List of people who disappeared mysteriously

This is a list of people who mysteriously disappeared, and whose current whereabouts are unknown or whose deaths are not substantiated, as well as a few cases of people whose disappearance was notable and remained mysterious for a long time, but was eventually explained.

Before 1800

• 71 BC – Although he was presumed killed in battle, the body of the rebel slave Spartacus was never found and his fate remains unknown.^[1]
• 53 BC – Ambiorix was, together with Catuvolcus, prince of the Eburones, leader of a Belgic tribe of north-eastern Gaul (Gallia Belgica), where modern Belgium is located. According to the writer Florus (iii.10.8), Ambiorix and his men managed to cross the Rhine and disappear without a trace.
• AD 117 – Legio IX Hispana, (Ninth Spanish Legion), was a legion alleged to have disappeared in Britain during the Roman conquest of Britain. Many references to the legion have been made in subsequent works of fiction.^[2]
• 378 - Roman Emperor Valens is defeated by the Goths at the Battle of Adrianople (modern Edirne, Turkey). The body of Valens was never found.
• 834 (circa) – Muhammad ibn Qasim (al-Alawi) led a rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate but was defeated and detained. He was able to flee but was never heard from again.
• 1021 – Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (36), sixth Fatimid caliph and 16th Ismaili imam, rode his donkey to the Muqattam hills outside Cairo for one of his regular nocturnal meditation outings and failed to return. A search found only the donkey and his bloodstained garments.^[3]
• 1071 - Hereward This formely exiled Anglo-Danish minor noble ebel led a huge revolt in the marshy region of Ely in England against the rule of William the Conqueror. Eventually betrayed by fearful local monks who led the Norman troops through secret trackways, many rebels were mutilated or executed, but Hereward escaped, never to be heard of again.
• 1203 – Arthur I, Duke of Brittany, designated heir of the throne of England. He was supported by French nobility who did not want John of England as overlord. On 31 July 1202, Arthur was surprised and captured by John's barons and imprisoned at Falaise in Normandy. The following year Arthur was transferred to Rouen, and then vanished mysteriously in April 1203.
• 1291 (circa) – Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi, Genoese sailors and explorers lost while attempting the first oceanic journey from Europe to Asia.^[4]
• 1412 – Owain Glyndŵr, the last native Welsh person to hold the title Prince of Wales, instigated the Welsh Revolt against the rule of Henry IV of England in 1400. Although initially successful, the uprising was eventually put down, but Glyndŵr disappeared and was never captured, betrayed, or tempted by royal pardons.^[5]
• 1483 – Edward V of England (12) and Richard of Shrewsbury, 1st Duke of York (9), sons of King Edward IV of England, were placed in the Tower of London (which at that time served as a fortress and a royal palace, as well as a prison) by their uncle Richard III of England.^[6] Neither was ever seen in public again and their fate remains unknown.
• 1499 – John Cabot, Italian explorer, disappeared along with his five ships during an expedition to find a western route from Europe to Asia.^[7]
• 1501 – Gaspar Corte-Real, Portuguese explorer, disappeared on an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage from Europe to Asia. Two of his ships returned to Lisbon, but the third, with Gaspar on board, was lost and never heard from again.^[8]
• 1502 – Miguel Corte-Real, Portuguese explorer, disappeared while searching for his brother Gaspar. Like his brother, he took three ships, and as with his brother, the ship with Miguel on board was lost and never heard from again.^[9]
• 1526 – Francisco de Hoces, Spanish sailor, was commander of the San Lesmes, one of the seven ships of the Loaísa Expedition under García Jofre de Loaísa. It has been speculated that San Lesmes, last seen in the Pacific in late May, may have reached Easter Island or any of the Polynesian archipelagos, or even New Zealand.^[10][11]
• 1546 – Francisco de Orellana, Spanish explorer and conquistador disappeared while exploring the Amazon in November. His fate remains a mystery.
• 1590 – The Roanoke colonists disappeared, becoming known as The Lost Colony, in 18 August 1590, when their settlement was found abandoned.^[12]
• 1611 – Henry Hudson was an English explorer and seafarer. He discovered New York Harbor for the Dutch East India Company. In 1611, mutineers set him, his son and six others adrift in a small boat in what is now Hudson Bay. They were never seen again.
• 1652 - Maurice von der Pfalz (31), brother of Rupert of the Rhine. During the English Civil War Rupert's fleet was destroyed in a terrible storm south of Puerto Rico. All ships except 2 were lost, among them Prince Maurice's ship Defiance. Neither he nor the ship were ever found.
• 1696 – Henry Every was an English pirate who vanished after perpetrating one of the most profitable pirate raids in history; despite a worldwide manhunt and an enormous bounty on his head, Every was never heard from again.
• 1779 – Thomas Lynch, Jr. (30), signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence, boarded a ship bound for the West Indies with his wife and was never seen again.
• 1788 – Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, daughter of a wealthy plantation owner on the French island of Martinique. After being sent to a convent school in France, she was returning home in July or August 1788 when the ship she was on vanished at sea. It is thought that the ship was attacked and taken by Barbary pirates. It has been suggested that she was enslaved and eventually sent to Istanbul as a gift to the Ottoman sultan by the Bey of Algiers. It is unconfirmed if she was the same person as Nakshedil Sultan, consort of the sultan.

