How can a person be here one day and then completely gone the next? The topic of missing persons is at once both intriguing and horrifying. I’m your host Leah. I’m Phil And I’m Steve. Today we are going to investigate some baffling cases of missing persons.
According to a website called en.as.com as of February 21, 2023, there are 22,740 unsolved missing persons in the United States. This figure comes from the Department of Justice which maintains the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. The article further breaks the number of missing persons down by state. Of course, the states with the largest populations, California, Texas, and Florida have the most. Surprisingly, Alaska, the state with the smallest population, is fourth on the list. I guess there’s a lot of places to get lost and never be found in Alaska.
We touched on this topic a few months ago in our National Parks episode (S4E3). In particular the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has seen a string of people seeming to vanish into thin air. Like Alaska, our national parks do offer ample opportunities to disappear by falling into a crevice or being eaten by a bear or an alligator. But some of the other cases of missing persons appear to have no explanation whatsoever. We are going to touch on some of these today.
Jimmy Hoffa
When I think of missing persons, there is one that immediately comes to mind. We will take some cues from our virtual mentor, Mike Rowe and present the information without telling you at first who we are talking about and see if you can guess. The following information comes from britanica.com. This person was born in 1913 in Brazil. No, not that Brazil, I’m talking about Brazil, Indiana. His father was a coal miner, but died when our subject was only seven. His family moved to the Detroit area where, after dropping out of school at age 14, he became a stock boy and then a warehouseman. The workers in these positions often faced dangerous working conditions and were paid low wages. There was little to no job security. Sensing his co-worker’s frustration, our gentleman at the tender age of 18 began to organize them into labor unions in an attempt to gain better working conditions. The results were not greatly successful, but his engaging personality helped his popularity to spread among laborers throughout Detroit.
In 1932 at the age of 19 he was invited to become an organizer with the local Teamsters Union of Detroit. Working with other leaders, he managed to consolidate local truck drivers and warehouse workers into one large regional union. In just three years under his leadership the Teamsters grew from 75,000 members to 170,000 and became a powerful force for workers in the Midwest. With the advent of WW II came the opportunity for organizing these workers on a national scale By 1950 the Teamsters Union boasted more than a million members and became one of the most powerful labor unions in the United States. Our gentleman became the President of this union in 1957.
Ah, but in the rough and tumble world of labor union politics, you can’t advance by being a rule follower. And as Garth Brooks might tell you, it also is helpful to have some friends in low places. His reputation as a person who sometimes smudged the rules and dined with known crime bosses drew the attention of Federal authorities. When President Kennedy was elected in 1960 his younger brother Bobby became the Attorney General of the United States. Robert Kennedy appeared to have a severe dislike for this gentleman and went about looking for dirt. He didn’t have to look very hard. In 1964 he was convicted in Nashville of conspiracy, jury tampering, and attempting to bribe a grand juror. He was given an 8-year sentence and a $10,000 fine. While out on bail during his appeal, he was convicted in Chicago for mail and wire fraud and improper use of the Teamsters pension fund. For this he was given an additional five years in prison. (I love the name of his defense attorney, Morris Shenker!) He began serving his time in 1967.
Of course, by now you’ve probably guessed that the missing person I’m referring to here is Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa attempted to control the Teamsters Union while behind bars, but his hand-picked successor didn’t always cooperate. Then in 1971 President Nixon pardoned Hoffa but made him promise to keep away from labor union activity until 1980. Hoffa replied, “What do you think I am, a crook? I am not a crook!” Ok, I just made that part up, but it would have been cool. Though Hoffa officially kept his nose clean, behind the scenes he was trying to gain control of the Teamsters Union again. He was opposed in his efforts by members of organized crime.
A peaceful luncheon was arranged on July 30, 1975 between Hoffa and Anthony Provanzano, the Mob boss from New Jersey who was opposing him. The luncheon had been arranged at a Detroit area restaurant by two local mobsters, Tony and Vito Giacalone. (No, I am not making that up!) The lunch meeting was set for 2:00 p.m., but at 2:30 p.m. Hoffa called his wife from a payphone outside the restaurant and said that the others had never shown up. He told her that he would be coming home and would grill some steaks. Jimmy Hoffa was never seen or heard from again. His body has never been found.
