A Port Angeles woman disappeared without a trace from her home more than 30 years ago. Because of new technology, police now believe they can crack the case.

Hi-tech Help For Old Murder Case

Police have never felt they had enough evidence to arrest anyone in the case, even though they always had a person of interest. Now they think they have found a way.

"I remember getting up and going to her bedroom and just calling 'Mommy, mommy," trying to find her," says Jeanne Thimm.

Jeanne Thimm was just six years old when her mother disappeared from their Port Angeles home in 1970.

Bertha Louise Burke was a mother of three, getting out of a troubled marriage, already seeing another man.

Then one day, she was gone.

Retired Port Angeles police lieutenant Roy Morgan, haunted by Burke's disappearance, spent years investigating it.

"It didn't gel, no matter who was trying. And yeah, I'd surely like to see it come to roost and have it all over with," Morgan said.

Now, some 33 years later, police in Port Angeles are hoping new technology coupled with FBI know-how will help them find Bertha Louise Burke and catch the person they believe killed her.

Drilling holes into concrete, using ground-penetrating radar flown in from the East Coast, police hope to find evidence they couldn't find in 1970 to bring Burke's killer to justice.

"It gives me hope that I can have a different kind of closure and that's always important because even though I'm a grownup, there's still that little girl that very much misses her mother," Jeanne Thimm said.

Port Angeles police wouldn't name their person of interest, but they said he still lives in Port Angeles.

In a couple of weeks, the FBI will return and they will begin digging up the places they think Bertha Louise Burke may have been buried.