1800 to 1899

• 1803 – George Bass (32), British explorer of Australia, set sail from Sydney for South America and was never heard from again.^[13]
• 1809 – Benjamin Bathurst (25), British diplomat, disappeared from an inn in Perleberg.
• 1812 – Theodosia Burr Alston (29), daughter of U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr and sometimes called the most educated American woman of her day, sailed from Georgetown, South Carolina, aboard the Patriot, which was never seen again.
• 1826 – William Morgan (52), resident of Batavia, New York, disappeared just before his book critical of Freemasonry was published.
• 1829 – John Lansing, Jr. (75), American politician, left his Manhattan hotel to mail a letter at a New York City dock and was never seen again.
• 1848 – Khachatur Abovian (38), Armenian writer and national public figure of the early 19th century, credited as creator of modern Armenian literature, left his house early one morning and was never heard from again.
• 1848 – Ludwig Leichhardt (34), Prussian explorer and naturalist, disappeared during his third major expedition to explore parts of northern and central Australia. He was last seen on 3 April at McPherson's Station on the Darling Downs, en route from the Condamine River to the Swan River. His fate after moving inland, although investigated by many, remains a mystery.
• 1849 – Sándor Petőfi (26), Hungarian poet and liberal revolutionary, one of the key figures of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Petőfi was last seen in Transylvania during the Battle of Segesvár. Although there are many different theories and rumours about his supposed death or deportation to Siberia neither his body nor genuine records to support the theories were ever found.
• 1865 – Captain James William Boyd (43), a Confederate States of America military officer, vanished after his release as a prisoner of war in February 1865. Boyd’s disappearance was at the center of a conspiracy theory that he was killed in the place of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.^[14]
• 1872 – Captain Benjamin Briggs (37), his wife Sarah Elizabeth (31), daughter Sophia Matilda (2), and all seven crew members were missing when the Mary Celeste was found adrift in choppy seas some 400 miles (640 km) east of the Azores. Their unexplained disappearances are the core of "one of the most durable mysteries in nautical history"^[15]
• 1880 – Lamont Young, a government geologist inspecting new goldfields on behalf of the New South Wales Mines Department, together with his assistant, Max Schneider, and boat owner Thomas Towers and two other men all disappeared near Bermagui, New South Wales, Australia.^[16] The location where the abandoned wreck of their boat was discovered was subsequently named Mystery Bay.^[17]
• 1888 – Boston Corbett (56), the Union Army soldier who fatally shot John Wilkes Booth, later went insane and was incarcerated in a mental asylum in 1887. He escaped from the facility a year later and was never seen again, though some historians suspect that he may have perished in the Great Hinckley Fire of September 1, 1894.^[18][19]
• 1890 – Louis Le Prince (48), motion picture pioneer, disappeared after boarding a Paris-bound train at Dijon, France.
• 1896 – Albert Jennings Fountain (57) and his son Henry (8) disappeared near Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States.

1900s

• 1900 – Three lighthouse keepers working on the Flannan Isles (off the northwestern coast of Scotland) disappeared in a mystery commemorated in the ballad Flannan Isle and the opera The Lighthouse.
• 1909 – Joshua Slocum (65), Canadian-American sailor and first man to sail single-handedly around the world (1895–1898), disappeared after setting sail from Vineyard Haven on Martha's Vineyard alone, bound for South America, aboard the same 36 ft 9 in (11.20 m) sloop Spray he had used for his circumnavigation.^[20]

1910s

• 1910 – Dorothy Arnold (25), Manhattan socialite and perfume heiress, vanished after buying a book in New York City. She intended to walk through Central Park but was never seen again.^[21]
• 1912 – Bobby Dunbar (4), disappeared during a fishing trip in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. A child found in the custody of William Cantwell Walters of Mississippi some eight months later was ruled to be Bobby Dunbar by a court-appointed arbiter, and Walters was found guilty of kidnapping. The child grew up as Bobby Dunbar, had four children of his own, and died in 1966. In 2004, DNA tests proved that the child found was not related to Bobby Dunbar's brother, Alonzo.^[22]
• 1913 – Rudolf Diesel (55), German inventor and mechanical engineer, was lost overboard from the steamer Dresden. The consensus of his biographers,^[23][24] is that he committed suicide, but homicide theories abound, and no one can be sure.
• 1914 – Ambrose Bierce (71), American writer known for "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and The Devil's Dictionary, was last heard from in a letter of December 1913 bearing a Chihuahua postmark to his secretary and companion, Carrie Christiansen. Although alternative theories are plentiful,^[25] he almost certainly perished in war-torn Mexico, possibly at the Battle of Ojinaga on 10 February,^[26] or perhaps was executed as a spy in the municipal cemetery of Sierra Mojada, Coahuila, where a gravestone bearing his name was erected in 2004.^[27]
• 1914 – F. Lewis Clark (52), businessman from the U.S. state of Idaho, disappeared while visiting Santa Barbara, California.
• 1914 – František Gellner (33), Czech poet, was recruited to the Austro-Hungarian Army at the beginning of World War I and went to Galicia, where he disappeared.^[28][29]
• 1914 – Alejandro Bello Silva (27), a lieutenant in the Chilean Army, disappeared during a qualifying exam flight over central Chile. Although search efforts commenced within hours, no trace was ever found. His disappearance is reflected in a Chilean set phrase, "more lost than Lieutenant Bello", applied to people who stray off course or disappear en route.
• 1918 – USS Cyclops, collier, left Barbados on March 4, lost with 309 crew and passengers en route to Baltimore, Maryland.
• 1918 – Arthur Cravan (31), French proto-dadaist writer and art critic, disappeared near Salina Cruz, Mexico; he most likely drowned.^{[citation needed]}
• 1919 – Mansell Richard James (25), a Canadian flying ace, was last seen in western Massachusetts on 2 June, just days after a record-setting flight between Atlantic City and Boston^[30]
• 1919 – Ambrose Small (56), Canadian millionaire, disappeared from his office. He was last seen at 5:30 pm on December 2, 1919, at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario.^[31]

