LIMA, Ohio - In the dark dining room of her home, Krista Coppler was anything but defeated after authorities failed to find her daughter s body a week ago on the property of a suspect s nearby home.

“I am going to keep fighting,” Mrs. Coppler said without hesitancy. “Nobody is going to fight for your children except a parent. She was only 14.”

With her daughter, Nicholle Coppler, missing for four years, she holds only slim hope she is alive.

One grim outcome, that she was secretly buried outside the house of its former owner, Glen Fryer, has been ruled out.

Using sophisticated electronic equipment, the FBI - working with the Lima police - probed the entire lot and concluded her body was not hidden there.

Despite her anguish, Mrs. Coppler, married and the mother of six other children, has not shut herself off from others. She is determined to see the case solved. The disappearance is the second oldest missing runaway case in Ohio.

“You kind of cope with this by staying angry,” she said. “I guess there are all kinds of emotions but anger helps me the best. I am a very pushy person.”

She is angry at Fryer, 55, who hanged himself a year ago in the Allen County jail rather than cooperate with police.

Nicholle was last seen with him in May, 1999. Two years later, he was arrested on multiple counts of rape and child pornography involving four area girls. None of the charges involved Nicholle.

Fryer committed suicide in jail on Feb. 18, 2002, shortly after pleading no contest to four rape counts while at the same time promising to give police information about Nicholle.

Mrs. Coppler had some hope the search a week ago would be a turning point in the investigation. Yet, if Nicholle s body were found “two blocks away, I don t know how much closure that would be,” she reflected.

“Part of me knows she is not there. Another part of me wants to tear the whole house up and go through it piece by piece.” The house was sold shortly after Fryer s death.

Police said they still have whatever time they need to follow-up on leads. Since the search, there have been few tips, Lima detective Jeff Kinkle said.

“Every passing day her name and Social Security number isn t used and there are no verifiable sightings, the chances decrease there will be a good outcome,” Detective Kinkle said. “The tips we are getting are either dated or have no substance.”

Lima police are in the midst of having DNA samples from the Coppler family compared with the remains of an adolescent girl found several months ago by hunters in Ontario.

The DNA analysis is being pursued because a comparison of Nicholle s dental records could not exclude her as the victim. It will be several months before results are known.

Once a truck driver, Fryer was described by police as extremely paranoid with a long criminal background dating back to the early 1970s. It ranges from convictions on federal firearms violations, including the theft of a machine gun and destructive devices from the military, to breaking and entering, domestic violence, and child stealing that was the outgrowth of a custody dispute.

Married three times, his first wife was murdered in the early 1980s. A local man was tried and acquitted. Police said the case remains unsolved. Fryer s second and third marriages ended in divorce.

He was a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War who was twice awarded the Purple Heart. Family and friends called him “Stubby.” For many years he belonged to the Barbarians Motorcycle Club but most of the members of his era are dead, police said.

“He had hidden cameras all over the house, including one pointing out the front door,” Lima detective Jeff Kinkle said. “He was very vindictive - flat-out nasty - to sum it up.”

Some of Mrs. Coppler s anger also is directed at the Lima Senior High School where her daughter was a ninth grader when she ran away, and at the police department s early handling of the case.

A few weeks before Nicholle left home, her mother saw her skipping classes. When she talked to an assistant principal, she learned her daughter had been absent from classes on 12 occasions in recent weeks. Mrs. Coppler said the school never informed her of the truancies.

The assistant principal with whom she talked has since retired. School officials say the policy is to notify parents after students have skipped classes three or four times without explanation.

Mrs. Coppler is critical that police didn t take Nicholle s disappearance more seriously in the first few weeks.

Nicholle was an honor student with excellent attendance before she began hanging around a new group of friends a few months before her disappearance, her mother said.

After being missing for more than two weeks, Nicholle was spotted at a Lima motel with Fryer on May 31, 1999. It was hours after police got a tip she was there that they went there to investigate, Mrs. Coppler said. Her daughter never was seen alive again.

Her mother said it was 16 months after her daughter disappeared before the police sought advice of a specialized team from the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children, in Alexandria, Va.

The center offers assistance to publicize the case and suggests what law enforcement agencies can do to better coordinate their efforts regarding missing children.

Police juvenile officer Randy Kohli, who has been on the case from the beginning, said the hotel sighting was so long ago he can t recall details about the police response.

Officer Kohli admitted the department should have sought outside advice sooner. “This case has brought more awareness to help us investigate it to the best of our ability.”

First Published November 2, 2003, 10:40 a.m.