HOLLIS – Hollis Police searched deep into the woods along Silver Lake Road last week , and are on the trail of a 33-year-old missing persons case.

Eddy Segall disappeared June 15, 1977, after borrowing a car to drive to an exercise class in Merrimack. Two weeks later, the car was found about 11?2 miles from Wheeler Road in the woods. The keys were found about 150 feet away and a towel and leotard were found inside the car, according to the state attorney general’s Cold Case Unit files.

Segall, 28, lived in Nashua, and hasn’t been seen again.

Hollis Police have reopened the case and are asking anyone with information, including historians, hunters and anyone familiar with the area that is now a town forest, to get involved. Police, in particular, need to know where the trails were in the mid-1970s.

Hollis Police Lt. James Sartell said Hollis police became interested in the case when the Cold Case Unit was organized in 2009.

The original investigation “doesn’t meet the standards of 2010. There are a lot of loose ends,” said Sartell, and police “decided it was well worth it. There are still family members looking for closure. We do have a crime here.”

Police refused to release any information about the case until Tuesday, but Sgt. Angelo Corrado was in the woods across from Silver Lake Park last Thursday with a few other people, walking around and pressing some kind of instrument into the ground. There were about seven vehicles in the parking lot.

Police are reviewing all the evidence in the case file, Sartell said, and have gone into the woods about six times with “firefighters, hunters, retired police officers and history junkies.”

The search is like looking for “a needle in a haystack,” Sartell said, largely because of house construction over the last three decades and the fact that many of the trails that existed then are overgrown.

“We want to determine how people moved in and out (of the woods) in 1977,” Sartell said.

The police investigation stalled fairly quickly initially because Segall had moved to Nashua from Tampa, Fla., didn’t know many people in New Hampshire and didn’t “have a lot of family, no social network,” Sartell said.

Joseph Manning was a young Hollis Police officer when Segall was reported missing, and last week, he helped direct local police to a spot deep in the woods where police long ago found the green 1969 Oldsmobile that Segall had borrowed.

Manning, who left the department two years later to join the United Parcel Service, said he has been haunted by the case ever since.

“Someone got away with something,” he said, standing in the parking lot across from Silver Lake State Park on Dec. 9 after police had left on one of their searches. “I promised her mother I would find her.”

The state’s Cold Case Unit director, Senior Assistant Attorney General Will Delker, said Hollis Police contacted his unit about the search, but the state unit isn’t actively involved in the rejuvenated investigation.

Segall’s disappearance is the only Hollis case listed on the Cold Case Unit’s website.

The unit investigates cases of homicide or suspected homicide, and Delker said it’s focusing its resources on the most promising cases while also staying in contact with a number of local departments working their own cold case investigations.

The Cold Case Unit made its first arrest earlier this year, when it and California authorities arrested David McLeod, 53, in connection with a fatal fire he’s accused of setting at 88 High St., Keene, 20 years ago.

MacLeod was arrested in West Sacramento, Calif., in July and charged with four counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of the Hinna family.

Authorities say he set a fire inside the apartment building on Jan. 14, 1989, that killed Carl Hinna; his wife, Lori Hinna; their 4-month-old daughter, Lillian Hinna; and Carl Hinna’s 12-year-old daughter, Sara.

Joseph G. Cote can be reached at 594-6415 or jcote@nashuatelegraph.com. Kathy Cleveland can be reached at 673-3100, ext. 21, or kcleveland@cabinet.com.