1920s

• 1920 – Victor Grayson (39), British socialist politician, received a phone call and told his friends that he had to go to the Queen's Hotel in Leicester Square and would be back shortly. He was last seen entering a house owned by Maundy Gregory.
• 1921 – The captain and crew of the Carroll A. Deering, which was found beached near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
• 1921 – Charles Whittlesey (37), American soldier and Medal of Honor recipient who led the "Lost Battalion" in World War I. He was last seen on the evening of November 26, 1921, on a passenger ship bound from New York City to Havana, and presumed to have committed suicide by jumping overboard.
• 1924 - Andrew Irvine (22) English mountaineer who took part in British Mount Everest Expedition 1924. He and his climbing partner George Mallory disappeared somewhere high on the mountain's northeast ridge.
• 1925 – Percy Fawcett (58), British archaeologist and explorer, together with his eldest son, Jack, and friend Raleigh Rimmell, was last seen travelling into the jungle of Mato Grosso in Brazil to search for a hidden city called the Lost City of Z. Several unconfirmed sightings and many conflicting reports and theories explaining their disappearance followed, but despite the loss of over 100 lives in more than a dozen follow-up expeditions, and the recovery of some of Fawcett's belongings, their fate remains a mystery.^[32]
• 1925 – Frederick McDonald, Australian politician, set off from Martin Place, Sydney, for a meeting with Jack Lang two blocks away but failed to arrive. He was possibly murdered by his political rival Thomas John Ley. In 1947, Ley was convicted at the Old Bailey of "the chalkpit murder" of a barman in England and sentenced to hang but was then declared insane and sent to Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage two months later.^[33]
• 1926 – Agatha Christie, the British crime writer famously disappeared and, although she reappeared sometime later, the actual reason for her disappearance remains a mystery.^[34]
• 1927 – Charles Nungesser (45), French aviator, and his navigator, François Coli (45), disappeared while attempting a flight from Paris to New York. They are presumed to have crashed into the Atlantic, or possibly in Newfoundland or Maine, but no wreckage that could be confirmed to be from their biplane, The White Bird, was ever found.
• 1928 – Walter Collins (10) disappeared from his Los Angeles home.^[35] His disappearance and the attempt by the Los Angeles police department to convince his mother that a different boy was her son formed the basis of the 2008 film Changeling.
• 1928 – Glen and Bessie Hyde (29 & 22), American newlyweds, disappeared while attempting to raft the Colorado River rapids of the Grand Canyon.
• 1928 – Roald Amundsen, Norwegian Arctic explorer, disappeared on a search and rescue mission in the Arctic.
• 1928 - Captain Hans Ferdinand Andersen, fourteen crew and forty five cadets down to the age of 16 disappeared with the Danish sailtraining vessel "København" ("Copenhagen") on route from Buenos Aires to Australia, sometime between December 1928 and January 1929.

1930s

• 1930 – Joseph Force Crater (41), an associate justice of the New York Supreme Court, was last seen on August 6 entering a New York City taxicab, and his mistress, Sally Lou Ritz (22), often claimed to have disappeared a few weeks later, was interviewed by police as late as July 1937.^[36] Judge Crater was never heard from again, and Crater's disappearance, which prompted one of the most sensational manhunts of the 20th century,^[37] was the subject of widespread media attention and a grand jury investigation. Crater was declared legally dead in 1939 and his missing persons file was officially closed in 1979; however, Cold Case Squad detectives have investigated new leads as recently as 2005,^[38] and "pull a Crater" became slang for a person vanishing.^[39]
• 1934 – Wallace Fard Muhammad (43), founder of the Nation of Islam, left Detroit and was never heard from again.^[40]
• 1934 - Everett Ruess, young American artist travelling through the deserts of Utah
• 1935 – Charles Kingsford Smith (38), Australian pioneer aviator, and co-pilot Tommy Pethybridge disappeared during an overnight flight from Allahabad, India, to Singapore, while attempting to break the England-Australia speed record. Eighteen months later, Burmese fishermen found an undercarriage leg and wheel (with its tire still inflated) on the shoreline of Aye Island in the Andaman Sea, 3 km (2 mi) off the southeast coastline of Burma, which Lockheed confirmed to be from their Lockheed Altair, the Lady Southern Cross. Botanists who examined the weeds clinging to it estimated that the aircraft itself lies not far from the island at a depth of approximately 15 fathoms (90 ft; 27 m).^[41] A filmmaker claimed to have located Lady Southern Cross on the seabed in February 2009.^[42]
• 1937 – Amelia Earhart (39), famous American aviator, and her navigator, Fred Noonan (44), disappeared over the central Pacific in the vicinity of Howland Island while attempting a circumnavigational flight of the globe, July 2.
• 1937 – Sigizmund Levanevsky (35), famous Soviet aviator, together with his five crew and their Bolkhovitinov DB-A aircraft, disappeared in the vicinity of the North Pole after reporting loss of power from one of their four Mikulin AM-34 engines while attempting to prove a transpolar route between Asia and North America commercially viable .^[43]
• 1937 – Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe (24 & 28) escaped from Alcatraz prison in the U.S. state of California and disappeared. Authorities presumed that they drowned, but no bodies were ever recovered.
• 1938 – Ettore Majorana (31), Italian physicist, disappeared during a boat trip from Naples to Palermo.
• 1938 – Andrew Carnegie Whitfield (28), nephew of U.S. steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, disappeared during a solo morning flight in a small light aircraft from Roosevelt Field, New York, on Long Island, to an airfield at Brentwood, approximately 22 miles away.
• 1939 - Barbara Newhall Follett (25) was an American child prodigy novelist. Her first novel, The House Without Windows, was published in 1927 when she was thirteen years old. Her next novel, The Voyage of the Norman D., received critical acclaim when she was fourteen. In 1939, aged 25, she became depressed with her marriage and walked out of her apartment with just thirty dollars. She was never seen again.
• 1939 – Lloyd L. Gaines (28) was the central figure in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), one of the most important court cases of the U.S. civil rights movement. On the evening of 19 March, Gaines left his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity house in Chicago, having told the housekeeper he was going to buy some stamps, and was never seen or heard from again, forcing the NAACP to drop the case. It was another decade before MU admitted a black student. MU awarded Gaines an honorary posthumous law degree in 2006.^[44][45] Some accounts suggest he was living in New York or Mexico City in the late 1940s.^[46]
• 1939 – Richard Halliburton Missing at sea since March, 1939 after trying to sail a Chinese junk across the Pacific Ocean. The Sea Dragon was a gaudily decorated 75-foot junk. In 1945 some wreckage identified as a rudder and believed to belong to the Sea Dragon washed ashore in California.

