Alberta Leach feels a pang in her heart whenever she watches television coverage of the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping in Utah, or the Precious Doe case in Kansas City.

“We watch all of those,” the Linwood woman said Thursday. “It brings back a lot of memories.”

Leach’s son, Randy, was a 17-year-old Linwood High School senior when he vanished 14 years ago. He was last seen at a rural graduation party about 2 a.m. April 16, 1988. Neither he nor the family car, a gray 1985 Dodge 400, has been seen since.

More than a decade later, the pain of her son’s disappearance still moves Alberta Leach to tears. She and her husband, Harold, sometimes take turns supporting each other through bad days.

“It’s just turned our lives upside down,” she said. “We have to deal day-to-day, hour-to-hour sometimes.”

It’s a hurt that’s felt among hundreds of families across the state. State officials said Thursday that as of June 13, there were 651 open missing children’s cases in Kansas dating to 1984, when the state first began keeping a database. The vast majority of those cases, 610, were children who had run away or been kidnapped by their parents.

Less than a half-dozen of those open cases are believed to be “stranger abductions” like that of Smart, the 14-year-old Utah girl who was kidnapped from her bedroom last month.

Judy Ashbaugh, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation administrative specialist who oversees the state’s clearinghouse for missing children, said most cases were resolved quickly.

“Most missing persons are found within three days,” she said. “There are others who are found after longer periods. And there are others we’re still looking for.”

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Kids lists five open cases in Kansas from the last two years:

l Jaquilla Scales, who would now be 5 years old. She was last seen in her bedroom at 12:30 a.m. Sept. 5, 2001, in Wichita; her family discovered she was missing about two hours later.

l Monica Tran, a 16-year-old who on April 30, 2001, ran away from her Wichita home.

l Tiffany Scoggins, 17, who in February ran away from her Kansas City, Kan., home.

l Hilda Torres, 16, who in April ran away from her Kansas City, Kan., home.

l Samantha Wagner, 16, who last month ran away from her Dodge City home.

Many parents give up hope when their child has been missing a long time, but Ashbaugh said old cases were sometimes resolved. She pointed out the case of Tiffany Stasi, who was 4 months old when she disappeared in 1985 with her mother, Lisa. Tiffany Stasi was found alive in 2000. Authorities believe John Edward Robinson Sr., charged in Kansas City for murder, may have killed Tiffany’s mother. Tiffany was found alive, and adopted, in another Midwestern state.

“There is hope,” Ashbaugh said.

Alberta Leach struggles to maintain that hope, however.

“I’ve got to have that hope, but it gets slimmer all the time,” she said. “The first few years, we didn’t want to know what happened  we thought it was bad. Now we have to know.”