A Delco woman vanished 5 years ago. A search continues, as cops vow: ‘This case will stay open.'

Sgt. Phil Lydon’s quest for answers took him to Kensington Avenue one recent day. For hours, he scanned the face of everyone he passed in a sea of people, comparing them to the picture on the cell phone in his pocket.

Finally, in the baking heat of the midday sun, he saw her: a young woman whose long, dark hair and striking features bore a haunting resemblance to Amanda DeGuio, a Drexel Hill mother of two who vanished in 2014.

Lydon, an Upper Darby police officer, has spent years searching for Amanda, along with her family and a private investigator, in an effort to find her and bring her home.

Cautiously, Lydon approached the woman.

“I’m not Amanda,” she said almost immediately, betraying that she knew exactly what the out-of-town cop was doing there.

The look-alike’s picture had been widely shared on social media by a vigilant network of friends, relatives, and others who have joined in the DeGuio family’s search. Fueled by the hope of some resolution after so many years, the picture had made its way even to the crowded streets of Kensington, where people sympathetic to the DeGuios had approached the woman in the days before Lydon arrived in July.

The woman handed Lydon her ID, which confirmed that she was not DeGuio. And he prepared to make a call he knew would be devastating.

This lead had seemed so promising. But like so many other families searching for loved ones up and down the Avenue, the DeGuios hold on to hope. And unlike countless others who have lost loved ones to the street, they have marshaled sustained support from local police.

“This case will stay open until Amanda is found. That’s the bottom line,” Lydon said in a recent interview. “There’s no closing this case until that point.”

This recent legwork underscores the attention DeGuio’s disappearance has received from Upper Darby police. Few cases command such focus, especially a half-decade after the first reports were filed, according to Lydon.

“At this point, this is probably the missing-person case where we’ve had the most tips generated,” he said. “I think part of it is the mystery of it all. We’ve done at least 60 interviews over the course of this investigation.

“But I don’t want to be so narrow-minded or fixated on one thing that I miss something else,” he added. “That’s why we look at every aspect of this.”

Lydon works on DeGuio’s case in his downtime between other investigations. He fields tips, sussing out the obviously bogus reports of sightings and making calls on ones that seem more substantive. The sergeant, a 16-year veteran of the department, said it’s a routine he’ll keep until his retirement.

Joanne DeGuio is grateful to have allies such as Lydon and Kevin Ryan, a private investigator who is aiding in the search.

“This one was close. I had to catch my breath,” she said, referring to the picture that had seemed to offer so much hope.

She knows that her search could lead to a tragic end. But that hasn’t deterred her.

“At this point, I don’t care how we find her," DeGuio said. “Either way, she’s coming home.”

On June 3, 2014, Joanne DeGuio came home from work to an empty house. Amanda should have been there. She always told her mother when she was going somewhere.

Hours stretched on without any word from Amanda. She didn’t check in on her two daughters, a sign that something was wrong.

At first, DeGuio thought her daughter had fallen into old habits. For years, Amanda had struggled with opioid addiction. Her craving traced to the morphine and Vicodin she was prescribed for a painful skin infection after her first daughter was born, a condition that ultimately required three surgeries, her family said.

She eventually started abusing prescriptions and, later, heroin, according to the investigators who have spent years looking for her. But at the time of her disappearance, she was in recovery. She had been detoxing with suboxone, and had expressed an interest to her family in going on job interviews, of starting fresh, DeGuio said.

And then, without warning, she disappeared from their lives.

“Amanda wouldn’t just walk out on her kids, and there was no reason for her to leave and never come back,” DeGuio said. “She had a support system here. She was loved.”

DeGuio and her older daughter, Nicole, formed their own search party in those early days. They had frank conversations with Amanda’s former drug dealers, who said they hadn’t seen her in a while.

They knocked on doors in neighborhoods where she used to hang out, everywhere from Swarthmore to Kensington. They were drawn to the latter by a tip from a worker at a drop-in center for women who had spotted someone matching her description.

They started showing her picture to people they encountered on the street. To many others lost in the grip of heroin, she looked familiar.

“Sometimes, we just go down to keep the story alive,” Nicole DeGuio said. “And we also try to give back, to help other people that are lost, in hopes that somebody would do the same for Amanda and reach out to us.”

In Kensington, it’s not unusual to find families searching for missing relatives lost to addiction — or worse. Jose Benitez, chief executive of Prevention Point, said his staff at the hub for harm-reduction services sees about four or five families a month trekking through the neighborhood looking for a loved one. But he couldn’t recall another case where an out-of-town police officer assisted in one of those searches.

“For a lot of folks, they’re thinking, ‘Of course you’re going to reconnect with family,’” Benitez said. “But we don’t always know what the history is, and there are things we need to consider.”

Some people, for instance, don’t want to be found.

“And even in loving families, even when people have a world to go back to, there isn’t a solid mechanism for this,” Benitez added. “So it’s case by case, unfortunately.”

In DeGuio’s case, her family has cast a wide net, beyond physical searches. The FBI has a listing for Amanda, and her DNA is logged with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. If an unidentified body is found, the database can quickly identify a positive match.

But, so far, nothing.

Last year, the DeGuio family stood next to Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood at a news conference announcing a $5,000 reward for information about her disappearance. Chitwood also said, for the first time, that Amanda might be the victim of foul play.

Her mother isn’t prepared to accept that, but she realizes it is a possibility.

“Where is she? Everybody is seen somewhere, somehow,” Joanne DeGuio said. “They have to eat, they have to sit on the street, have to buy drugs? If she hasn’t been seen in five years, where is she?”

As they wait for answers, the family is working with Ryan, who takes on missing-persons cases pro bono. By his estimate, he’s made 30 trips to Kensington in search of Amanda, and looked for her even more while in the area handling other cases.

On a recent afternoon, Ryan walked the neighborhood’s streets, showing Amanda’s picture to people idling on corners and gathered outside Prevention Point.

Most knew of her — word of the search for her and Lydon’s recent trip to the neighborhood had spread. But none could say with certainty where she was.

“People are quick to judge,” Ryan said between stops. "Everybody deserves a voice. I don’t care what you do. Everyone here is somebody’s brother or child.”