1940s

• 1941 – Thomas C. Latimore, U.S. Navy captain and former Governor of American Samoa. Never returned from a hike in the Aiea Mountains of Hawaii during July 1941. No body has ever been found.
• 1944 – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French author and aviator. His plane vanished while conducting an intelligence mission over German-occupied France near Marseilles. A bracelet bearing his name was recovered in a fishing dragnet in 1998, and part of his airplane--a P-38 Lightning-based Lockheed F-5B reconnaissance plane--was found in 2000, recovered in 2003. The wreckage was confirmed in 2004.
• 1944 – Glenn Miller (40), the popular American jazz musician and bandleader, was en route from England to France on December 15, 1944, to play for troops in recently liberated Paris, when the single–engined, Noorduyn Norseman aircraft in which he was a passenger disappeared over the English Channel. The plane and those on board have never been located. As a U.S. military officer who vanished in wartime, Miller continues to be listed officially as missing in action.
• 1944 – Rocco Perri (born 30 December 1887, date of death unknown, last seen alive 23 April 1944) was an organized crime figure in Ontario, Canada in the early 20th century.
• 1944 – Szilveszter Matuska, Hungarian mass-murderer known as "The Train Killer", escaped from jail in 1944 and was never recaptured.
• 1945 – Heinrich Müller (45), Nazi Gestapo chief, last confirmed sighting in the Führerbunker on the evening of May 1, 1945. His CIA file and related documents state that while the record is "...inconclusive on Müller's ultimate fate ... [he] most likely died in Berlin in early May 1945."^[47]
• 1945 – Raoul Wallenberg (32), Swedish diplomat credited with saving the lives of at least 20,000 Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, was arrested on espionage charges in Budapest following the arrival of the Soviet army. His subsequent fate remains a mystery despite hundreds of purported sightings in Soviet prisons, some as recent as the 1980s. In 2001, after 10 years of research, a Swedish-Russian panel concluded that Wallenberg probably died (most likely was executed) in Soviet custody on July 17, 1947, but to date no hard evidence has been found to confirm this.^[48] In fact, in 2010 evidence from Russian archives surfaced suggesting he was alive after the presumed execution date.^[49]
• 1945 – Constanze Manziarly (25), cook and dietitian to Adolf Hitler, disappeared while escaping Berlin following the Soviet invasion and fall of Nazi Germany. She was believed to be raped and killed by Soviet soldiers in an U-Bahn subway tunnel.^[50]
• 1945 – Subhas Chandra Bose (48), one of the most prominent leaders of the Indian Independence Movement, disappeared after a plane crash in Taiwan. His body was never recovered and his death has long been the subject of dispute.
• 1945 – Flight 19: Five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers disappeared on 5 December while on a training flight in the area known as the Bermuda Triangle. During the subsequent search, a PBM-5 Mariner flying boat participating in the search disappeared, apparently the result of a mid-air explosion. No remains of the six planes and 21 crewmen involved have ever been positively identified.
• 1945 – Supriyadi (22) was an Indonesian national hero. On 6 October 1945 in a government decree issued by the newly independent Indonesia, Supriyadi was named Minister for Public Security in the first cabinet. However, he failed to appear, and was replaced on 20 October by ad interim minister Muhammad Soeljoadikusuma. To this day his fate remains unknown.^[51][52]
• 1945 – Genrikh Lyushkov (45), high-level Soviet defector and former Far East NKVD chief. A participant in the Great Purge, he fled to avoid what he believed would be arrest and execution into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. After his defection, he became a military consultant and analyst for the Imperial Japanese Army. He disappeared during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and was reported as being last seen in a crowded train station in Dairen (Dalian). Several theories exist about his fate, but he is presumed to have died in 1945, killed either by Soviet or Japanese forces.^[53]
• 1946 – Paula Jean Welden (18), Bennington College sophomore, disappeared while walking on the Long Trail near Glastenbury Mountain, Vermont, USA.^[54][55]
• 1948 – Sir Arthur Coningham (53), retired RAF Air Marshal, disappeared when Avro Tudor IV G-AHNP Star Tiger went missing over the western Atlantic.^[56] He was one of 25 passengers, together with 6 crew, who were lost when the flight from Santa Maria Airport in the Azores failed to reach its destination of Kindley Field, Bermuda.^[57]Star Tiger's sister aircraft G-AGRE Star Ariel also disappeared over the western Atlantic, with the loss of all 7 crew and 13 passengers, while flying from Bermuda to Kingston Airport, Jamaica, the following year.^[58]
• 1949 – Jean Spangler (26), American dancer, model and bit-part actress, disappeared in October 1949 from Los Angeles, California. Last seen by her sister-in-law before going to meet her ex-husband. Two days later her purse was found near the entrance gate to Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

