators, like Lee Constantine, for change.

“It got to me that yes, they were absolutely right. Why, just because you turn a certain age, 17 to 18 or 19, that now you’re an adult and you can’t even file a missing persons report because you’re an adult? It made no sense at all,” said Constantine, former Florida state senator.

In 2008, state legislators voted on a bill requiring law enforcement to adopt uniform policies for missing person cases, to report missing persons to statewide and national databases, and to collect DNA from family after 90 days missing.

At the last second, an amendment was filed to rename the act for Jennifer Kesse and Tiffany Sessions.

“This one became very personal because I knew what I was doing was going to ensure that what happened to the Kesses and the Sessions never happened again,” Constantine, who now serves as a Seminole County commissioner, said.

That law later became the basis for the silver, purple and blue alerts statewide. Hilary says more than 2,000 missing and endangered Floridians have been saved.

But she was still no closer to answers about Tiffany.

Todd Hand is now leading the investigation into Tiffany’s disappearance for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office in Gainesville.

“There was an array of people of interest from the get-go, but over time those people had alibis and so on and so forth, and no one was really of interest,” said Hand.

In 2014, the then-sheriff of Alachua County, Sadie Darnell, announced, 25 years after Tiffany’s disappearance, they had found their prime suspect.

Convicted murderer and rapist Paul Rowles, detectives believe, could be responsible. He was interviewed in 2012, but didn’t confess. He died behind bars in 2014 without being charged.

“For us, what has been significant was the journal entry on the calendar in his cell, from the items that were seized, the notation #2 2-9-89, which is the day Tiffany went missing,” said Darnell, in a 2014 press conference.

“We need your help to try and close this case because I know it can be closed. We just need that little piece of information,” Sessions said in 2014.

Fast forward nearly 12 years, Hilary and Alachua County deputies are still looking for that little piece of information.

“Somebody probably saw something. But, if they’re still alive, they may not realize what they saw. There’s always that chance that somebody will come forward and know something,” said Hand.

The case remains open, Tiffany’s body yet to be found.

Spectrum Bay News 9 Watchdog Reporter Andy Cole asked Sessions whether she believes she’ll get the answers she needs.

“There’s always hope, and that’s what I have to keep. Sometimes my hope is like this big, and then sometimes it’s huge, and I never know when my breakthrough is coming through,” said Sessions. “But, I need to give her a Christian burial, and that’s the last part of the story.”

If you know anything about Tiffany’s disappearance, you’re asked to contact Investigator Todd Hand at (352) 367-4164 or by email at thand@alachuasheriff.org. You can also contact Alachua County Crime Stoppers at 352-372-STOP.