Mystery Unexplained Missing Persons Cases

[craffles]

Wondering if the Springfield three mentioned on page one could be a case of witness protection? The two girls could have seen something and then been permanently relocated with the mother after they told her and assumed new identities.

Some of the missing persons cases would have to fall into this area surely

 

[Moonwatcher]

Wondering if the Springfield three mentioned on page one could be a case of witness protection? The two girls could have seen something and then been permanently relocated with the mother after they told her and assumed new identities.

Some of the missing persons cases would have to fall into this area surely

Never thought of people in witness protection being 'missing persons' as far as the rest of the community is concerned before.

 

[craffles]

Never thought of people in witness protection being 'missing persons' as far as the rest of the community is concerned.

I would imagine they would need to play it out that way otherwise what would their family and friends say?

 

[emuboy]

I would imagine they would need to play it out that way otherwise what would their family and friends say?

There are many theories around the Springfield Three, and witness protection does have some merit. However, like every theory in this case there is always something else that appears to rule it out. I'm not sure how witness protection works exactly, but if the three women had seen something that potentially put their lives in danger, it would have to be so big for them to have to go into hiding so quickly and allow a world-famous mystery to develop. Who would they be giving evidence against? And in over 30 years since then, there have been reviews of the now cold case by the FBI and Missouri State Police, all of which cost money and use police resources. Would they do this if the Springfield Three were living under new names in a village in France, a luxury hotel in Dubai from which they never ventured out, or in a small Tasmanian town?

 

[emuboy]

I am the same age as the killers of James Bulger. That one still hurts to think about.

The photo of the two boys who killed James Bulger - Thompson and Venables - never fails to send chills down my spine over 30 years later. Another odd thing is that while Thompson under his new identity has vanished into obscurity and stayed out of trouble, Venables in his new identity has not been able to stay out of trouble with the law and has been sent to prison multiple times for numerous offences, some extremely serious.

I always feel sad when this case and the Jon-Benet Ramsay case are brought up and you see old photos of the child victims, thinking about the lives they were robbed of by evil killers and the suffering their families went through. It's like the well-known 2002 picture of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in their Manchester United shirts, the chilling thing about this image is that it was taken just hours before the two friends were murdered by evil killer Ian Huntley.

Another well-known photograph of a child born in 1990 - the same year as James Bulger and Jon Benet Ramsey - also chills me, but for different reason. It shows a pretty little blonde girl aged about six, wearing her best dress, a bow in her long blonde hair and smiling for the camera. This little girl was named Lucy Letby, the apple of her parent's eyes had a happy home life, would do well at school and grow up to fulfil her dream of becoming a nurse. She also became one the UK's worst serial killers of children, murdering and attempting to murder a number of sick and premature babies (as Letby herself was as an infant) in her care at a neo-natal unit in a hospital in Chester where she was employed.

What is strange about the Lucy Letby case is that she was a much-loved only child from a stable home. Only child serial killers are very rare, as are female serial killers who act alone and serial killers who target infants. Letby didn't have an evil husband or boyfriend and was the Myra Hindly to his Ian Brady or the Karla Homolka to his Paul Bernardo. The stable happy family life is also very rare for serial killers, most of them have traumatic events in their formative years. If Letby had come from an impoverished family where abuse, alcohol and drugs were common factors and she spent an unhappy childhood being shuffled between her parents, other equally dysfunctional relatives, foster homes and group homes for troubled children, but through it all was intelligent enough to study and get the grades she needed to become a nurse, her criminal ways would make more sense. Even murderers who kill only once like Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme - obsessive teenage girls who murdered Parker's mother in Christchurch New Zealand in 1954 - had traumatic childhoods with Pauline Parker stricken by and partially crippled by polio, and Juliet Hulme suffering debilitating TB and also bomb shock after growing up in the UK during the Second World War.

