It was her smile. Morgan Violi’s broad smile is ever-present in family pictures and vivid memories.

Morgan, who was 7 years old in 1996, was “very flamboyant, a very spirited child who loved to dance,” said one of her sisters, Nikki Britt.

Britt was 10 that year, and the oldest sister, Heather Coleman, was 11.

“(Morgan) was the youngest so she liked to be the center of attention,” Britt said. “She was the baby of the family.”

Morgan liked to draw and do cartwheels in the grass. She did a gymnastics routine for the school talent show.

But her vibrant spirit was best captured by her ever-present smile, according to Stacey Violi, Morgan’s mother.

“But it was always her smile. … She was always smiling,” Stacey said.

The last time her family saw Morgan’s smile was a warm July day that year.

• • •

On July 23, 1996, a maroon 1978 Chevy van was stolen from a home near Dayton, Ohio – a routine incident that drew little notice.

The van was soon headed southwest, toward Kentucky.

The next day was a Wednesday. It was hot in Bowling Green, with temperatures nearing 90. The Violi sisters were on summer break from Warren Elementary School and living with their mother at what was then known as Colony Apartments in Bowling Green off Shive Lane.

The girls were in and out of the apartment that morning, playing with various friends.

Morgan was technically not supposed to be outside, but the lure of friends and sunshine was strong, and her two older sisters were nearby.

As they played, a van came through the apartment complex parking lot driven by a young man around 12:30 p.m. No one seemed to give it much thought.

“We actually passed the guy in the van and waved at him and he waved back,” Britt recalled.

But a short time later, as the older sisters were at a friend’s house, “some people came frantically saying Morgan was taken,” Britt said.

There were some conflicting stories on exactly what happened – the friend Morgan was playing with at the time was only 5. But what soon became clear was that Morgan was pulled into the van and it – along with Morgan – were gone.

Law enforcement vehicles soon filled the apartment complex’s parking lot, and police throughout the region were notified to be on the lookout for the van.

Stacey and Glen Violi were going through a divorce at the time. As neighbors, reporters and police swarmed the apartment complex, Glen Violi also arrived and yelled out, to no one in particular, “Why didn’t someone try to stop him!”

Bill Waltrip, later chief of the Bowling Green Police Department, at the time was in charge of criminal investigations for the BGPD.

He was returning from Louisville when he heard heavy police radio traffic regarding a missing child. He soon joined other law enforcement officials at the apartments.

“There wasn’t much to go on initially … and that’s frustrating for everybody involved,” he said.

Bowling Green police asked the FBI to join the investigation.

“A witnessed child abduction results in frankly one of the highest levels of response that the FBI can bring to bear and obviously this was one of those instances where it was witnessed, it seemed to be clearly an abduction from the moment it happened, so all resources were brought to bear at the point,” said Will Kurtz, FBI supervisory special agent for the Bowling Green FBI office.

An impromptu candlelight vigil was held at the apartments on Thursday. Yellow ribbons and stuffed animals soon filled the trees outside the Violis’ apartment.

News reports at the time said Glen Violi was under intense scrutiny by law enforcement because he had just lost custody of the girls and failed several lie detector tests, but he was eventually cleared by the FBI.

The abduction made national news, even being featured on the “America’s Most Wanted” TV show. But finding where the van with Morgan went after Bowling Green was a challenge given the proximity of the apartments to Interstate 65, which seemed a likely escape route.

“Theoretically it’s an area that even if you were not familiar with Bowling Green you could stumble upon fairly quickly,” Kurtz said of the apartments.

Two days later, on July 26, the stolen maroon van was found abandoned at a truck stop in Franklin, Tenn. Without going into details of evidence found in the van, Kurtz said the FBI was “confident the maroon van was used in Morgan’s abduction.”

But there was still no sign of Morgan.

The days passed frantically for the Violi family, but the agonizing wait was destined to continue that long summer.

There were a few false alarms in the coming weeks – a waitress in Ohio called Stacey to say she had seen a sullen young girl matching Morgan’s description with a man in a restaurant. But that, and all other leads, turned out to be dead ends.

Britt remembers she was pessimistic that she would ever see her sister again.

“It was very traumatic experience. The first few days felt like a dream,” she said.

Days turned into agonizing weeks, then months.

Then one day after school, the sisters came home “and the living room was filled with police,” Britt said.

On Oct. 20, a woman in Robertson County, Tenn., found the body of a young girl in a culvert adjacent to a barn near White House, Tenn. A yellow hair clasp – like the one Morgan was wearing when she was abducted – was among the remains.

While there was no official identification of the body pending DNA tests, the Violis knew.

The dreaded but expected news came soon after – the tests confirmed the body was Morgan’s.

