The Disappeared

This project is about people who disappeared mysteriously, 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.

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Before 1800

• 1499 – John Cabot, Italian explorer, disappeared along with his five ships during an expedition to find a western route from Europe to Asia.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 1546 –Francisco de Orellana, Spanish explorer and conquistador, disappeared while exploring the Amazon in November. His fate remains a mystery.
• 1578 –Sebastian of Portugal, Portuguese King, whose body was never found after the Battle of Alcácer Quibir; many Portuguese came to believe that Sebastian had survived the battle and would return to claim his throne. The belief arose that Sebastian could return at any moment to help Portugal in its darkest hour.
• 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.
• 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 Naksh-i-Dil Haseki, consort of the sultan.
• 1788 – The French expedition of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse disappeared after a last stop off Botany Bay (near what is now Sydney, Australia). The wrecks of the expedition's two ships were subsequently discovered near Vanikoro, where the survivors may have set up a camp.
• 1792 – James Harrod, 46, an early explorer of the areas west of the Appalachian Mountains prior to their settlement by European-Americans, never returned from a trip to western Kentucky from Harrodsburg. Theories about his fate range from murder at the hands of his companions or native Americans in the area, to accidental death or a desire to abandon his wife and family.

1800 to 1899

• 1803 – George Bass (32), a British explorer of Australia, set sail from Sydney for South America and was never heard from again.
• 1809 – Benjamin Bathurst (25), a 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), an American politician, left his Manhattan hotel to mail a letter at a New York City dock and was never seen again.
• 1843 –Sequoyah (circa 73), the creator of Cherokee syllabary, disappeared during a trip to Mexico to locate isolated tribes of Cherokees who had moved there during the time of Indian Removal in the U.S. His body has never been found, although at least three different burial sites have been reported.
• 1845 – Franklin's lost expedition, with more than 100 seamen, made last contact with a whaling ship before entering Victoria Strait in search of the Northwest Passage. Although the remains of some individuals were later discovered, the majority of corpses were never found, and the exact reason for their demise remains a mystery.
• 1848 – Khachatur Abovian (38), an 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, was one of the key figures of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Petőfi was last seen in Transylvania during the Battle of Segesvár. Although different theories and rumours abound about his supposed death or deportation to Siberia, neither his body nor genuine records to support the theories were ever found.
• 1857 –Solomon Northup (48–49?), American author, is most notable for his book Twelve Years a Slave, in which he details his kidnapping and subsequent sale into slavery. Northup did not return to his family from his book-promoting tour. No contemporary evidence documents Northup after 1857. Historians are divided on whether Northup was kidnapped once again and sold back into slavery or simply died of natural causes.
• 1857 - Nana Sahib (33), an Indian aristocrat. As a leader of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 he disappeared after the East India Company's forces retook his city of Kanpur. Rumours that he had died of an illness or fled to exile in Nepal or another part of India were never proven.
• 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, as he failed to show up for a rendezvous with his son to go to Mexico at the end of the American Civil War. 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.
• 1872 – Captain Benjamin Briggs (37), his wife Sarah Elizabeth (31), their 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 at the core of "one of the most durable mysteries in nautical history".
• 1874 – Charley Ross, age 4, a resident of Philadelphia, was enticed along with his brother Walter into a horse-drawn carriage while playing in their front yard on 1 July. Walter got out at a fireworks shop, and the carriage drove on without him. The family received ransom notes and worked with police, to no avail.
• 1880s – William Cantelo, inventor of an early machine gun, never returned to his Southampton home after one of his frequent and lengthy sales trips. His sons speculated years later that he may have re-emerged as Hiram Maxim, another machine-gun pioneer, whom he strongly resembled.
• 1880 – Lamont Young, a government geologist inspecting new gold fields on behalf of the New South Wales Mines Department, together with his assistant, Max Schneider, boat owner Thomas Towers, and two other men, all disappeared near Bermagui, New South Wales, Australia.The location where the abandoned wreck of their boat was discovered was subsequently named Mystery Bay
• 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 he may have perished in the Great Hinckley Fire of 1 September 1894.
• 1890 – Louis Le Prince (48), motion picture pioneer, disappeared after boarding a Paris-bound train at Dijon, France.
• 1892 – Hermann Fol, 46, Swiss zoologist regarded as the father of modern cell biology, disappeared with several crewmembers of his yacht shortly after leaving Bénodet, France.
• 1896 –Albert Jennings Fountain (57), a former Texas state senator and lieutenant governor of that state, disappeared near Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States, along with his son Henry (8) on February 1. Evidence found along their route strongly suggests they were murdered, but no bodies were ever found.

