ALLSTON SPA - The parents of a Ballston Spa woman who has been missing for nearly nine years plan to create playing cards with pictures of missing people and victims of unsolved homicides from around the Capital Region.

The idea, Doug Lyall of Ballston Spa said Tuesday, is to get the playing cards into the hands of inmates at area county jails.

"They play a lot of cards, they have a lot of time on their hands," Lyall, father of missing University at Albany student Suzanne Lyall said. "When they play cards, they will be looking at pictures of missing people and victims of homicides. We hope to spark a memory or spark some conscience. People in prison talk, some of them brag. Some inmate might have heard something."

People will be able to call in tips anonymously, Lyall said.

Suzanne Lyall disappeared after leaving her job at Crossgates Mall in Guilderland March 2, 1998. She's known to have gotten on a CDTA bus back to the University campus and is thought to have gotten off the bus at Collins Circle at about 9:45 p.m. She hasn't been seen since.

State Police are investigating the case as a homicide. After Suzanne's disappearance, her parents Doug and Mary Lyall became very active in helping other families searching for missing loved ones and getting laws passed to better deal with missing-persons cases.

Doug Lyall said he Mary got playing card idea from a friend who works in the prison system, but the Lyall's aren't the first to think of it. Heartland Crime Stoppers, a not-for-profit that covers three counties in Central Florida, has been doing this for since Sept. of 2005, Wayne Cross, Heartland Crime Stoppers executive directors said by phone Tuesday. "It kind of came from those playing cards they had for the Iraq War a few years ago when they were looking for Saddam and his henchmen," Cross said. "It's our program and we're very proud of it."

Heartland Crime Stoppers is on its third deck of cards and has solved four homicide cases, Cross said. "We have four more that are in various stages of being presented to grand juries down here," he said. Heartland distributes cards to 2,400 inmates a month, he said. There are similar programs in nine other parts of Florida, four places in Texas and one is just starting in San Diego. Cross said he hopes to start distributing the cards in Florida's state prisons. Doug Lyall said the organization he and Mary have founded, the Center for Hope, can finance the first run of cards: 5,000 52-card decks for $1.75 a deck. Besides meeting with Cross in Florida last week, the Lyalls have enlisted the help of Saratoga County District Attorney James A. Murphy III and they've sent letters to area police agencies looking for cases to profile on the cards.

Lyall said he won't include a missing person without that family's permission. Saratoga Springs police are going through thier files and hope to get at least one case, the 1980 killing of Shelia Shepard, included in the deck, Police Chief Edward Moore said. "1980 isn't too long to solve a homicide," Moore said. "This case is something we still look at, something we still work on."Shepard, then 22, was found tied loosely to her own bed, gagged with her own blouse and stabbed with a steak knife in her Church Street apartment.

Ballston Spa Police Officer Dave Bush said he wants a photo of Douglas Philips included. Philips, 52, of Milton Avenue in the village, has been missing since Sept. 23. Police know that someone used his ATM card Oct. 10 in the village, though, and fear foul play.

Col. Richard Emery, the administrator at Saratoga County Jail said inmates there buy cards through the commissary and every jail in the state basically uses one of two commissary suppliers. All the Lyalls have to do is hook up with those firms, he said. He would have no problem distributing cards like the ones the Lyalls want to distribute, he said.

Anyone interested in the program is asked to call the Center for Hope at 884-8671 or through www.hope4themissing.org
Reach Jim Kinney at jkinney@saratogian.com or 518-583-8729 ext.216.