1950s

• 1950 – Richard Colvin Cox (20), second-year military cadet, disappeared from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.
• 1953 – First Lieutenant Felix Moncla (27), pilot, and Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson (22), radar operator, disappeared when their United States Air Force F-89 Scorpion was scrambled from Kincheloe Air Force Base and subsequently went missing over Lake Superior while intercepting an unknown aircraft in Canadian airspace, close to the Canada – United States border. The USAF identified the second aircraft as Royal Canadian Air Force C-47 Dakota VC-912, crossing Northern Lake Superior from west to east at 7,000 feet en route from Winnipeg to Sudbury, Canada.^[59] Some ufologists have associated the disappearance with alleged "flying saucer" activity and refer to it as the "Kinross Incident".^[60]
• 1955 – The crew and passengers of the 69-foot merchant vessel Joyita, which disappeared in the South Pacific; the Joyita was found five weeks later, partially submerged and listing heavily, with no one on board.
• 1955 – Weldon Kees (41), U.S. poet, disappeared without leaving a note but had talked about packing up and moving to Mexico. His Plymouth Savoy was found on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge with the keys in the ignition.
• 1956 – Three USAF airmen, commander Captain Robert H. Hodgin (31), observer Captain Gordon M. Insley (32), and pilot 2nd Lt. Ronald L. Kurtz (22), disappeared when their B-47 Stratojet was lost after failing to make contact with an aerial refueling tanker at 14,000 ft over the Mediterranean.^[61]
• 1956 – Lionel "Buster" Crabb (46), retired British Royal Navy frogman, disappeared during an MI6 mission to spy on the Soviet Sverdlov class cruiser Ordzhonikidze in Portsmouth Harbour. The coroner concluded that a body (missing its head and hands) in a frogman suit found floating in Chichester Harbour the following year was Crabb's, but no positive identification was ever made nor cause of death determined.^[62]
• 1956 – Gunnel Gummeson (26), Swedish teacher, disappeared with her American boyfriend Peter Winant travelling in Afghanistan.
• 1957 – Moira McCall Anderson (11) disappeared while on an errand for her grandmother in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, Scotland. The Moira Anderson Foundation was established in memory of her.
• 1959 – Camilo Cienfuegos (27), Cuban revolutionary, disappeared when his Cessna 310 went missing over the ocean during a night flight from Camagüey to Havana.

1960s

• 1961 – Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern New Guinea.
• 1961 - David Kenyon Webster (39), a journalist for the Los Angeles Daily News, and The Saturday Evening Post, and World War II veteran with "Easy" Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division (made famous in the book, and miniseries "Band of Brothers"), went out on a boat near the coast of Santa Monica, and disappeared; he is presumed drowned, though no body was ever recovered.
• 1962 – Frank Morris (35) and brothers Clarence Anglin (31) and John Anglin (32) escaped from Alcatraz prison in the U.S. state of California and disappeared. Authorities presumed that they drowned but no bodies were ever found.
• 1964 – Charles Clifford Ogle (41) took off from Oakland International Airport, California, in his Cessna 210, a single-engine aircraft, and was never seen again.^{[citation needed]}
• 1966 – The Beaumont children, Jane Nartare (9), Arnna Kathleen (7), and Grant Ellis (4), were three siblings who disappeared from a beach near Adelaide, South Australia.
• 1967 – Jim Thompson (61), former U.S. military intelligence officer who once worked for the Office of Strategic Services (and later known as the "Thai Silk King" for his revival of the Thai silk industry), failed to return from an afternoon walk in the Cameron Highlands in Pahang, Malaysia, quickly prompting a massive manhunt. Many have since investigated his disappearance and attempted to explain it, but no trace of him has ever been found.^[63]
• 1967 – James P. Brady (59), Canadian Metis leader, and a Cree friend, Abraham Halkett (40), disappeared while on a prospecting trip in northern Saskatchewan. An extensive land, air, and water search located their camp but failed to find any trace of either man.^[64]
• 1967 – Harold Holt (59), then Prime Minister of Australia, disappeared while swimming in heavy surf at a beach notorious for strong and dangerous rip currents. Despite one of the largest search-and-rescue operations ever mounted in Australia, his body was never found.^[65][66]
• 1969 – April Fabb (13) went missing in mysterious circumstances from Metton, Norfolk, United Kingdom.

1970s

1970

• Sean Flynn (28), son of Errol Flynn and Lili Damita, and Dana Stone (32), American photojournalists on assignment for Time Magazine and CBS News, respectively, were captured by Communist guerrillas while travelling by motorcycle in Cambodia, April 6.
• Robin Graham (18) ran out of gas on the Hollywood Freeway. She was last seen by California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers, who directed her to a call box and later saw her speaking with a man beside her car. The circumstances of her disappearance resulted in CHP policies being changed to ensure the safety of stranded female motorists.^[67]

1971

• D. B. Cooper, skyjacker, collected a ransom of US$200,000 and then parachuted from the rear stairs of a Boeing 727 at a height of 10,000 feet (3,000 m) over the Pacific Northwest region of the United States somewhere between Seattle and Portland, Oregon, November 24.^[68]

1972

• Hale Boggs (58), US House Majority Leader (D-LA) and Nick Begich (40), U.S. Representative from Alaska disappeared with their Cessna 310 in Alaska, along with Begich's aide Russell Brown and pilot Don Jonz, presumably on October 16.
• Roberto Clemente (38), Puerto Rican baseball player and member of the baseball hall of fame, whose plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean after take-off from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, bound for Managua, Nicaragua, with supplies to help earthquake victims on December 31. His body as well as those of the others on his plane were never found. He is presumed dead
• Zahir Raihan (36), Bangladeshi filmmaker went looking for his brother Shahidullah Kaiser and never returned.

1973

• Anna Christian Waters (5), disappeared from her backyard.
• Joanne Ratcliffe (11) and Kirsty Gordon (4), attended a football match at Adelaide Oval in South Australia, and then disappeared.

