Have You Seen Andy?

The documentary Have You Seen Andy? will air on Cinemax tomorrow, Tuesday, June 12, at 7:00 pm.

In an age of Amber Alerts, JonBenet Ramsey, and images of missing children on all the 24-hour news channels, it's difficult to imagine a disappearance that wasn't resolved.

But 10-year-old Andy Puglisi, who vanished in 1976 from a Lawrence swimming pool, has never been found. One of his childhood friends, Melanie Perkins, grew up to be a documentary filmmaker and has thrown her resources into the film Have You Seen Andy?

Andy's disappearance is still unsolved. In 1999, the Globe followed Perkins' relentless search for her lost childhood friend. That series gives a hint of how desperate the initial search was:

She remembers the next few days as a cacophony of sounds and swirling images in the search for Andy: helicopters whirring overhead; police, National Guard troops, and Green Berets scouring the neighborhood; truckers with CB radios rallying 'round; neighbors helping out. Dogs were brought in to sniff an abandoned dump and woods adjacent to the pool. Scuba divers dragged the nearby Shawsheen River. More than 2,000 volunteers pitched in.

When she returned to Lawrence as a filmmaker, Perkins learned that there were "at least five known pedophiles at the pool" at the time Andy disappeared.

Perkins admits that filming her search for her long-lost friend was often difficult emotionally. She says, "It was sometimes hard to differentiate between my filmmaker hat and my friend hat." Some moments just cut too close. While filming an excavation, Perkins became "nauseous and sick, but we had to keep filming." She adds that, later on while making the movie, "There were times when I had to leave the editing room."

But Perkins revisited the traumatic experience because of what so many families go through when their children disappear. Recent incidents, such as the killing of a Kansas teen and the discovery of a missing New Hampshire girl, remind Perkins of Andy's situation.

Perkins praises the Amber Alert, but she notes that much more needs to be done. She says it's the families of the missing children who make reforms happen, but families need to focus on prevention because, as Perkins says, "You realize it could happen at any time and at any place."

Image from HBO Documentary Films.