The Daily News wrote that the news was “a punch to a community’s stomach, a wound that may heal but would leave people never feeling quite the same.”

“I really, really prayed to God that she would come home,” Stacey Violi said, “But I never thought that she would come home that way.”

• • •

On the day of the public announcement that the body found was Morgan’s, Stacey Violi was taken to the FBI offices in Bowling Green where she found herself in a room crowded with law enforcement officials from various agencies.

She picked a face out of the crowd.

“There were a lot of people in there and I just saw (Waltrip’s) face, and I didn’t know him, but he looked as hurt as I was,” she said.

Waltrip did have a unique background that gave him some insight into what the Violis were going through.

“I had a sister that was murdered in 1969,” he said. “I was 15 and obviously that was something that stuck with me to this day. And so being sensitive to Stacey’s situation was very easy for me to do.”

Amid the grief, the discovery of Morgan’s body spurred some optimism that her killer would be found.

“It launches a whole new part of the investigation,” Waltrip said. “Hopefully there was something to go on from the crime scene. So you had a crime scene initially at the Shive Lane apartments, then you have a crime scene in Tennessee … you hope that someone has seen something.”

Witnesses described seeing an unfamiliar white van in the area shortly before Morgan’s body was found and even reports that a maroon van had been seen near the barn.

The white van, described as a full size, older model with a glass, louvered window in the passenger side sliding door, has never been found.

The FBI, however, had a third composite sketch of a person of interest in the case – a White male in his 20s to early 30s with shoulder-length, light brown hair and a muscular build.

Of the three composite sketches released during the case, the latest is “the best rendering we have of a possible suspect,” Kurtz said.

Over the years, there have been rumors and speculation that Morgan’s abduction could be linked to other child abductions.

Every time a case with the rough parameters of what happened to Morgan occurs, the FBI looks for links, Kurtz said.

But no concrete evidence has ever emerged linking Morgan’s case with any other, and the search for her killer continues.

• • •

Dealing with the unimaginable is a burden that is never lifted.

Britt said she has become an admitted over-protective mother, always keeping extremely close tabs on her two children.

To this day, “I don’t like windows,” she said, worrying that someone could be watching.

“Sometimes it feels like it was someone else’s life,” she said, adding that she formed “a bubble” with her mom and sister “since no one else can really understand it.”

“We will never … be able to tell you how I felt. How it makes me feel on a daily basis. How it’s hard to get out of bed some days,” Britt said.

“Growing up I was very angry at people,” Heather Coleman said. “I was very angry at the gossip. I was angry about what it did to our family, and I took things extremely personal.”

Beyond the Violi family, the case still resonates for others like Waltrip.

“Thinking about all the things that Morgan missed and all the things the family missed with Morgan and that some individual would commit something like this … I still believe most people are good people. I haven’t lost that. I was in law enforcement for 32 years and I still believe that most people are good people,” Waltrip said. “But we also know that there’s some really bad, mean people who have a whole lot of issues and they do something like this. That part drives me crazy. That somebody could actually do something like this to anybody, much less a child.”

Stacey Violi said she changed fundamentally and stopped trusting people. It is only through her daughters “and the grace of God” that she has gotten through it.

“It was hard, and it’s still hard,” she said.

• • •

In 1996, the FBI offered a reward of $20,000 for information related to Morgan’s killing. In the intervening years, the reward amount has increased to $25,000.

The case has also been repeatedly featured on national TV shows and in publications across the country in the hope that someone will come forward.

“All of us who have worked on this case, who are familiar with this case, are confident that there is somebody out there who knows something. … We’re looking for that one or two facts, one or two statements, that add the pieces of the puzzle that we’ve been missing all these years,” Kurtz said.

The idea that Morgan’s abductor will be found evokes mixed emotions for her family.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been hopeful that we’ll find the person … that’s my way of moving on,” Britt said.

Coleman said it’s important for people to remember Morgan as more than a name in the news.

“Morgan was very sweet, caring; she was just a baby. I think people forget that, they forget that. They only think of her as an incident, a horrible thing that has happened. But I want people to remember, if they’ve ever known her, the sound of her voice, or her fat, itty bitty chubby fingers or how she was so happy to do a cartwheel and barely land on her feet. I just think that they really need to remember her as a person, as a baby, and if anyone has information, to please come forward,” she said.

“I want that person found,” Stacey Violi said. “There’s not anything on God’s green earth that the justice system or anyone could do to this person that will equal up to what they’ve done to Morgan, to me, to my daughters, my family.”

But finding the person, Stacey Violi said, “would give me somebody else to hate besides myself.”

– Anyone with information on the case is asked to contact the FBI Louisville office at 502-263-6000.

– Follow Managing Editor Wes Swietek on Twitter @WesSwietek or visit bgdailynews.com.