1974

• Oscar Zeta Acosta (39), American attorney and Chicano activist, most famous for portrayal as "Dr. Gonzo" in Hunter S. Thompson's book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
• Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan (39), and the last person indicted for murder by a coroner's jury. His whereabouts have been unknown since the night his children's nanny, Sandra Rivett, was beaten to death with a lead pipe in the basement of his estranged wife's home. He was officially declared dead in 1999.^[69]

1975

• Bas Jan Ader (33), Dutch artist, disappeared while attempting to sail a 13 ft (4 m) pocket cruiser across the Atlantic.
• Mona Blades (18), New Zealander, disappeared while hitch-hiking in the North Island. Believed murdered, but no remains have ever been discovered.
• Jimmy Hoffa (62), U.S. trade union leader, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters disappeared in the parking lot of a restaurant, where it is believed he was to meet with two Mafia leaders—Anthony Giacalone and Anthony Provenzano.^[70]
• The Lyon sisters, Katherine Mary (10) and Sheila Mary (12), disappeared while walking home after visiting a nearby mall in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., USA.
• Juanita Nielsen (38), Australian publisher and anti-development campaigner, disappeared from Kings Cross, Sydney.

1976

• Eloise Worledge (8) disappeared from her home in Beaumaris, Victoria, Australia, thought to have been abducted from her bedroom.^[71]
• Renee MacRae (36) and son Andrew (3) were last seen in Inverness, Scotland.^[72]

1977

• Donald Mackay (43), Australian anti-drugs campaigner, was possibly murdered after providing information to police which resulted in what was then the biggest drugs bust in Australian history.^[73][74]
• Megumi Yokota (13) was kidnapped from the city of Niigata, Japan. She was later believed to have been abducted by North Korean intelligence forces. The American documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story was released in 2006.

1978

• John Brisker (31), former American Basketball Association and National Basketball Association player, disappeared after flying to Uganda. He was declared legally dead in 1985.
• Frederick Valentich (21) disappeared during a solo flight over the Bass Strait in Australia, with the media suggesting a UFO abduction as a possibility.^[75]
• Genette Tate (13) disappeared while delivering newspapers in Aylesbeare, Devon, England.^[76]
• Musa al-Sadr (49) and two aides, Mohammed Yaaqoub and Abbas Badreddine, disappeared six days after entering Libya on an official visit from Lebanon at the invitation of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi.^[77][78]
• Peter Winston (19), American chess player, disappeared in New York City.

1979

• Etan Patz (6) disappeared while on his way to school in lower Manhattan. He is considered legally dead as of 2001. He was the first missing child featured on a milk carton.^[79] In May 2010 authorities re-opened the case.^[80]

1980s

1980

• Azaria Chamberlain, nine-week-old Australian baby girl, presumed to be taken by a dingo near Uluru. Some clothing items were later recovered, but her remains have never been found. Azaria's disappearance and the subsequent police investigation were the basis for the 1988 motion picture Evil Angels (released in the Europe and North America as A Cry in the Dark).^[81]
• Louise and Charmian Faulkner, mother (43) and daughter (2), disappeared from outside their home in St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia.

1982

• Johnny Gosch (12) was reported missing to West Des Moines Police Department^[82] by his parents after he disappeared while delivering newspapers. At that time, there was a customary three-day waiting period before police responded to missing persons reports. Gosch was never heard from again, but his case prompted new laws for Iowa and other states, resulting in missing persons reports involving children being given immediate attention.^[83]

1983

• Emanuela Orlandi (15), citizen of Vatican City.
• Kirsa Jensen (14) disappeared while riding her horse to a beach near Napier, New Zealand.
• Tammy Lynn Leppert (18) a model and actress who disappeared without a trace after leaving her Rockledge, Florida, family home.^[84]

1984

• Kevin Andrew Collins (10) disappeared while returning home alone from basketball practice at his school in the Haight district of San Francisco. His was one of the first of the "Have you seen me?" milk carton photos.
• Edward L. Montoro (52) motion picture producer/distributor, disappeared after taking more than $1 million from his own company, Film Ventures International. It was speculated that he fled to Mexico, but his whereabouts to this day have been undetermined.

1985

• Boris Weisfeiler (43), U.S. mathematician, disappeared in the Biobío Region of Chile during a solo hiking trip.^[85] Chilean authorities originally concluded that he drowned, but documents released by the United States Department of State in 2000 included a 1986 memo suggesting he may be a captive "somewhere in Chile (probably Colonia Dignidad)", and a 1987 account by a CIA source claiming that Weisfeiler had been interrogated and fatally beaten by a Chilean army patrol.^[86]
• Vladimir Alexandrov, Russian physicist, disappeared while attending a nuclear winter conference in Madrid.^[87]
• Christopher Dale Flannery, a famous figure of the Australian underworld and an alleged hitman who was responsible for numerous murders, exited his apartment in May 1985 to meet with his employer and was never seen again.

1986

• Suzy Lamplugh (25), British estate agent, disappeared from Fulham, west London. In 1994 she was declared dead, presumed murdered. Despite further police investigations in 1998 and 2000, no trace of her has ever been found.
• Philip Cairns (13), Irish schoolboy, disappeared in October 1986 on his way back to school after going home for lunch. His schoolbag was found abandoned in a previously searched lane near his house a few days later, but there has been no trace of Philip, and no arrests have ever been made in connection with the case.

1987

• Federico Caffè (73), Italian economist, suddenly disappeared on the dawn of April 15, shortly after quitting university teaching. He was declared dead on October 30, 1998. The mystery of his disappearance has not been unveiled.

1988

• Tara Calico (19), disappeared near her home in Belen, New Mexico on September 20, 1988. A Polariod photo of a boy and girl, bound and gagged, surfaced on June 15, 1989. The girl has been identified by some as Tara Calico.

1989

• Jacob Wetterling (11) was abducted by a masked gunman while cycling home in the dark with his brother Trevor (10) and friend Aaron (11) after going to rent a video from a convenience store a 10-minute ride away from his home in St. Joseph, Minnesota.^[88]

1990s

1990

• Sarah MacDiarmid (23) disappeared from Kananook railway station, Melbourne, Australia.

