"He asked me if I wanted to go with them," Rosetta said. "I was 17 and pregnant at the time and decided against it."

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Norman Police Capt. Tom Easley said investigators haven't eliminated as a suspect the man who was granted temporary custody of Josephine and Joyce.

"He's the same person who reported them missing. He's still around and we haven't conclusively eliminated that individual as a suspect.

"He's definitely a person of interest," Easley said.

Investigators have interviewed the man on several occasions, but criminal charges have never been filed in the case.

The circumstances of the girls' disappearance, as reported by The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, are as follows:

"Josephine and Joyce were staying with an adult male friend of their family in a Norman apartment in October 1983. The friend reported them missing, police said. He claimed both Josephine and Joyce ran away from him. He stated that he last saw them when they left to go to the library.

"Neither girl has been seen or heard from since."

The girls had moved to Norman after having disciplinary problems at home in Broken Bow, Easley said.

"One or both may have been attending the old Central (Junior High School). It would be fair to say that both were enrolled in Norman Public Schools," Easley said.

The man with whom the girls were staying told police that he had left for the day, and that the sisters were supposed to go to the library, Easley said.

"When they didn't come back, he contacted some of their friends and subsequently contacted us," he said.

Police initially viewed the girls' disappearance as a "typical runaway case," Easley said, but circumstances bothered investigators.

"One thing that popped up, was the lack of anybody having seen them," he said. None of their friends from school, nobody in the community had seen the girls after they'd supposedly run away.