When Hoffa did not return home that day his wife called their son, Jimmy Hoffa Jr. He went to the restaurant, found his dad’s unlocked car, but no sign of his father. The Police were called. One witness said that they thought they saw him get into the back of a maroon Mercury Marquis with some other men. It happened that Tony Giacalone’s son Joseph owned such a car. But on the day of the disappearance, the car had been borrowed by a mutual acquaintance of Tony and Jimmy, one Chuckie O'Brien, to deliver fish. Because, like, you know, like, everyone delivers fish in a Mercury Marquis, nothin to see here. However, the fish scent wasn’t enough to throw police scent dogs off the track as, during the investigation, they consistently indicated that Hoffa’s scent was in the vehicle.
The Police suspected that the organized crime families decided to stop Jimmy Hoffa from regaining control of the Teamsters by making him disappear. However, the main players, Anthony Provanzano and Tony and Vito Giacalone all had ironclad alibis and good documentation that they were not in Detroit that day. Most likely Hoffa was murdered by other mob operatives and the body was cremated either in Michigan or back in New Jersey. Though there are several dozen theories about what happened to Hoffa, including that his body is buried in the cement of the New York Giant’s football stadium which was under construction at the time, only a handful of people actually know what happened to him, and they ain’t talkin!
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jimmy-Hoffa
Bobby Dunbar
We couldn’t talk about strange cases of missing people without mentioning Bobby Dunbar. Bobby went missing on August 23, 1912 while on a trip with his family to Swayze Lake in Louisiana. He was just four years old and his parents, Lessie and Percy Dunbar were frantic. They looked for him everywhere. When their search turned up nothing they called the police.
An exhaustive statewide search was immediately launched by the local authorities as well as the state police. They left no stone unturned as they caught and dissected alligators looking for remains and they threw dynamite in the lake hoping to make a body rise to the surface all to no avail. They never found any trace of little Bobby.
But then, eight months after the disappearance, a boy matching Bobby’s description was found in Mississippi with a traveling handyman named William Cantwell Walters. When questioned by police Walters said that the boy was Charles Bruce Anderson, his nephew. He claimed that the boy’s mother had left him in his care while she looked for work. Many people in the town backed up the story but the police were convinced that this was Bobby Dunbar and took the boy into custody and arrested Walters. They may have been swayed by the fact that Walters didn’t have steady employment as well as his claim that the boy was the illegitimate son of his brother, a tenuous connection at best.
While one account indicated that the boy immediately shouted "Mother" upon seeing her and the two then embraced, another said only that the boy cried and quoted Lessie Dunbar as saying she was unsure whether he was her son. Other newspaper accounts quote both the Dunbars as initially stating doubts as to the boy's identity.
The news media was in a frenzy over the missing child case. There are many differing and contradictory accounts of how the reunion of the boy and his parents went. Some sources say that it was a joyful event indicating that the boy immediately shouted "Mother" upon seeing her and the two then embraced, while other accounts claim that there was a lot of hesitation on the part of the parents and that the boy cried. They quoted Lessie Dunbar as saying she was unsure about the boy being her son. Other newspaper accounts quote both the Dunbars as initially stating doubts as to the boy's identity. It was also reported that after taking the boy home and bathing him, Mrs. Dunbar was then convinced it was her son because of certain moles and scars on his body.
A few days after the Dunbars took their son home, a woman named Julia Anderson showed up at the police station claiming the boy was in fact her son and backed up the story that she had allowed Walters to watch him for a few days while she looked for work. Those days had then turned into months when she had still not been able to find a job.
The police collected the little boy and placed him in a lineup for Anderson to identify, but she was unable to and she went home. Anderson showed back up to the police department the next day though insisting that the little boy was her son. You have to understand that the boy at four years old was only a toddler and according to Anderson she had not seen him in months. But her initial hesitation convinced the police that she was not the mother and they returned the boy to the Dunbars convinced he was in fact the missing Bobby Dunbar. Unable to pay a court battle to pursue her case, Ms Anderson was forced to give up and return home empty handed.