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.
• 1902 – Yda Hillis Addis, (45), a translator of ancient Mexican narratives, was never seen after escaping from an insane asylum in California which her husband had her confined to during their divorce.
• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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, he almost certainly perished in war-torn Mexico, possibly at the Battle of Ojinaga on 10 February,[31] 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
• 1914 – F. Lewis Clark (52), businessman from the U.S. state of Idaho, disappeared while visiting Santa Barbara, California.
• 1914 – Alejandro Bello Silva (27), a lieutenant in the Chilean Army, disappeared during a qualifying examination 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.
• 1916 – Béla Kiss (39) was a Hungarian serial killer who murdered 24 young women prior to his enrollment in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War. Upon the discovery of his crimes, he was traced to a Serbian military hospital but escaped a few days before investigators arrived. Although there were several reported sightings of the killer (notably in New York in 1932), his true fate remains a mystery.
• 1918 – Arthur Cravan (31), French proto-dadaist writer and art critic, disappeared near Salina Cruz, Mexico; he most likely drowned.
• 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.
• 1919 – Ambrose Small (56), a Canadian millionaire, disappeared from his office. He was last seen at 5:30 pm on 2 December 1919, at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario.

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 26 November 1921, on a passenger ship bound from New York City to Havana, and is 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. Though Mallory's body was found in 1999, the search for Irvine's continues to this day.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• 1926 – Agatha Christie, the British crime writer, famously disappeared. She was located 10 days later in a Yorkshire health spa, and always refused to give an explanation. Subsequent investigations by author Jared Cade have shed considerable light on the event.
• 1927 – Charles Nungesser (35), 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 (9) disappeared from his Los Angeles home 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 and the first man to reach the South Pole, disappeared on a search-and-rescue mission for Umberto Nobile and other survivors of the crashed airship Italia, in the Arctic.
• 1928 – The Danish sailtraining vessel København ("Copenhagen") vanished en route from Buenos Aires to Australia sometime between December 1928 and January 1929 with the loss of 14 crew and 45 cadets, some of whom were as young as 16 years old.

1930s

• 1930 – Catherine Moroney, a struggling 17-year-old mother of two, gave her two-year-old daughter Mary Agnes to a stranger calling herself "Julia Otis" in exchange for $2 on May 15, on the understanding that the woman would take care of the girl in California for a short time and then return her to the Moroneys' Chicago home when things were better. She never did, and the ensuing investigation attracted national media attention. The girl was never located, and the case remains the oldest unsolved missing-persons case in the city. A California woman's belief that she was Mary Agnes has subsequently been disproven by DNA testing.
• 1930 – Joseph Force Crater (41), an associate justice of the New York Supreme Court, was last seen on 6 August after a meal at a restaurant. Judge Crater was never seen or heard from again. (His mistress, Sally Lou Ritz (22), was falsely said to have disappeared a few weeks later, but was interviewed by police as late as July 1937. Crater's disappearance, which prompted one of the most sensational manhunts of the 20th century, 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.To "pull a Crater" became slang for a person vanishing.
• 1933 – C. B. Johnston (c. 38), American college athlete and coach.
• 1934 – Wallace Fard Muhammad (43), founder of the Nation of Islam, left Detroit and was never heard from again.
• 1934 – Everett Ruess (20), a young American artist, disappeared while 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). A filmmaker claimed to have located Lady Southern Cross on the seabed in February 2009.
• 1937 – Amelia Earhart (39), famous American aviatrix; she was the first woman to try a circumnavigational flight of the globe. During the attempt she and her navigator, Fred Noonan (44), disappeared over the central Pacific in the vicinity of Howland Island, 2 July.
• 1937 – Sigizmund Levanevsky (35), famous Soviet aviator, together with his crew of five 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.
• 1937 – Juliet Stuart Poyntz (50), was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), and a founding member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). After resigning from active work with the Party, she disappeared in 1937, never to be seen again. She is believed by several sources to have been abducted and murdered by a Soviet NKVD assassination squad.
• 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 Taylor Cub light aircraft from Roosevelt Field, New York, on Long Island to an airfield at Brentwood, approximately 22 miles away.
• 1938 – Willie McLean (34), an American soccer player who played in the 1934 World Cup. His family received occasional Mother's Day cards for several years afterwards, purportedly from McLean.
• 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 twelve 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, an early success for the U.S. civil rights movement. One evening, he 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. Some accounts suggest he was living in New York or Mexico City in the late 1940s.
• 1939 – Richard Halliburton, missing at sea since March 1939 after trying to sail Sea Dragon (a gaudily decorated, 75-foot Chinese junk) across the Pacific Ocean. In 1945, some wreckage identified as a rudder and believed to belong to the Sea Dragon washed ashore in California.
• 1939 – Rita Gorgonowa (38), defendant in a widely publicized 1931 Polish murder trial where she had been convicted of murdering a child under her care while employed as a governess, was released from prison after a successful appeal on 3 September, a date moved up due to the German invasion that started World War II in Europe two days earlier. Her subsequent whereabouts are unknown. Her children say she survived the war; she was reported to have either remained in Poland under an assumed name or emigrated to South America and lived out her life there.

