In a dream she had following the 1983 disappearance of her two sisters, Rosetta Cogburn Ivey said the two girls were pleading for justice.

"I could see Vette and Joyce reaching their hands out to me, saying, 'Rosetta, get justice for us -- don't let our deaths be in vain,'" she said.

It was Oct. 2, 1983 -- 25 years ago today -- that Josephine Yvette Cogburn, 16, and Joyce Irene Cogburn, 15, went missing while living in Norman with a family friend.

Jerry Nance, supervisor of the Forensic Services Unit with The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, thinks the Cogburn girls may still be alive.

"In most long-term cases, the higher percentage of children missing this length of time, if they are found, are found deceased," Nance said. "My estimate is less than 2 percent are found alive.

"There are some indications that this case may fall into that rare 2 percent. There have been reported sightings but attempts to run down those reports have not been productive to date," he said.

The girls and their older sister Rosetta lived with their mother in Broken Bow, in far southeastern Oklahoma.

"Their mother was a single mom and struggling to attend nursing school and keep a job. A friend of the family offered to take in Joyce and Josephine and he was given temporary custody of both girls. The girls apparently ran away or disappeared shortly after," Nance said.

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The Cogburns' father and an aunt were killed March 16, 1968, in a car wreck in Mount Ida, Ark. At the time, Rosetta was 2 years old, Josephine was an infant and their mother was pregnant with Joyce.

"After our dad was killed, my mother split us up. She gave me to her mother to raise, and gave Josephine and Joyce to our dad's mother and father," Rosetta said.

The sisters were reunited in 1975. Although her mother had remarried, she ran off her husband after he tried to molest her sisters, Rosetta said.

In 1981 the girls were introduced to the man who Rosetta thinks killed her sisters.

"My mom had been working as a bartender at Steele's Tavern Corner -- that's where she introduced my sisters and me to (B.J.S.)," she said. "She said she had known him for 13 years. She quit bartending and was going to school to be an LPN. We were making it on Social Security payments."

About two years after they'd met B.J.S., Josephine and Joyce went to live with him in Norman.