HANNIBAL, MO. -- A Tri-State mystery has attracted national attention once again.
The Steve Wilkos Show re-aired its episode featuring family and friends of Christina Whittaker on June 4, 2012.
She's the Hannibal woman who went missing in November 2009.
The show first aired in 2010 just months after Whittaker's disappearance.
KHQA spoke with her mother who says she's received several messages from people all over the country since the rerun.
"I never have watched it, but I always know when it's on," said Cindy Young. "A lot of people reach out to me, because they portrayed her as being dead."
Young says she regrets appearing on The Steve Wilkos Show.
"What they do is they take families' tragedies, and they turn them into their ratings," she said. "They don't care about us. They promised us to get Christina's face out there to help find her. It's getting her face out there, but it's not helping us get her home by making people believe she's dead. That's not helping us. I wish we hadn't done it, but at the time, I didn't know about the show. I didn't know what type of show it was, but hindsight is 20/20. You have somebody missing, you do whatever you do to get them home. It doesn't come with a manual."
Meanwhile, Young says she's focusing on her granddaughter, Alexandria, who was not quite seven months old when her mother went missing. She turned Whittaker's former bedroom into a room just for Alexandria.
"I'm not depressed as I used to be," she said. "I still have my days where I cry and don't want to get out of bed. At some point, you have to realize life goes on. I had to teach myself how to live again. It's hard, and it never gets easy. I'm just like an open wound. It never heals. It's always there."
Young and her husband have traveled throughout the reason looking for Whittaker who went missing when she was 21-years-old.
"There's not a lot of help out there for the missing, and their families," she said. "If you're not an investigator, you'll learn quickly to be one, because you have to do a lot on your own."
Young says she's working on a cookbook to raise money for a reward. She says she hopes to offer a $4000 reward soon to help bring Christina home. Anyone with any information on Christina's whereabouts is asked to contact the Hannibal Police Department at (573) 221-0987.
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