ALEXANDER, N.Y. — Memories of 41-year-old Ann Rippel live on in old family photos placed in albums for safe keeping, photos that her baby sister Janet Rippel looks at when she misses her.
"She was a fireball. Her energy was just like nothing you've ever seen," she said.
Rippel had three children. One of them passed away at young age.
In 1997, Rippel lived in Batavia, and Janet said her sister distanced herself from the family because she was struggling with addiction.
"Unfortunately she had addictions that kept pulling her back in, but she really wanted to be there for her kids," Janet Rippel said.
On April 23, 1997, Janet got a call from her dad.
"My father had called me and said, 'They found your sister, Ann. They found her dead in the Tonawanda Creek.' ... It was a shock. I mean, I really don't even remember how I reacted it was, we were all in shock."
Rippel's body was found in Little Tonawanda Creek in Alexander, New York. It was a place Janet said Rippel did not frequent. Rippel also didn't have a driver's license, so Janet wonders how she even got there.
"What has always struck me as odd is this was out of Annie's area. She was Batavia/Rochester. She would hop on a bus and go to Rochester, come back to Batavia. She wouldn't have been out in the middle of nowhere. That just wasn't her," Janet Rippel said.
The Genesee County Sheriff's Office responded to the scene.
"The sheriffs said that she was partially clothed. Nobody knew how she got there, what time she got there, and we don't know who she was with."
"Her head was in the water, her feet were on the bank. She was wearing her sweater and socks. The rest of the clothes were thrown about the bank," she said. "She had tape around, duct tape around her neck, which we believe was probably from her mouth pulled down."
An autopsy showed that Rippel died from an accidental drowning, and despite being found partially nude, there were no indications of sexual assault or bruises found on her body.
Watch Part One of Ann Rippel's story below:
Janet Rippel said there were a couple fisherman nearby at the time of Ann Rippel's death but it did not lead investigators to new information.
"A woman driving down the road, even further away from where the fisherman were fishing, drove by and seen her in the creek. Went to the nearest house and called the authorities," she said.
With so many questions left unanswered, her family has had to try and figure out what could have happened. Janet Rippel suspects it had something to do with drugs but said she had not heard about persons of interest.
"I know that there were a couple people that the police interviewed heavily" she said. "That's all they really told me is that they interviewed them heavily.
"There was DNA that they had found at the scene that they processed, that they've never found a match to."
Just this year that DNA was sequenced in hopes of finding a match, which could bring a breakthrough in the case.
"Everybody knew Annie they knew who she hung out with. I believe there is still people out there that know but don't want to be the one to point the fingers," she said. "Twenty-two years is long enough. Annie deserves justice. Her family deserves peace. Her kids deserve peace, and just do the right thing."
If you have any information on this case you are asked to contact the Genesee County Sheriffs Office at (585) 345-3000.
If you have an unsolved case you would like our team to look into, send us an email to UnsolvedWNY@wgrz.com.