1940s

• The later whereabouts of James Litterick, 41, first Communist elected to the Manitoba provincial parliament, are unknown following his release from police custody (he had been at large since the Communist Party was banned in 1940). One report has him working at a Toronto garment factory the following year.
• Glenn Miller (40), the popular American jazz musician and bandleader, was en route from England to France on 15 December 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.
• Rocco Perri (born 30 December 1887, last seen alive 23 April 1944) was an organized crime figure in Ontario, Canada, in the early 20th century.
• Szilveszter Matuska, Hungarian mass-murderer known as "The Train Killer", escaped from jail in 1944 and was never recaptured.
• Herschel Grynszpan (22), Jewish exile from Germany whose 1938 assassination of diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris was the trigger for Kristallnacht. For various reasons, largely legal delays, a planned trial was never held in either France or (after 1940) Germany, while Grynszpan was held in various prisons and concentration camps. Adolf Eichmann testified at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem that he had interrogated Grynszpan in Magdeburg in either late 1943 or early 1944; after that there is no record of his whereabouts or ultimate fate. The West German government had him declared legally dead in 1960.
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (44), French author and aviator, last seen when flying a reconnaissance mission out of Corsica in preparation for the Allied invasion of Southern France. The remains of his aircraft, found at sea off Marseille, would be identified in 2004.
• Heinrich Müller (45), Nazi Gestapo chief, last confirmed sighting in the Führerbunker on the evening of 1 May 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
• 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 or was executed in Soviet custody on 17 July 1947, but to date no hard evidence has been found to confirm this. In 2010, evidence from Russian archives surfaced suggesting he was alive after the presumed execution date.
• 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 have been shot by Soviet soldiers in an U-Bahn subway tunnel.
• Alfred Partikel (57), German painter of East Prussian origin, vanished while picking mushrooms in the woods near the artist's colony of Ahrenshoop, Darß, Western Pomerania. His remains have never been found.
• 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.
• 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.
• Paula Jean Welden (18), Bennington College sophomore, disappeared while walking on the Long Trail near Glastenbury Mountain, Vermont, USA.
• In the aftermath of the 1947 Glazier–Higgins–Woodward tornadoes, 4-year-old Joan Gay Croft and her sister Jerri were among refugees taking shelter in a basement hallway of the Woodward hospital. As officials sent the injured to different hospitals in the area, two men took Joan away, saying they were taking her to Oklahoma City. She was never seen again. Over the years, several women have come forth saying they suspect they might be Joan. None of their claims have been verified.
• Sir Arthur Coningham (53), retired RAF Air Marshal, disappeared when Avro Tudor IV G-AHNP Star Tiger went missing over the western Atlantic] He was one of 25 passengers, together with six crewmen, who were lost when the flight from Santa Maria Airport in the Azores failed to reach its destination of Kindley Field, Bermuda. Star Tiger's sister aircraft G-AGRE Star Ariel also disappeared over the western Atlantic, with the loss of all seven crewmen and 13 passengers, while flying from Bermuda to Kingston Airport, Jamaica, the following year.
• Virginia Carpenter (21), was last seen talking to the occupants of a car parked in front of her dorm at the Texas State College for Women in Denton on 1 June 1948. Many sightings were reported in the days afterwards, but she was never found nor has any evidence of her fate come to light.
• 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.

1960s

• 1960 – James Squillante (41), a caporegime in the Gambino crime family, disappeared after being indicted on extortion charges. He is believed to have been murdered and his body disposed of in a car crusher and subsequently melted down in an open hearth furnace, although no physical evidence has ever been found to substantiate this and no one was ever charged for the crime.
• 1961 – Michael Rockefeller (23), 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 a 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 – Anthony Strollo (62), a caporegime in the Genovese crime family, last seen leaving his residence in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He is believed to have been murdered on the orders of Vito Genovese in retaliation for having conspired to have Genovese imprisoned for drug trafficking, although no traces of his remains were ever recovered.
• 1962 – Frank Morris (35) and brothers Clarence (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.
• 1965 – Mehdi Ben Barka (45), a Moroccan politician, disappeared while in exile in Paris.
• 1965 – Charles Rogers (43), a reclusive unemployed seismologist in Houston, Texas, has remained at large since the "Icebox Murders" of his parents were discovered on June 23, leading to a warrant for his detention as a material witness. It has been theorized that he had worked for the CIA in the past and may have had connections to figures involved in Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. He was declared legally dead in 1975.
• 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 – John Lake (37) was the sports editor of Newsweek until his mysterious disappearance in December 1967.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 1969 – April Fabb (13) went missing in mysterious circumstances from Metton, Norfolk, United Kingdom.