1991

• Ben Needham, a 21-month-old boy, disappeared from the island of Kos in Greece on July 24. He has never been found. It was believed Ben was abducted, and several suspects in Kos and Veria were suggested as being responsible, but no one was ever charged with abduction.
• Michael Dunahee (4) disappeared from a school playground in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. His parents were nearby, but no witnesses to his presumed abduction have ever been identified, and there have been no subsequent confirmed sightings of him.^[89]

1992

• The Springfield Three—Sherrill Levitt (47), her daughter Suzie Streeter (19), and Suzie's friend Stacy McCall (18)—disappeared from Levitt's home in Springfield, Missouri, after which Suzie and Stacy had just graduated from Kickapoo High School earlier that day. Suzie and Stacy had arrived at Levitt's home at around 2:00 am after a graduation party. It is being investigated as an apparent triple disappearance.^[90]

1994

• Michael Anthony Hughes (6) was kidnapped from his school in Choctaw, Oklahoma, by Franklin Delano Floyd, who claimed that Hughes was his son.^[91] Authorities have received conflicting reports from Floyd as to whether Hughes was murdered or is still alive and safe in the custody of an undisclosed caregiver.^[91]
• Ylenia Carrisi (23), Italian TV celebrity and daughter of singers Albano Carrisi and Romina Power, disappeared during a vacation in New Orleans.

1995

• Morgan Nick (6), was at a little league baseball game with her mother in Alma, Arkansas, when she was believed to have been abducted by a man she was seen with earlier. Her mother started the "Morgan Nick Foundation" for missing children. However, she has yet to be found.
• Richey Edwards (27), member of Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers, had a history of self-injury and received treatment for alcoholism, anorexia nervosa and depression in the years leading up to his disappearance. His car was found abandoned at the Aust service area adjacent to the Severn Bridge, a location notorious for suicides.^[92] He was declared presumed dead in November 2008.^[93]
• Jodi Huisentruit (27), KIMT news anchor, was abducted from outside her apartment while on her way to work in Mason City, Iowa. She was declared legally dead in 2001.^[94]

1996

• Kristin Smart (19), student at California Polytechnic State University, disappeared after leaving a party.
• Sarah Spiers (18) disappeared after leaving a nightclub in Claremont, Western Australia in January 1996. Her body has never been found. Almost six months later, Jane Rimmer, 23, disappeared from the same part of Claremont. Her remains were found in a southern Perth suburb in August 1996. A third victim, Ciara Glennon (27), also disappeared from Claremont in March 1997, with her remains being found three weeks later in a northern Perth suburb. The cases became known as the Claremont serial murders.

1997

• Angelo Cruz (39), New York-born Puerto Rican basketball player.
• Grant Hadwin (48), an anti-logging activist, went missing while traveling by kayak across the Hecate Strait to Graham Island in Canada.^[95]
• Kristen Modafferi (18) was last seen at the Crocker Galleria Mall coffee shop where she worked in San Francisco. She was living in Oakland, California, while attending summer school at the University of California, Berkeley, following the completion of her freshman year of college in Raleigh, North Carolina.^[96]

1998

• Amy Lynn Bradley (23), American passenger on the Royal Caribbean International cruise ship Rhapsody of the Seas, disappeared while the ship was docking in Curaçao, Antilles.^[97]
• Florinda Donner (54) and Taisha Abelar, along with several other female followers of Carlos Castaneda, disappeared shortly after his death. The remains of one, Patricia Partin (40), were found in 2003; the whereabouts of the others are unknown.^[98]
• Tom and Eileen Lonergan (34 and 29), American couple who failed to return from a SCUBA diving expedition in the Coral Sea.

2000s

2000

• Bruno Manser (45), Swiss-born activist who fervently campaigned for the preservation of rainforests in Sarawak, was last seen in May 2000 in the isolated village of Bareo in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, close to the border with Indonesia. He was declared legally dead in March 2005.
• Trevor Deely (22) was last seen when filmed by a CCTV camera near the Baggot Street bridge in Dublin city centre as he walked home to his apartment in Serpentine Avenue, Sandymount, on a stormy night during a taxi strike. Despite an extensive poster campaign and police searches from the air, with dogs, with divers, and by dredging, his fate remains unknown.^[99]

2001

• Peter Falconio (28), British tourist, disappeared in the Australian outback while traveling with girlfriend Joanne Lees. Although Falconio's body has never been found, Bradley John Murdoch was convicted of his murder in 2005.
• Jason Jolkowski (19), resident of Omaha, Nebraska, disappeared on June 13. His parents subsequently founded Project Jason, a nonprofit organization that assists families of missing persons.

2002

• Bison Dele (33, born Brian Carson Williams), a former NBA player; his girlfriend Serena Karlan (30); and French skipper Bertrand Saldo (32) were last heard from on 6 July when they left the French Polynesian island of Moorea aboard Dele's 55 ft (17 m) catamaran, Hakuna Matata, bound for Honolulu via the Marquesas Islands.

2003

• Ben Charles Padilla (50), licensed aircraft mechanic, flight engineer, and pilot of small airplanes, was on board Boeing 727-223 designation N844AA when it was stolen from Luanda, Angola, on 25 May and has not been heard from since.^[100]
• Fryderyk Frontier (28) disappeared near Taroko Gorge in Taiwan some time between May 22 and May 26, 2003.^[101]

2004

• Maura Murray (21) from Hanson, Massachusetts, a nursing student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was last seen at the scene of a minor one-vehicle accident in which her car was immobilised after having crashed into a roadside snowbank on New Hampshire Route 112. Earlier on the day of her disappearance, she had lied to professors about a death in her family, saying she would be absent from class for a week.^[102][103]
• Somchai Neelapaijit (52), Thai Muslim lawyer and human rights activist representing South Thailand insurgency terrorism suspects, was last seen in Bangkok. Possibly a case of forced disappearance.^[104][105]