The Dunbars settled into their family life with little Bobby playing happily with his brothers and seeming to remember things about his house and life before his disappearance. He thrived, grew up and got married, eventually having four children of his own before his death in 1966. He of course had been told about the events of his early childhood and he always maintained that he knew exactly who he was and that he was Bobby Dunbar.
But…that is not the end of the story. Bobby’s children were well acquainted with their dad’s curious story and decided to look into it further to finally put to rest any question that their dad was a Dunbar. In 2004, Bob Dunbar Jr. consented to a DNA test. It was compared to the DNA from his cousin, the son of Bobby Dunbar’s younger brother. I think you can guess the results from the fact that we are here talking about it. The test concluded that Bob Dunbar Jr. was not blood-related to any of the Dunbar family and so of course neither was his dad.
The Anderson family and the Walters family were both informed and very happy to be vindicated in their stories. Walters had actually gone to prison for two years for the kidnapping of Bobby Dunbar before his conviction was overturned.
It’s interesting to note that when the information about the DNA results came out the Anderson family came forward with stories of how Bobby Dunbar had visited with them on a couple of occasions so it’s unclear of how convinced he really was of his parentage.
In the end, the mystery still remains of what actually happened to the real little Bobby Dunbar. As so many years have passed it’s likely to always remain an unsolved mystery but the Dunbar family thinks it’s probable that the little boy fell into Swayze Lake during the fishing trip and was eaten by an alligator.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/bobby-dunbar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Bobby_Dunbar
Paula Jean Weldon
From a website called the-line-up.com we learn about the strange disappearance of a young college student named Paula Jean Weldon. In December of 1946 Paula was a sophomore student at picturesque Bennington College in the quiet town of Bennington, Vermont.
On the afternoon of December 1, 1946 Paula had finished her shift working in the college dining hall and then returned to her room. She told her roommate, Elizabeth Johnson, “I’m all done with my studies, I’m going on a long walk.” According to Johnson, Paula was dressed in a distinctive red parka coat with a fur-lined hood, blue jeans, Top-Sider shoes with thick soles, and a gold Elgin wrist watch with a black band. She indicated that she was planning to walk a section of Vermont’s Long Trail; a hiking trail that traversed the state from Massachusetts to the Canadian border.
Around 3:00 p.m. a truck driver picked up a young hitchhiker who matched Paula’s description. She asked to be dropped off at a trailhead on Route 9. About 4:00 p.m. another man said he saw her at the beginning of the trail. He advised her not to travel into the mountains unless she had heavier clothing. But she proceeded to the trail anyway.
When Paula didn’t return by dinner her roommate Elizabeth began to worry. When she did not return by morning, Elizabeth notified the college president. A call was made to Paula’s parents in Connecticut to see if she had returned to her home. Paula’s mother collapsed when she heard that she was missing. Her father immediately drove to Bennington and sprang into action organizing a search party.
Local residents and students were incorporated into search parties which combed the Long Trail looking for any sign of Paula, but nothing was found. Vermont did not have a state police at the time, so her father called the Connecticut and New York State Police to assist. A helicopter was brought in to fly over the trail. (It was the case of Paula Weldon that caused Vermont to form a state police the following year.)
Several false leads were reported including one from a waitress in Falls River, Massachusetts, who claimed to have served dinner to a disturbed woman fitting Paula’s description. For some reason, Paula’s father drove to Falls River to investigate this lead without telling anyone where he was going. During the two days he was gone, some in Bennington began to suspect that he might have some involvement with her disappearance. These suspicions became even stronger when it was revealed that Paula and her father had recently had a falling out over a boyfriend that he disapproved of. Mr. Weldon himself promoted the idea that this boyfriend must have had some hand in Paula’s disappearance.
