The search for a teenager from Jay who disappeared in 1986 will likely resume within a month in Canton, where police dogs indicated in recent days that human remains are on land next to the property owned by a man who was one of the last people seen with her.

Maine State Police Detective Sgt. Mark Holmquist said it was a sign of progress in the search for Kimberly Moreau, which began Thursday on 5 acres owned by Brian Enman and included two neighboring properties. Dogs focused on a 5-acre plot to the west, and that’s where Holmquist said a future search would focus.

“It just narrows the search a little bit more,” Holmquist said.

Moreau disappeared on May 10, 1986, after arguing with her boyfriend and canceling plans to attend the Jay High School junior prom with him. Instead, Moreau, then 17, went out with a female friend and met two 25-year-old acquaintances. Police have said one was Enman, but they haven’t called him a suspect or said what led them to his property, which was cleared Sunday after police found no remains.

Moreau’s father, Richard, has said Enman “knows where my daughter is,” but Enman has denied involvement in her disappearance, saying he “rode around,” drank alcohol and did cocaine with the three that day, but dropped off Moreau, alone, in downtown Jay after she told him she didn’t want to go home.

Holmquist said that the next search will likely begin within a month, and that investigators have landowners’ permission to search there. In the search so far, state police and other agencies have used dogs and ground-penetrating radar from the University of Maine.

Holmquist said only the dogs have focused on the 5-acre plot next to Enman’s property, which they plan to search more, and radar searches there have produced no results so far.

“The best way to describe this is putting a 10,000-piece puzzle together,” Richard Moreau told The Associated Press on Monday. “We’ve got to have the final piece to tell us where the body is.”

The search of the property appeared to be a big break.

State police obtained a search warrant, and Moreau said he was told that there was new evidence in the disappearance.

The land was owned by someone else in 1986, but Enman later purchased it. He filed a building permit in 2004, and there’s a home on the property. Holmquist declined to say what made investigators zero in on the land.

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