Authorities are interviewing people again and pursuing new information in a murder investigation that is considered one of the most notorious unsolved cases in Hawaii’s recent history.

Hawaii County Prosecutor Mitch Roth said Wednesday police are re-interviewing people connected with the case of Peter Boy Kema, who disappeared on Hawaii island in 1997, and have turned up new leads as a result.

"Right now we’re actively pursuing the case," Roth said.

The mystery of what happened to Peter Boy, whom state records showed suffered repeated abuse in his short life, has persisted for 17 years, ever since Peter Boy’s father, Peter Kema Sr., told authorities he gave his son to a longtime family friend while on a job-hunting trip to Oahu.

Police were unable to verify the existence of Auntie Rose Makuakane, the woman who Kema said took custody of Peter Boy in the summer of 1997. Peter Boy’s mother, Jaylin Kema, did not report her son missing until January 1998.

Big Island police initially investigated Peter Boy’s disappearance as a missing-person case but changed it to a homicide investigation when they turned over the files to prosecutors in 2000.

No body was ever found, and no one was ever charged or arrested in the case, which for years remained stalled. At the time of his disappearance, Peter Boy was 6.

When Roth campaigned to become the county’s top prosecutor in 2012, he pledged to take a fresh look at unsolved murder cases, including Peter Boy’s. He took office in December 2012.

"We’re looking at the case with a new set of eyes," he said of the Peter Boy investigation.

Roth would not characterize the new information in the case or say whether new evidence has been uncovered. But he said new information typically surfaces when authorities take a fresh look at an unsolved case and re-interview people.

"Ifeel pretty confident we’ll move the case forward," he said.

Peter Boy and two older siblings were removed from their home by child welfare authorities shortly after Peter Boy’s birth in 1991 because of reports of child abuse. They eventually were reunited with their parents, but reports of abuse continued to surface. When Peter Boy was 3 months old, he was hospitalized with multiple new and healing fractures on his body.

Records released in 2005 by the Department of Human Services, which investigates child abuse cases, revealed that Peter Boy’s sister told a psychologist nearly a year after her brother disappeared that she saw his dead body on two occasions.