Section III · The Index
Gone, but not closed.
People who stepped out of an ordinary day and never came back. Disappearances, unidentified remains, and the questions still left open.
8 cases reported in full
Brandon Swanson, a 19-year-old Minnesota college student, vanished on May 14, 2008, after his car went off a rural road and his late-night phone call to his parents cut off mid-sentence. He was never found, and his case led Minnesota to enact Brandon's Law.
On Australia Day 1966, siblings Jane, Arnna, and Grant Beaumont vanished from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide and were never found. Six decades on, it remains one of Australia's most influential and haunting cold cases.
The 2000 disappearance of nine-year-old Asha Degree, who walked alone from her Shelby, North Carolina home into a rainstorm and vanished, and the forensic evidence that decades later reopened the case as a suspected homicide.
On June 7, 1992, three women vanished overnight from a home in Springfield, Missouri, leaving their cars, purses, and pets behind. Decades later, the disappearance of Sherrill Levitt, Suzie Streeter, and Stacy McCall remains unsolved.
Maura Murray, a 21-year-old UMass Amherst nursing student, crashed her car on Route 112 in Haverhill, New Hampshire on February 9, 2004, and vanished before police arrived. She has never been found, and her case became a defining early test of online sleuthing.
On the night before Thanksgiving in 1971, a calm, well-dressed man hijacked a jetliner over the Pacific Northwest, parachuted into the dark with $200,000, and vanished, the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.
The 1948 Tamam Shud case: an unidentified man dead on an Adelaide beach, a cryptic scrap of poetry, and a seventy-year hunt for his name.
Twelve-year-old Jonelle Matthews vanished from her Greeley, Colorado home in 1984. Her remains surfaced in 2019, and a former neighbor was convicted of her murder.
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