Sheila Allen, who was abducted from Central Avenue and Rapple Drive in the village of Colonie in 1970.

Charles Oechler is led down hallway by police officers in February 1975. (Times Union Archive)

Thomas Nieckarz in police custody in February 1975; he was barely 20 years old when he and Charles Oechler kidnapped and murdered Sheila Allen. (Art Markey/Times Union Archive)

Sheila Allen was a senior at Colonie Central High School when she was abducted and murdered in 1970.

If not for the two men and what they did, Sheila Allen could be a grandmother today. She'd be 71 years old, with a lifetime of experiences to remember. College. A career as a gym teacher, if she'd stuck with that plan. Marriage and children, presumably. Lots of love and inevitably some pain.

She was robbed of all that.

On a rainy October evening 54 years ago, Allen took the bus from Colonie Center, the four-year-old mall where she'd been studying at the town library (at the time located on the center's second level), west toward her Cape Cod-style home on Rapple Drive.

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Charles Oechler and Thomas Nieckarz had watched the teen step on the bus, then followed it down Central Avenue and abducted Allen when she got off.

One sneaker, a pocketbook and a school notebook were later found on the ground.

The young men — Oechler had just turned 30, Nieckarz just shy two weeks into his 20s — took Allen to the Pleasant........

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