DENISE Alves vividly recalls the night her seven-month-old brother Christopher was abducted from his cot.
“I remember hearing my mother screaming: ‘Christopher. . .  He’s not here!’ I’ll never forget it,” says Denise.

Denise Alves’ nightmare begun on July 15, 1986, the night where her little baby brother Christopher was abducted from his cot Credit: Supplied by Denise Alves

Denise, pictured doting on her little brother, is now leading the family’s investigation Credit: Supplied by Denise Alves
“She was running through the house in a complete panic, knocking things over. I stopped her in the hallway, put my hands on her shoulders and told her: ‘Mom, calm down, he’s here somewhere.’ She looked at me with terror in her eyes.”
The night of July 15, 1986 marked the beginning of a nightmare for the family that has spanned four decades and is a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Christopher’s mother Bernice would become the prime suspect, leaving another person of interest – her husband’s ex-mistress – in the clear.
“Christopher was an innocent baby. I loved him,” says Denise, a 55-year-old mum of four who lives in Las Vegas. “I watched my parents spend decades searching for their son. I can’t allow all of the work, sacrifice and suffering of my parents, especially my mother, to be forgotten or wasted.”
Aged 15 at the time of Christopher’s disappearance, Denise was the second youngest of seven children born to stay-at-home mum Bernice and her husband Gil Abeyta, who worked in human resources, and recalls an idyllic childhood in Colorado Springs, USA.

“We were a very close and loving family,” says Denise. “My mother was extremely hands-on and my father worked hard to provide for us. We took road trips, had picnics and spent a lot of time together.
“I was the youngest until Christopher was born. He was a complete surprise. We all adored having a baby brother, and he was the centre of attention in the best possible way. With big, blue eyes and light-blonde hair, he was a sweet, happy baby who rarely cried.”
That happiness was shaken when Christopher was just four months old, and Bernice discovered lipstick on Gil’s collar. Though he denied having an affair, the couple separated – with Gil moving out to live with one of their older sons.
Over the coming months, however, the couple began to reconcile, and Gil moved back home on July 14, 1986.

“It was a quiet summer night and it was the first time Christopher had ever pulled himself up to stand using our coffee table,” says Denise.
“There were flowers on the table, I leaned over to smell them and sneezed, and Christopher burst into a belly laugh. I fed him his bottle and he fell asleep in my arms. Then, I laid him down in his crib and my mother placed a blanket over him. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
At 6am, Denise was woken by her mother’s frantic screams.
“My mother had woken up and seen the empty crib, which was near her bed. She knew immediately something was terribly wrong,” she says.

Bernice and Gil’s bedroom door had been left ajar, and it was only a short walk from their room to the front door, which the family found lying open.
“We lived in a safe neighbourhood and my older sisters were always coming and going, so the door was left unlocked,” she adds.
By 6.45am, the police arrived, but with no sign of forced entry, detectives focused on the family. During questioning, Gil admitted he’d been having an affair with a woman he’d met when he interviewed her for a position at his company.
“The affair had been going on for a year and this was the first time that my father had admitted it,” says Denise.
The police did not treat the woman as a suspect, although on the night of the disappearance she’d been calling the house where Gil had previously been staying, trying to get in touch with him.
Instead, they turned their attention to Bernice, who they suspected of harming Christopher and hiding his body.

The Abeytas were all asked to take polygraph tests, which Bernice failed.
“My mother was grief-stricken, exhausted, traumatised and under enormous pressure,” explains Denise, who says she was later told by a representative from the National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children that parents of missing children can produce false negative polygraph results because of the extreme emotional trauma.

The Abeytas before Christopher was born Credit: Supplied by Denise Alves

The family continue to post anniversaries and updates about the case online, and in 2013 offered a $200,000 reward for information Credit: Supplied by Denise Alves/Find Christopher Abeyta Facebook
“She said she didn’t care they suspected her, because she wasn’t involved – except that it hurt Christopher because they weren’t actively looking for him,” says Denise. “We were all in shock. I would wake up at night and think it had all been a nightmare.
“That first week, my mum would drive slowly through local neighbourhoods at night looking to see if a light would turn on around the time Christopher would normally wake up, wondering if someone close by took him.
“One vivid memory I have is seeing her curled into a ball with her knees pulled to her chest, crying: ‘I need my baby.’ She couldn’t eat or drink. She’d drive to a nearby park with a lake and sit alone praying – something investigators interpreted as suspicious, because they believed she might have put Christopher there.”
Gil insisted that, despite his affair, their marriage was a happy one. “My father openly accepted responsibility for his affair and never blamed his marriage for his choices,” says Denise. “He always maintained that there were no marriage problems, but that he was the problem.”
But the timing of Christopher’s disappearance on Gil’s first night back at the family home following the split reinforced the investigators’ theory that something had happened between him and his wife.Police later interviewed the woman he’d had the affair with.
“The detective told my father she had been fully investigated and cleared,” says Denise.