But with Lucy Letby, absolutely nothing came out from her childhood that might have suggested a trigger for what she would do as an adult. This is what makes that childhood photo of Lucy circa 1996 - a literal picture of innocence - so chilling.

 

[BlueE]

The photo of the two boys who killed James Bulger - Thompson and Venables - never fails to send chills down my spine over 30 years later. Another odd thing is that while Thompson under his new identity has vanished into obscurity and stayed out of trouble, Venables in his new identity has not been able to stay out of trouble with the law and has been sent to prison multiple times for numerous offences, some extremely serious.

Don't be too sure about that.

Anyone living in Perth with connections to media or the prison system 17 years ago might have a different view.

World wide surpression orders exist, so don't ask, don't tell.

 

[ioppolo]

Don't be too sure about that.

Anyone living in Perth with connections to media or the prison system 17 years ago might have a different view.

World wide surpression orders exist, so don't ask, don't tell.

Livingston shopping centre?

 

[craffles]

There are many theories around the Springfield Three, and witness protection does have some merit. However, like every theory in this case there is always something else that appears to rule it out. I'm not sure how witness protection works exactly, but if the three women had seen something that potentially put their lives in danger, it would have to be so big for them to have to go into hiding so quickly and allow a world-famous mystery to develop. Who would they be giving evidence against? And in over 30 years since then, there have been reviews of the now cold case by the FBI and Missouri State Police, all of which cost money and use police resources. Would they do this if the Springfield Three were living under new names in a village in France, a luxury hotel in Dubai from which they never ventured out, or in a small Tasmanian town?

You’re probably right, they would just let it die out until it didn’t get any traction but stranger things have happened. If it’s not relevant in this case, it’s one to consider for other missing persons at least.

 

[faible]

Livingston shopping centre?

Dante Arthurs - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It was alleged that Arthurs was in fact Robert Thompson, who at the age of 10 years was convicted of Bulger's murder, given a new identity and then transported to Australia. Information was revealed publicly by the Western Australian and Australian Federal Police that Arthurs was not Thompson and the rumour gathered no more momentum.[9][10][11][12] On 29 June 2006, the British High Commission in Canberra issued a media release stating "There is no connection between the man arrested in Western Australia and the individuals involved in the James Bulger case."

 

[emuboy]

The USS Cyclops, which vanished without trace in March 1918 between Barbados and Baltimore along with its 306 passengers and crew is one of the Bermuda Triangle's greatest mysteries, and astonishingly more than a century on remains the US Navy's deadliest maritime incident not involving direct conflict. No trace of the lost ship or those aboard has ever been found.

The Cyclops was one vessel in a class of four Proteus Class colliers, and two of her sister ships - the USS Proteus and the USS Nerius - like the Cyclops would vanish without trace, both within weeks of each other in November & December 1941 and both in the vicinity of the Carribean sea. Neither ship has ever been found.

The fate of the fourth ship in the class - the USS Jupiter - is the only one known, but it had an unhappy ending, sank by Japan in the Pacific Ocean in 1942.

 

[emuboy]

The Maura Murray case from 2004 - often cited as the first high profile missing persons case of the social media age - was a strange one. Maura Murray, then aged 21 and a college student studying nursing definitely seemed to be a young woman with problems in her life, and on the 9th of February 2004 emailed college lecturers and her boss at her part time job that there had been a death in her family and would need to be away for a week. In fact there was no death in either side of her family, and after buying alcohol and withdrawing an amount of cash, Maura set off driving through rural New Hampshire in heavy snow. She was in a single vehicle car accident due to the poor driving conditions, the second car accident she had been involved in within a week, and refused help from witnesses, saying she had called AAA and would wait with the damaged car. One man called the police, but when they arrived Maura was gone and searches of the woods failed to yield any clues.

In this case there was no shortage of plausible theories - suicide, disorientation after the accident and subsequent death by exposure in the freezing forests, voluntary disappearance or abduction followed by homicide - but none could be substantiated despite a huge search and appeals for information. Maura Murray was never seen or heard of again, and more than 16 years later no closer to being solved than the cold day she vanished.

