Family of missing Oakland woman continues search of East Bay hiking trails

Six months after Oakland cafe owner Amy Hillyard walked away from her home and disappeared, volunteers are continuing their search and her family is appealing to the public for answers.

Volunteers and an investigator hired by the family will comb five more stretches of hiking trails in the East Bay starting on Sunday with the hope of revealing the whereabouts of Hillyard, said Steve Fischer, a private investigator based in Los Angeles who specializes in missing persons cases.

Fischer said his investigative firm developed a new analysis of the data on Hillyard’s cell phone, which revealed that the mother of two and co-owner of Farley’s East coffee shop in Oakland had searched for eight hiking trails before she disappeared. Five of those trails have not been searched yet, Fischer said.

Fischer said additional volunteers weren’t needed on Sunday, and he declined to share the names of the hiking trails. But he said they’re all within a five-and-a-half mile radius from Hillyard’s home, in the 500 block of Radnor Road in the Cleveland Heights area.

“Not too much has changed besides this information,” Fischer said. “We’re still investigating any angle in this. We don’t know for sure if she’s out in the wilderness.”

Hillyard was an avid hiker, and she also explored the East Bay’s trails to soothe her anxiety. She had been grappling with mental health issues when she vanished, the family has said.

Volunteers have conducted about 20 searches since her disappearance, Fischer said, including with scent-sniffing canines flown in from Southern California. The volunteers also teamed up with police, firefighters and personnel from East Bay Regional Parks on three major searches, Fischer said.

“Despite the efforts of law enforcement, private investigators, and hundreds of volunteers, we still don’t know what happened to Amy when she left our home that afternoon,” Chris Hillyard, her husband, said in a video this week.

The family is offering a $25,000 reward for any information that leads to Hillyard’s safe return.