After two weeks with no clues the search was called off. Heavy snow was accumulating making it likely that any evidence or remains would be obscured. But new efforts the following spring resulted in nothing.
So what happened to Paula Jean Welder? Did she die from exposure? Was she eaten by a bear or another wild animal? Did she run off to Canada and join her boyfriend? Or was she a victim of the so-called Bennington Triangle? Paula’s was the second of five missing persons to occur in the Bennington area between 1945 and 1950. Officially the case remains open, and it is unlikely to ever be solved.
https://the-line-up.com/paula-jean-welden-disappearance
Other Bennington Missing Persons
As I said, Paula Weldon was the second of five unsolved missing persons in the Bennington area during the late forties. According to a website called coolinterestingstuff.com the first was the case of a gentleman named Middie Rivers. Mr. Rivers, age 74 was an experienced hunter and fisherman. On November 12, 1945 he was guiding a group of four hunters on a trek in the area of the Long Trail. This was an area Rivers was very familiar with as he had lived nearby most of his life.
At one point along the way Rivers was scouting out ahead of the group and then was never seen again. An extensive search was conducted, and the only evidence discovered was a single rifle cartridge that was found in a small stream. The speculation was that Rivers had leaned over and the cartridge had dropped out of his pocket into the water. No trace of Middie Rivers has ever been located.
Then on October 12, 1950 eight year old Paul Jephson was riding along in a farm truck with his mother. The mother parked the truck on their farm and walked to feed some pigs that were penned in a remote location. Paul’s mother told him to stay in the truck until she returned, that it might be a while. About an hour later when Paul’s mother came back to the truck, Paul was gone. Vermont’s new state police brought bloodhounds in to assist in the search for Paul. The hounds indicated that Paul had walked to a nearby highway, but then the scent disappeared. It happened to be the same stretch of highway where Paula Weldon was dropped off by the truck driver four years earlier. Paul Jephson has never been located.
Then about two weeks later, on October 28, 1950, a 53-year-old woman named Frieda Langer and her cousin Herbert Elsner were on a camping trip with other family members at Somerset Reservoir near Bennington. They decided to take a walk, but shortly Frieda slipped and fell into a stream. She asked Herbert to wait for her while she returned to the campsite to change into dry clothes. When she didn’t return, Herbert came back to the campsite and discovered that she had never made it back and that no one had seen her.
Over the next two weeks, several searches were conducted involving aircraft, helicopters and up to 300 volunteers. Nothing. No trace of clothing, sign of struggle or anything was located to indicate what had happened to Frieda. Then on May 12, 1951 Frieda’s body was located by hikers in an area that had been thoroughly searched in the weeks following her disappearance. Cause of death could not be determined because of the deteriorated condition of her remains. Of the five Bennington Missing Persons, hers are the only remains to be found.
Now if you have been counting, you will note that we have only covered four of the five Bennington, Vermont missing persons. The 5th may be the strangest of all, and may also contain a 6th missing person as well.
https://coolinterestingstuff.com/the-strange-mystery-of-james-edward-tedford
ODJ: Pasta Dump
I love spaghetti, don’t you? I like spaghetti (and almost all Italian food) so much that my family sometimes gets sick of pasta. I think that’s how residents of a certain New Jersey neighborhood felt when hundreds of pounds of pasta were found to be dumped in a nearby wooded area earlier this year.
According to NPR.org, workers in Old Bridge Township found 15 wheel-barrow loads of illegally dumped pasta along a creek in a residential neighborhood. The pasta was estimated to weigh around 3 or 4 hundred pounds and ranged from your regular spaghetti noodles to macaroni noodles. In spite of being kind of funny the pasta is a source of possible contamination of the nearby water.
There is some speculation as to whether the pasta was cooked or if it was pulled dry out of packages and dumped raw at the location, growing soft in the weather conditions. In either case, the authorities were not amused and are still trying to find out who threw out the noodles.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/05/1174294967/pasta-dumped-new-jersey-old-bridge
Nicholas Barclay
This next story is a bit similar to that of Bobby Dunbar in that it’s about a missing boy that was found years later…but not really. This case has even more twists and turns. It also briefly mentions some very adult topics so listener discretion is advised.