It's now been 20 years since Maura Murray vanished into the snow that cold night in February 2004, and still no closer to the case being solved. The most likely explanation - that Maura wandered off into the forest either deliberately or through shock after the car accident and succumbed to the elements - is strange given her body was not found in the snow during extensive searching, and no remains or any of her clothes have been found in all the years since.

 

[kaijuwarrior]

It's now been 20 years since Maura Murray vanished into the snow that cold night in February 2004, and still no closer to the case being solved. The most likely explanation - that Maura wandered off into the forest either deliberately or through shock after the car accident and succumbed to the elements - is strange given her body was not found in the snow during extensive searching, and no remains or any of her clothes have been found in all the years since.

How spooky is this?
I literally have just read about this case and then came to this thread after a year or so and there it is.
No coincidence. It's her from the other side telling us she's ok.

 

[emuboy]

When English celebrity doctor Michael Mosely vanished on a Greek island last month (his body was found a few days later) I posted about some cases where people have inexplicably disappeared in a very short timeframe.

One was Trenny Gibson, a 16-year-old high school student who in 1976 along with her class went on a field trip to the Smokey Mountains National Park in Tennessee. While hiking one of the trails with her fellow students, Trenny stepped off the path and into the forest to answer the call of nature - and that was the last time anyone ever saw or heard from her. Not a single trace of her was ever found at the time or in any of the 48 years that have gone by since then.

For obvious reasons Trenny would not have gone too far into the forest - this also minimizing the chances of her getting lost - so her classmates and supervising teachers should have been able to hear her call for help if she was injured, or if she was attacked either by an animal or a man. But nothing was ever heard.

 

[emuboy]

Fame can be fleeting in show business, especially for child and teenage actors. Sometimes when looking back at old TV shows, movies and other media, one sees a forgotten child/teen actor and actress from years earlier and think, 'They just vanished from the face of the Earth'.

Of course, these young actors did not literally vanish from the face of the Earth and today are working different jobs and living different lives out of the entertainment industry. One of the flight attendants on your Qantas Adelaide to Brisbane flight might be a former young actress who appeared in Home and Away and other TV shows around the time like Blue Heelers, Stingers, Water Rats and All Saints back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A couple in England meeting their kid's teachers at a parent-teacher night might think that something seems familiar about the English teacher, not realizing as a boy he played a support role in the Harry Potter films 20 years ago. The manager of a Walmart in Chicago might as a boy have been a child actor with a number of roles in movies on TV in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and likewise a personal trainer from Philadelphia might over 15 years ago have been a tween/teen actress on sitcoms produced by companies like Disney or Nickelodeon in the 2000s.

However in one case a former child actor did literally vanish without trace, and his name was Joseph Pichler. One otherwise unremarkable day at age 19 in January 2006 Pichler went missing under mysterious circumstances and has not been seen or heard of since. Pichler had a number of TV and movie roles from 1995-2002 and for a time his family lived in LA to further his acting career, however they moved back to their home town in Washington State for Pichler and his siblings to finish high school there. There is no mention of Pichler being upset at taken out of the acting world in his mid teens and going back to ordinary suburbia and attending high school. He graduated high school at age 18 in June 2005 and at the time of his disappearance was attending college. Pichler had expressed some interest in returning to acting in the future, but these were not definite plans and there was certainly no urgency to return to California and try and resume his show business career. It isn't like he was aged 21, had desperately been trying to become an actor again for the past 3 years all to no avail and had slumped into a deep depression. He just disappeared completely with no explanation.

 

[emuboy]

In major disasters there are frequently cases where people are lost and no trace of them are ever found. This is understandable but in two of the world's most infamous disasters the complete disappearances of two people are harder to explain.

