The last time Lucy Carman saw her daughter, the 21-year-old was sitting on the concrete steps in front of her Church Street home, talking to a bicyclist.

Next thing she knew, the daughter named after her was gone.

Two weeks later, on Sept. 15, 1987, family members found young Lucy Carman’s body face down in a channel of the nearby Hockanum River. Police treated the case as a homicide, canvassing dozens of neighbors and doing more than 70 interviews. They gathered weather data, subpoenaed medical records and took aerial photographs, chronicling all the information in a case file more than 300 pages long.

But they never made an arrest.

As the family marks the 20th anniversary of Lucy’s death, they and investigators past and present are hoping someone comes forward with information. Police are taking another look at the case, as is a retired cop turned private investigator.

“That is always my hope, that is always my objective: to pique people’s interest, to jog someone’s memory,” said Lt. Curt Stoldt of the department’s detective bureau.

“Little Lucy,” as she was called, was tanned and trim, her 115-pound frame a testament to her love of walking. She was known for strolling up and down Church Street and Burnside Avenue or sitting on her front steps near the road, waving and talking to motorists and other passersby.

“She always had a smile on her face,” said her mother, who still lives in East Hartford. “She really loved life.”

And she found joy in places others wouldn’t. One windy day, Carman noticed her daughter gazing out the kitchen window. Carman asked what she was looking at, and Lucy answered: “Oh, I’m watching the branches. The branches are dancing.”

“Everybody loved her,” Carman said. “Nobody would want to hurt my daughter if they knew her.”

Lucy had recovered from three open-heart surgeries as a child, but after the last, she developed psychological problems, including a split personality, her mother said.

The family had endured other hardships. Lucy’s father, Charles W. Carman Jr., was convicted of assaulting Lucy’s younger brother in 1984 and of fatally beating her 18-month-old sister in 1958, years before Lucy was born. Charles Carman - now deceased - was quickly ruled out as a suspect in Lucy’s death because he was in prison at the time.

Police talked to more than a dozen people they thought may have been involved in Lucy’s death. They never built a strong case against any of them.

One man, labeled in the case file as a “possible suspect,” had an arrest record and had recently dated Lucy, although he downplayed the relationship when he talked to police. Before Lucy’s body was found, the man had told his sister that she was dead, and he flunked a lie detector test, police records show.

Investigators also talked to an ex-boyfriend with whom Lucy had lived - and argued - and arranged for an interview in Georgia with a relative the family said distanced himself once Lucy’s body was found.

Another man was accused in an inmate’s anonymous letter of pushing Lucy to the ground because she refused to have sex. She hit her head on a rock or small tree stump, the inmate’s letter said. In what appears to be a brief interview with Det. Mark Sirois, now the police chief, the man denied the allegations. Sirois, who was the case’s lead investigator, did not return a call for comment.

In 1997, after Stoldt joined the bureau, he became interested in the case and followed up on new leads. He talked to a man who confirmed that he used to ride his bike to see Lucy, but the man’s mental state kept police from pursuing an arrest warrant, Stoldt said. For reasons Stoldt doesn’t understand, his report about the interview is missing from the case file.

Despite all of the questioning, police said they lacked a solid suspect they could link conclusively to the crime.

“There were too many suspects,” said Mark Simmons, a retired sergeant who worked on the case. “It’s difficult to weed out the dead ends.”

Police also lacked physical evidence. The sluiceway’s water had carried some away, and Lucy’s body was partially decomposed when it was found, making it impossible to determine the exact time of death or whether she had been sexually assaulted. She was naked from the waist up; her neatly-placed clothes were found 47 feet away.

Even medical examiners couldn’t agree on how she died. The cause of death was head trauma, they concluded, but the manner of death was undetermined.

Many of those interviewed gave conflicting information, a common problem in police work. People differed on everything from when Lucy was last seen to the position the body was in when it was found. Many, including two letter carriers, told police they last saw her in the neighborhood in September, after the Aug. 31 date she reportedly disappeared, and the two relatives who found her body told police it was moved after they first spotted it.

Like Stoldt, Bruce Nease became interested in the case after he joined the detective bureau. In 2002, he did a flurry of interviews, some with people police had never spoken to but, again, nothing panned out. Nease has since retired, but is working on the case as a private investigator for Tritec Investigations Inc. of Portland.

“She should not have died like this,” Nease said.

Anyone with information about the case is asked to call Stoldt at 860-291-7589.