Nicholas Barclay was reported missing from his San Antonio Texas home on June 13th, 1994 when he was just 13 years old. He had been out playing basketball with his friends when he reportedly called home to get someone to pick him up. He spoke to his older half-brother, Jason, who told him to walk the 1.5 miles home. Nicholas never made it.
From the beginning the police labeled Nicholas as a runaway and it wasn’t hard to see why. The Barclay family was quite dysfunctional with the police having been called to the house several times before. Nicholas had also run away before and even at the young age of 13 he had an established juvenile criminal record for stealing and breaking and entering. He also had a couple of tattoos. It was surmised that he had run away this time because he was in trouble and about to possibly be put into a juvenile detention facility that summer.
A missing child case had been opened but there wasn’t much development in the investigation. That is until three months later on September 25th, when Nicholas's older half-brother called the police and said he thought he saw Nicholas trying to break into the family's garage. He said that Nicholas had fled when he realized his brother had seen him. The police did search the neighborhood but ultimately decided that they didn’t believe that Nicholas's brother had in fact seen him, and neither did their mother. Without any further information coming in, the case went cold.
But in October of 1997--three years after the disappearance--police in Spain received a very strange phone call from a man at a youth shelter. He said there was a boy living there at the shelter claiming to be the missing boy, Nicholas Barclay. The boy claimed he had escaped from a child sex ring operation where he had been held and abused for years.
A Barcaly family member flew to Spain, identified the man as Nicholas and brought him home to the family who welcomed him with open arms…kind of. Nicholas’ mother and sister were certain they had Nicholas back, but other family members including an uncle, were not so sure. After all, the young man claiming to be Nicholas had dark brown hair and eyes and spoke with a distinct French accent. When confronted with this, the young man stated that his eye color had been chemically changed by his captors and he refused to provide a blood sample for DNA or have his fingerprints taken. He also refused to name his abductors. The family didn’t care, they were sure this was their Nicholas. The authorities however, were not convinced.
A 1998 court order put all the speculation to rest when DNA was ordered to be collected and the man was determined to be 23-year-old French citizen Pierre Bourdin. Bourdin seemed to be a pathological liar who was well known to the authorities. He had a criminal history in Europe and had used many aliases. After being exposed Bourdin made several contradicting statements about Nicholas saying that he had known Nicholas in Spain and that the boy was alive. He later claimed he had proof that the boy was deceased and then said he had never met Nicholas at all. He was sentenced to six years in prison, more than three times what the sentencing guidelines suggested, because of the harm he caused the Barclay family.
But what had actually happened to Nicholas? It remains a mystery to this day but the police suspect the family of being involved, particularly because of their eagerness to accept Bourdin as their missing boy in spite of glaring inconsistencies with his story. Nicholas’ mother was known to have had an addiction to heroin at the time of the disappearance. His half brother Jason was considered a suspect by the police. He developed an addiction after the disappearance and died of an overdose in 1998. His death was after Bourdin had been brought into the family home and stirred up the missing persons case once again. But with his death the investigation stalled and the whereabouts of Nicholas is still an unsolved case.
Info from Wikipedia and The Charley Project.
James Edward Tedford
James E Tedford was born around 1884, no one is quite sure of his exact birthdate or of the details of his early life. But in 1940 he shows up on the census as residing in Franklin, Vermont age 56 with his wife Pearl, age 28. Evidently James was a WW I veteran, but when WW II broke out, he was called back into the reserves.
When James returned to Vermont in 1945 Pearl was nowhere to be found. The house they rented together was abandoned. Someone had seen her walking toward the Amoco Store, but beyond that there was no trace of Pearl. After exhausting his resources looking for Pearl, James took residence in a soldiers’ home in Bennington, Vermont.