When the Titanic sank in 1912, there were only five women from first class who died in the disaster. Four of these have their fates well documented. Ida Strauss elected to stay with and die with her husband Isidor and Edith Evans lost her life helping other women and children to the lifeboats but missing out on a spot herself, dying when the ship's bow plunged under and the forward funnel collapsed. Young mother Bess Allison and her 3-year-old daughter Lorraine drowned along with the husband/father Hudson Allison thanks to a shocking run of blunders, misunderstanding and panic, which started when the family's nanny completely lost her head and took infant son Trevor (although oddly not older sister Lorraine) to a lifeboat without telling the parents and things went from bad to worse from there. The Allison family seemed jinxed, and this only continued with rescued son Trevor, who died of food poisoning just short of his 18th birthday in 1929.

The fifth woman from first class to die was 50-year-old Anne Isham, a wealthy American who lived in Europe, but what is really strange about her case is that despite having existing friends on board and having made other friends during the voyage, she was not sighted at all after dinner on the Sunday night nor during the ensuing evacuation and subsequent disaster, despite her friends actively looking for her on board the Titanic and later the Carpathia, and her body was never found. There was a false story that she refused to leave the ship because she could not take along her Great Dane, but this story has long been debunked as myth and in any case Mrs. Isham did not own any dog much less a Great Dane, and there were no dogs aboard of this breed anyway. One woman did enter but elected to leave a lifeboat to her doom, but she was established as being from second class and was identified by name. So how Mrs. Isham was never seen by friends looking for her, other passengers and crew, missed being evacuated and died could not be readily explained.

Then 89 years later and in the chaos that enveloped New York City on Tuesday September 11 2001 a doctor named Sneha Anne Phillip vanished from sight and has not been seen since. A woman with plenty of troubles in her personal and professional life, Dr. Phillip was last seen and heard from on the wet and stormy afternoon of Monday, September 10 2001. In a phone conversation with her mother she mentioned that she wanted to visit the WTC observation decks, but it was more a general plan than anything definite.

It was suggested that Doctor Phillip went to the WTC to help with medical emergencies, but while this might have been the case nobody remembered seeing her and she would not have been allowed in the burning twin towers before both skyscrapers collapsed. No trace of her body was ever found.

So what happened to her? Did she somehow gain access to the WTC towers and die when they collapsed? Was she already there up on the observation deck and was simply a 9/11 victim caught above point of impact? Was she a victim of foul play either later the previous night or early that morning with her attacker not realizing he was committing this crime on what would turn out to be New York's most infamous day? Or did she fade away under the cover of chaos, leaving all her troubles behind to start a new life. Dr. Phillip is listed as a victim of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, but her exact fate remains a mystery to this day.

 

[Awakening]

Does Amy Lynn Bradley have her own thread?

I’d concluded she’d fallen overboard but this new doco has blown my mind and I need to debrief!

 

[emuboy]

Today marks 80 years since one of the world's most bizarre missing person's cold cases, that of the five Sodder children - Maurice (14), Martha (12), Louis (10), Jennie (8) and Betty (5) - who were apparently killed when their house burned down in mysterious circumstances on Christmas Eve night in 1945, with their parents George and Jennie, two older brothers and sister and a younger (toddler-age) brother and sister surviving the fire.

However, despite the temperatures of the house fire reaching nowhere near the levels required to destroy bones and even tissue in crematoriums, not a single trace of any of the missing five kids could ever be found in the burned-out house, nor were they seen or heard screaming for help during the actual fire as their parents and older brothers and sister frantically tried to rescue them.

A series of bizarre events in the months leading up to the fire, the night of the fire itself and for months, years and then decades since then make this whole case even stranger and like a crime thriller with twists and turns everywhere. But whatever happened that strange night in West Virginia so long ago, none of the five missing Sodder children were seen nor heard from again after they went to bed that evening, and 8 decades on how they vanished remains as unclear today as it did on Christmas Day in 1945.