“The police had this myopic view of the investigation and, very early on, people began contacting our family saying they had attempted to give tips to police but never received follow-up calls.”
In August, the family took matters into their own hands, set up an office space and advertised a tip-line number.
Using money they had set aside for retirement, Gil left his job to devote himself to the search, and two of Denise’s older siblings took time out of school to help their parents.
“We took shifts, answering calls 24 hours a day,” recalls Denise. “We were getting 10 tips a day, sightings of babies who looked like Christopher, calls from psychics. Every lead represented hope, and it was heartbreaking to watch leads come in, only for them to turn out to be nothing.”
Bernice wrote a list of everyone who had been at their home leading up to the abduction, from friends to tradespeople, taking it upon herself to surveil them for any sign of Christopher.
Denise visited the local library to painstakingly research newspaper obituaries for women who had lost a child around the time of Christopher’s abduction and investigate them to see if they now had a new baby.

Credit: Supplied by Denise Alves/Find Christopher Abeyta Facebook

An AI-generated image of what Christopher, who would be 40 years old, may look like now Credit: Supplied by Denise Alves/AI
With pressure mounting in the community to find the baby snatcher, police still seemed convinced Bernice was responsible – though with no evidence to link her with Christopher’s disappearance, they couldn’t charge her.
“Mum was always sure that he was growing up somewhere, because she couldn’t allow herself to believe that he was dead. She would see children his age and imagine what he might look like or what he might be doing,” says Denise.

“My siblings and I tried our best to support our parents as we grew older, got married and had kids of our own. I became very protective towards them. Watching the lengths they went to for Christopher showed me the depth of their love as parents.”
In 2012, Denise made accusations against Gil’s ex-mistress on social media. The family also continued to post anniversaries and updates about the case online, and in 2013 offered a $200,000 reward for information.
That year, Gil’s former-mistress filed a civil lawsuit against Denise and her parents, alleging that emails to her boss and statements made on the Facebook page and website dedicated to Christopher were false and defamatory and that the accusations had caused mental and emotional distress and loss of a job. A jury awarded her $150,000 in damages after ruling in favour of the emails but not the Facebook posts.
“In the court proceedings, a detective testified under oath that this woman was a person of interest in Christopher’s disappearance,” says Denise.
“My father saw her in court, but they didn’t speak.”
Bernice and Gil remained married and drew strength from helping other families.
“They even travelled to Mexico to reunite a couple of missing children with their family because they wanted to help others facing unimaginable pain,” says Denise.
In 2016, Bernice was diagnosed with cancer and recorded a heartbreaking video message for Christopher in which she said: “You couldn’t even imagine how much your whole family has loved you and missed you.” She died on February 12, 2017. Gil passed away from a heart attack five years later.
Denise is now leading the family’s investigation, which continues to look into all the possibilities of what may have happened.
In her civil lawsuit in 2013, Gil’s ex-mistress made a statement that the night Christopher went missing, she was at home with her brother, who testified she had woken him up in the morning. However, earlier this year, he told a journalist in a recorded interview that she hadn’t woken him up, bringing into question whether she was at home the night of

Christopher’s disappearance. Denise has since passed that information to the Colorado Springs Police Department, as well as the District Attorney, Mayor and Governor’s offices.
Meanwhile, not a day goes by when Denise doesn’t think about her brother. “The last time I saw him, he was a baby with big, blue eyes, so it’s difficult to imagine him now as a grown man,” she says.
Last year, a series of images were released by the National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, using AI to show how Christopher would have aged through his early years, teens, 20s and 30s, in case any profiles resonated with members of the public.
“Christopher was 40 this year,” says Denise.
“We still hold on to the hope that whoever took him couldn’t possibly have harmed an innocent baby. We choose hope, because the alternative is too painful. Christopher, if you’re out there, I want you to know that we never stopped searching for you.”