2005

• Natalee Holloway (18), American student from Alabama, was last seen leaving a nightclub in Aruba with three men, including Joran van der Sloot.^[97] She was declared dead in 2012.
• Ray Gricar (59), Centre County district attorney in the U.S. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania who originally declined to press charges against Jerry Sandusky in the Penn State scandal. Last heard from April 15, when he called his girlfriend from his car, stating he was in the vicinity of Centre Hall. He was reported missing that evening when he failed to return home; his car was found the next day and his laptop and its hard drive (too badly damaged to read) found in a nearby river over the next several months. His family had him declared legally dead in 2011.^[106]
• Margie Profet (47), controversial evolutionary biological theorist, was last reported seen by an acquaintance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sometime early in 2005. She may have had severe bipolar disorder and had slowly been dropping out of sight. ^[107]
• George Allen Smith (26) from Greenwich, Connecticut, USA, was discovered to be missing ten days after his wedding to Jennifer Hagel Smith, while cruising the eastern Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey aboard the Royal Caribbean International cruise ship Brilliance of the Seas.

2006

• Joe Pichler (18), American former child actor, disappeared from his home town of Bremerton, Washington. Four days later his car was found above the Port Madison Narrows; inside, police discovered a message which they characterized as a suicide note. Though it did not explicitly state that he intended to take his own life, the note expressed suicidal thoughts and asked that his belongings go to his younger brother.^[108][109]
• Jorge Julio López (77), retired Argentine bricklayer, was kidnapped during Argentina's National Reorganization Process in the 1970s. In September 2006, López disappeared after testifying in a trial against Dirty War criminal Miguel Etchecolatz.
• Sivasubramaniam Raveendranath (55), Sri Lankan Tamil academic and Vice Chancellor of the Eastern University of Sri Lanka, disappeared while attending a conference in Colombo.
• Jennifer Kesse (28), went missing in January 2006 near a local shopping mall in Orlando, Florida.

2007

• Jim Gray (63), database pioneer, Microsoft Research scientist, and Turing Award winner, left San Francisco Bay in his 12 m (39 ft) sailboat Tenacious to scatter his mother's ashes at the Farallon Islands, a wildlife refuge 43 km (27 mi) away, and was reported missing when he failed to return later the same day. No Mayday call was heard, his distress radiobeacon was not activated, and, despite one of the most ambitious search and rescue missions of all time, no trace of Gray or his yacht has ever been found.^[110]
• Kaz II, a 9.8 m (32 ft) catamaran, was found adrift with its three-man crew, owner Derek Batten (56) and brothers Peter Tunstead (69) and James Tunstead (63), missing. The yacht's sails were up and its engine running, and the global positioning system showed the yacht had been drifting since around the time of their last known radio contact, about 11 hours after they departed Shute Harbour for Townsville, Queensland, five days earlier.^[111]
• Madeleine McCann (3) disappeared after being left asleep in the unlocked ground-floor bedroom of her family's rented holiday apartment in the Algarve (Portugal) while her parents dined with friends at a local restaurant; there have been no confirmed sightings of her since then.^[112]

2008

• Amy Fitzpatrick (15), Irish-born teenager, was last seen in Mijas Costa in Málaga, Spain. She had been babysitting with a friend on New Year's Eve. Amy left at about 10:10pm that night and never arrived home, only a short distance away. She has not been seen or heard from since. Investigators are working on her case.
• Leonid Rozhetskin (41), Russian-born British media magnate, disappeared from his house in Jūrmala, Latvia, in what Latvian police described as "extremely worrying circumstances"; he may have been the victim of a political murder plot.^[113]
• Movladi Atlangeriyev, Chechen mafia boss and founder of the Lazanskaya crime organization. Atlangeriyev was reportedly seized at gunpoint in central Moscow by two men of Caucasian appearance in January 2008. His disappearance is widely believed to be tied to both the 2007 abortive assassination attempt on Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky and the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya. ^[114]

2009

• Jure Šterk (72) was on a sailing trip around the world. He regularly communicated with radio amateurs but all communications ceased around January 1, 2009, as reported by an Australian ham radio operator.^[115] His sail boat Lunatic was spotted on January 26 by a merchant vessel the Aida and it appeared abandoned. It was finally found adrift and abandoned on April 30, 2009, by the crew of science vessel RV Roger Revelle with no sign of Šterk on board.^[116]
• Claudia Lawrence, 35, was last seen on 18 March 2009 near Heworth in York, England.
• Susan Powell (28) is a Utah mother of two who disappeared from her home under suspicious circumstances in December 2009. In spite of an ongoing investigation, her fate remains unknown. Husband Josh Powell killed their two children and himself in a deliberately-set house fire at Graham, Washington on 5 February 2012.

2010s

2010

• Kyron Horman (7), American school boy, disappeared from his school in NW Portland, Oregon. Massive searches have taken place since June 4, 2010, but no evidence of his whereabouts have been found.

2011

• Edward and Austin Bryant from Monument, Colorado, United States. Edward and Austin are biological siblings who were adopted by Edward Eugene Bryant and Linda Bryant in March 2000. On January 22, 2011, El Paso County, Colorado, authorities were notified of Austin's suspicious disappearance; he had last been seen sometime "between 2003 and 2005." During the investigation, authorities discovered that Edward Dylan was also unaccounted for, having last been seen in 2001.
• Rebecca Coriam (24). A crewmember of the cruise ship Disney Wonder, she was last seen in the early morning of March 22, 2011, when a security camera in the crew lounge recorded her having an upsetting telephone conversation. Investigations are continuing. Some reports suggest she went overboard; other evidence points to the possibility that she was alive as of May of that year.

2012

• Gavin Smith (57), executive with 20th Century Fox. Last seen May 1, 2012, in his black 2000 Mercedes-Benz 420E with California license plate 6EKT044, leaving a friend's house in Oak Park, California.^[117]

See also

• Forced disappearance

References

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