Three years later in November of 1949 James boarded a Greyhound Bus to St. Albans, Vermont to spend Thanksgiving with extended family. A few days later his family members drove him to the bus station and put him on the bus for the return trip to Bennington. Several other passengers stated that they watched James get on the bus in St. Albans, take a seat, and promptly fall asleep. The trip was scheduled to be 8 hours long as several stops were scheduled along the way. Heavy snowfall made the trip even slower. Yet fourteen passengers and the bus driver said that Tedford was still on the bus when it made its last stop before Bennington. But when the bus arrived at Bennington, James was no longer on the bus. No one saw him get off the bus. All his personal belongings were still in the luggage rack and an open bus timetable was still folded open on his seat, but James had simply vanished. Oh yes, the date of his disappearance? December 1, 1949, exactly three years after the disappearance of college student Paula Jean Weldon.
Evidently Bernie Sanders isn’t the only unusual occurrence in Vermont!
The Sarah Joe Mystery
This very strange case of five missing persons comes to us from historymysteries.com and also from mauinews.com. February 11, 1979 was a beautiful day in Hawaii. Well, most days probably are, but this day was especially fine. There was hardly any wind, and the surface of the water was as smooth as glass.
On the island of Maui five buddies decided that the weather was too nice to waste away working on their construction job, so they would sneak off and go fishing instead. These gentlemen; Ralph Malaikini - 27, Peter Hanchet - 31, Scott Moorman - 27, Benjamin Kalama - 38, and Patrick Woessner - 26, left from the town of Hana on a 17 foot motor boat that belonged to Malaikini’s twin brother. The boat was named The Sara Joe after their mother and father.
Conditions couldn’t have been more perfect mid-morning when the quintet set out from the Hana Bay boat ramp. The sky was clear, and the sparkling blue water contained barely a ripple. Evidently the gentlemen didn’t look at a weather forecast and were unaware that a large low-pressure system was bearing down on the islands. It is unknown exactly what the men faced on the boat, but in Hana itself the winds were blowing between forty and fifty miles an hour by 1:00 p.m. and by evening was nearing hurricane force!
Benjamin Kalama’s wife Ulu called the police after the men didn’t return by mid afternoon. The police notified the Coast Guard, and a search began. Several volunteers with fishing boats and other types of vessels joined the search. One later reported that the storm was so fierce that their boat was once completely vertical in a forty-foot wave.
The Coast Guard called off its search after five days. Members of the Hana community continued searching for any sign of the five men or the boat. Days and then weeks passed with no trace of them. The search was officially called off, but fishing boats and pleasure cruisers continued to ply the waters around Hana hoping to spot something. One of these local volunteers was a marine biologist named John Naughton. And this is where the story takes a weird twist.
Almost ten years after the Sarah Joe went missing, John Naughton was leading a research team exploring the Marshall Islands chain some 2,200 miles southwest of Hawaii. On September 10, 1988, while sailing along an uninhabited coral atoll called Taongi he spotted an abandoned fiberglass boat on the coastline. Upon investigating it further he noticed it had numbers that were consistent with Hawaiian boat registration numbers. His mind immediately went back to The Sarah Joe.
Then a member of his landing party noticed about a hundred yards away, an odd pile of stones with a makeshift cross fashioned from driftwood inserted in the top. Closer investigation determined that this was a shallow grave that had been dug in the coral and covered with rocks. Brushing back the rocks a human skeleton soon appeared. But there was something odd about it.
As they examined the grave closer, they saw blank pieces of paper, about three inches square, resting on top of the skeleton. All the paper was loosely stacked like an unbound manuscript or book. In between each sheet of paper was what Naughton would later describe as tinfoil. The stack was roughly three-quarters of an inch thick, but the biology team could not imagine what the purpose of the papers could be. The four men collectively decided that any further excavation of the grave might be disrespectful. However, they did take the skeleton’s jawbone with them. Naughton supposed that the skeleton might be one of the missing men from the Sarah Joe and that the badly weathered boat might be the Sarah Joe itself.
When they returned to Hawaii, Naughton turned over the jawbone to the Hana Police Department. Forensic tests showed that the bone belonged to 27 year old Scott Moorman. While this part of the mystery is solved, there was still no sign of the other four men or an explanation about who buried Scott and placed those paper/foil stacks on his body.