1970s

• Jacques Vergès, a French-Vietnamese lawyer, left his wife Djamila Bouhired and cut off all ties. He was last seen on 24 February 1970, until he reappeared in 1978, without ever explaining his whereabouts during that period.
• 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, 6 April.
• 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 callbox 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
• Lynne Schulze, 18, a student at Middlebury College in Vermont, was last seen by one of her college friends on 10 December when she abruptly turned back on the way to a literature exam, claiming she had left her favorite pen in her dorm room, where her wallet, checkbook and other personal belongings were later found. A later report said that she was seen a short time later outside a health food store co-owned and operated at that time by Robert Durst and his wife Kathleen, herself disappeared a decade later. She had also been seen buying prunes from the same store earlier in the day. The case was reopened in 1992; in 2015, following Durst's arrest on charges of murdering his friend Susan Berman, Middlebury police confirmed that they wanted to speak to Durst about the case, but his lawyer has declined to let them do so.
• 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 16 October.
• Zahir Raihan (36), Bangladeshi filmmaker, went looking for his brother Shahidullah Kaiser and never returned.
• Civil rights activist Perry Ray Robinson (35) disappeared during the Wounded Knee Incident in South Dakota. It is believed that he was killed, perhaps executed for violating some of the terms of the occupiers, and he has been declared legally dead although his body has never been located. His family has sued the government to force the release of information, some of which seems to confirm that he was killed during the standoff.

1980s

• Alan Addis (19) was a British soldier serving with the Royal Marines in the Falkland Islands. He disappeared without trace in August 1980 in a remote settlement on East Falkland. Several local men were arrested and released without being charged several years later; the investigation continues.
• Azaria Chamberlain, nine-week-old Australian baby girl. Her remains have never been found. Azaria's mother Lindy Chamberlain insisted that a dingo took her baby from her camping tent near Uluru. In a trial sensationalised by the media, Lindy was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life. Her sentence was overturned six years later when Azaria's jacket was found in a dingo lair. Azaria's disappearance was the subject of four inquests, the last of which, in 2012, concurred that a dingo had taken and killed her. Azaria's disappearance and the subsequent police investigation were the basis for the 1988 motion picture Evil Angels (released as A Cry in the Dark outside of Australia and New Zealand
• Louise and Charmian Faulkner, mother (43) and daughter (2), disappeared from outside their home in St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia.
• Katrice Lee disappeared from a NAAFI shopping complex in Schloß Neuhaus, Paderborn in West Germany on 28 November 1981, the day of her second birthday.
• Upali Wijewardene, a well-known Sri Lankan businessman, disappeared on 13 February 1983 on a flight from Subang international Airport (Malaysia) to Sri Lanka in his private jet.
• Emanuela Orlandi (15), citizen of Vatican City. Her mysterious disappearance has been linked both to sexual exploitation as well as an attempt to demand the release of Mehmet Ali Ağca from prison.
• Mirella Gregori (15) mysteriously disappeared from Rome during the spring of 1983, about 40 days before Emanuela Orlandi vanished. The two cases are believed to be linked.
• 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.
• Ann Gotlib (12), was a Russian immigrant who disappeared from the premises of a Louisville, Kentucky mall on 1 June 1983.

1990s

• Sarah MacDiarmid (23) disappeared from Kananook railway station, Melbourne, Australia.
• Trevaline Evans (52) vanished without trace after leaving a note on the front door of her antiques shop in Llangollen, Denbighshire, Wales, United Kingdom, saying she would be "back in two minutes".
• Ames Glover, a 5-month-old boy, disappeared from the back seat of his father's car in west London, England, United Kingdom, on 5 February. He has never been found and no charges have been brought.
• 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. Suzie and Stacy had graduated from Kickapoo High School the day before, and had arrived at Levitt's home at around 2:00 am after a graduation party. It is being investigated as an apparent triple disappearance
• Ylenia Carrisi (23), Italian TV celebrity, the daughter of singers Albano Carrisi and Romina Power and the granddaughter of the American actor Tyrone Power, disappeared during a vacation in New Orleans.
• 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