It could well provide the breakthrough some families have been waiting for over decades, or it could lead to nothing.
But when someone has been missing for 42 years with no trace or any leads, any news is good news.
The ACT government has announced it will be offering $500,000 rewards in five cold cases, including a fatal kidnapping, a hit-and-run death, and the long-term disappearances of two Canberra teenage girls and a 35-year-old man.
For Dorothy Mulquiney, whose 17-year-old daughter Megan vanished from Woden Plaza - now Westfield Woden - without a trace in 1984, the reward is something she's been asking for repeatedly over many years.
The news that there might finally be an incentive for someone to come forward with information is a bright spot, a turning point in what has become an increasingly difficult ordeal.
Megan had finished her shift at Big W in Woden at midday on a Saturday, and left to catch the bus to her home, just 10 minutes away.
She never made it to the bus and hasn't been seen since.
Today, she would be nearly 60; Dorothy is 80.
"All these years, nobody's ever come forward with information that has led to anything, and that I suppose is what I'm really, really depending on now," Dorothy said.
"That somebody will realise after all these years what we actually go through, people with missing loved ones that don't have a clue what happened to them - it's pretty hard."
The police have followed various leads over the years, including questioning a convicted rapist, Paul Vincent Phillips, who lived in the area at the time.
He has been definitively ruled out, and died in 2018.
The police are also offering rewards in the cases of missing teenager Elizabeth Herfort, who was last seen at the old ANU bar on June 13, 1980, and David Abuoi, who hasn't been seen since July 10, 2012.
They also want answers relating to the death of Keren Rowland,whose body was found at the Air Disaster Memorial nearly three months after her disappearance, on May 13, 1971.
The unsolved homicides team's long-term commitment is highlighted in a homicide investigation spanning five years, nine months, and six days which ultimately led police to the two men recently jailed for the 1999 murder of Irma Palasics.
"If we get identification tomorrow and it takes us five years to lock up the murderer ... then so be it," Detective Sergeant Marriott said. "We don't want anyone to think they can get away with it."
He acknowledged financial rewards were historically a "last-ditch effort" across Australia that rarely resulted in cash payouts, yet remained highly effective at generating renewed public awareness.
"Life circumstances change, relationships with potential offenders change as well as people's consideration of the information itself," he said.
"The call for information is in the hope that a circumstance like that has eventuated, and that these people can then be encouraged to come forward."
In cases where suspects or key figures in these cases might no longer be alive, he said an offender's potential death could make it easier for witnesses or relatives to speak up and bring much-awaited closure to grieving families.
Mr Abuoi's case is the most recent. He was last seen on London Circuit on the morning of July 10, 2012.
Police believe he came to live in Canberra in 2005 using another Sudanese refugee's name - Gabrielle Malak Arok - who had been approved to come to Australia but didn't want to.
Detective Sergeant Marriott said based on Mr Abuoi's pattern of life at the time, police searched every possible geographical location where he could have been found under the circumstances of suicide or "death by misadventure".
"We have made the necessary inquiries with relevant authorities and survival experts to try and understand what might happen to somebody if they were to either intentionally or inadvertently, die, for example, out in parkland ... we're not left with any confidence that they would explain his disappearance," he said.
Dorothy Mulquiney has always followed other unsolved cases, and said she hoped the rewards would lead to a breakthrough of any kind, even if Megan's case is never resolved.
"If that doesn't happen and they do solve another couple of cases, I'd be over the moon," she said.
One of the defining features of Megan's disappearance is the timing - before mobile phones, cameras and advanced DNA testing.
Dorothy has long accepted that Megan is unlikely to be alive; while she has stayed at the same address, and spent years instinctively scanning crowds wherever she went, her searching changed some time ago.
"I really needed to get it out there again as I'm aging, and I would love to know what happened to be able to put Megan to rest properly before I pass away," she said.