While there are no solid answers, there is one plausible theory. In China and Taiwan it is customary to stack papers interspersed with gold or silver leaf onto the bodies of buried loved ones. The items are placed in the casket at the time of burial as an expression of good luck in the afterlife. As the Marshall Islands are some 2,200 miles from Maui, it is likely that Scott Moorman tied himself to the boat in the storm after seeing his buddies get knocked overboard. With little to no supplies, he might have survived the storm, but was then adrift in the vast Pacific Ocean alone. Most likely he died in the boat which drifted up onto the atoll. Fishermen from China or Taiwan, who may have been fishing illegally, likely came across the boat, and then Moorman’s body in the boat. They likely buried him on the atoll using their paper / foil tradition and placing the cross over the grave which would have been more of a nod to the sailor’s likely origin in Hawaii. If they had been fishing illegally then they would not have reported what they found or did.
In the early 1990s the Coast Guard found and retrieved The Sarah Joe from Taongi Atoll and returned it to Ralph Malaikini’s twin brother Robert back in Hana. Today it sits next to the entrance to his driveway as a reminder of his brother and the other four men who died and did not return.
https://www.historicmysteries.com/sarah-joe-mystery/ https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2019/02/40-years-later-mystery-still-surrounds-the-sarah-joe-and-its-five-hana-fishermen-who-didnt-return/
We’re going to end things on a lighter note with a couple missing persons cases that end well. This next story happened in August of 2012 in Iceland when a woman on a tour bus was reported missing. The other tourists on the bus noticed that a woman described as “Asian, about 160cm, in dark clothing and speaks English well” got off the bus at one stop and never got back on.
No one apparently knew her name but they were concerned so a large search was organized and went on throughout the weekend, with no sign of the woman being found.
Several of the tourists, concerned for their fellow traveler, volunteered in the search for the woman when one of those volunteers started thinking and putting two and two together. She approached authorities with the idea that the missing woman may in fact be herself. You see she matched the general description and did leave the bus at that one particular stop…and then changed her clothes before returning to the bus where her fellow tourists apparently didn’t recognize her.
The search was then called off and the woman finished her Icelandic tour and returned home with souvenirs… including the funny story of how she joined a search team to look for herself.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/the-sideshow/missing-woman-unknowingly-joins-search-herself-165249353.html
https://grapevine.is/news/2012/08/27/woman-takes-part-in-search-for-herself/
Robert McDonough
Having a loved one be diagnosed with dementia and then watch their mental state slowly decline is sadly a reality for many people. The situation is worsened when that loved one tends to wander off. It happens so frequently that here in Texas we have what’s called a “silver alert.” Similar to the well known Amber Alert that’s called when a child goes missing, the Silver Alert is called when a senior citizen, most often with dementia, goes missing. Other states have similar alerts.
Robert McDonough, or Bob as he was known by family and friends, was suffering from dementia when he wandered from his home in May of 2013. Sixteen hours after the missing person’s case was filed, a news crew was setting up on the road in front of McDonough’s Maine home to provide updates on the overnight search where dogs had been brought in to no avail.
Before going live but while the camera was recording, an elderly man walked out of the nearby woods to the news reporter to see what the fuss was about. That man turned out to be Robert McDonough.
Authorities were called and McDonough was looked over and in spite of being a bit confused he was determined to be in good physical condition having suffered through a very cold night in the woods. He was returned home, the search was called off and the news had a good story with a happy ending to tell for a change.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-mcdonough-missing-maine-found-news-crew_n_3353619
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN8LrVratjs
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Remnant Stew is part of Rook & Raven Ventures and is created by me, Leah Lamp. Dr. Steven Meeker and I research, write and host each episode along with commentary by our audio producer, Phillip Sinquefield. Theme music is by Kevin MacLeod with voiceover by Morgan Hughes. Special thanks goes out to Brandy Nichols, Judy Meeker, and Harbin Gould.
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