10 Unsolved Disappearances That Still Baffle Investigators

Some disappearances are solved quickly. Others become part of history. The cases below drew enormous searches, criminal investigations, government inquiries, and decades of speculation. Some remain completely unexplained, while in others authorities reached a likely or official conclusion without ever recovering the missing person. What keeps all 10 alive in the public imagination is the same thing: a crucial part of the story is still missing.

On July 30, 1975, former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa drove to the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, expecting to meet Detroit organized-crime figure Anthony Giacalone and New Jersey Teamsters figure Anthony Provenzano. At about 2:30 p.m., Hoffa called his wife and said Giacalone had not arrived. No member of his family saw or heard from him again.

The FBI treated the disappearance as an organized-crime case and pursued leads for decades. One major piece of evidence was a maroon 1975 Mercury that Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien had borrowed from Giacalone’s son. Years later, DNA testing matched a hair recovered from the car to Hoffa, although the match did not establish when or how it got there. Numerous searches and tips have failed to locate Hoffa’s remains, and no one has been charged with his disappearance.

Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, bound for tiny Howland Island in the central Pacific during Earhart’s attempt to fly around the world. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca was stationed near Howland to help guide them in. At 7:42 a.m., Earhart radioed that fuel was running low and that she could not see the island. The last transmission logged by the Itasca came at about 8:43 a.m., when Earhart reported that the aircraft was flying along a north-south position line.

The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard mounted what was then an extraordinary air-and-sea search, eventually covering more than 250,000 square miles. No confirmed wreckage or remains of Earhart, Noonan, or their Lockheed Electra were found. The prevailing explanation is that the aircraft ran out of fuel and went into the Pacific near Howland, although castaway and Japanese-capture theories have persisted without conclusive proof.

On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 after it left Portland for Seattle. He claimed to have a bomb and demanded four parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills. After receiving the ransom and releasing the 36 passengers in Seattle, he kept several crew members aboard and ordered the plane south. A little after 8 p.m., somewhere between Seattle and Reno, he parachuted from the rear of the Boeing 727 with the money and vanished.

The FBI has said Cooper may not have survived the jump. The parachute he chose could not be steered, his clothing and shoes were poorly suited to a rough landing, and he jumped at night over wooded terrain. In 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram found a deteriorating package containing $5,800 of the ransom money on a Columbia River sandbar. It remains the only physical evidence recovered after Cooper jumped.

In July 2016, the FBI redirected the resources assigned to its 45-year NORJAK investigation rather than declaring the mystery solved. The bureau says it will still consider specific physical evidence tied to the parachutes or ransom money. Cooper’s identity and fate remain unknown.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater had dinner at Billy Haas’s Chophouse on West 45th Street in Manhattan on August 6, 1930, with lawyer William Klein and showgirl Sally Lou Ritz. After leaving the restaurant that night, he vanished.

The case produced plenty of strange details but no answer. Earlier that day, Crater had two checks totaling $5,150 cashed. Months after he disappeared, his wife said she found an envelope in their apartment containing $6,690 in cash, insurance policies, a handwritten list of debts owed to him, and a short note saying he was “very weary.” In 2005, another woman’s posthumous letter alleged that her late husband knew men who had killed Crater and buried him near the Coney Island boardwalk, but no evidence ever established that account.

Crater was declared legally dead in 1939. His disappearance was never solved, and he became so famous that newspapers and comedians dubbed him the “Missingest Man in America.”

American businessman Jim Thompson helped revitalize Thailand’s silk industry after World War II and built the Thai Silk Company into an internationally known business. He had also served in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime U.S. intelligence agency that preceded the CIA.

On Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967, Thompson was staying with friends in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands when he went out alone for an afternoon walk and never returned. A large search involving police, soldiers, Indigenous Orang Asli trackers, dogs, aircraft, volunteers, and even psychics failed to find a confirmed trace of him.

Thompson’s intelligence background helped fuel decades of speculation about kidnapping, espionage, and a staged disappearance, but none of those theories has been proved. An accident or exposure in the rugged terrain is another possibility. Thompson was declared legally dead in 1974, and what happened to him remains unknown.

Harold Holt was Australia’s sitting prime minister when he disappeared while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, on December 17, 1967. Witnesses saw him enter rough surf, and despite an intensive search involving police, military personnel, divers, aircraft, and boats, his body was never recovered.

Rumors and conspiracy theories eventually ranged from suicide to claims that Holt had been taken aboard a Chinese submarine. Official investigations reached a much less exotic conclusion. A joint Commonwealth and Victoria Police report in January 1968 found no indication that the disappearance was anything other than accidental, and in 2005 the Victorian State Coroner formally found that Holt died by accidental drowning in rough conditions.

The Harold Holt Swim Centre in the Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris was named in his memory and opened in its expanded form in 1969. The pairing of Holt’s name with a swimming pool has become an enduring piece of Australian irony, but his cause of death is not officially unsolved: authorities concluded that he drowned even though his body was never found.

On the evening of February 9, 2004, 21-year-old UMass Amherst nursing student Maura Murray crashed her Saturn on Route 112 in Haverhill, New Hampshire. A passing school-bus driver stopped and offered assistance. Murray declined and said she had already called AAA, even though there was no cell service in the area and AAA had no record of a call. The driver went home and contacted authorities. When police reached the scene minutes later, Murray was gone.

Earlier that day, investigators said Murray had searched online for directions and lodging in parts of New Hampshire and Vermont, withdrawn most of the money from her bank account, and told a professor and work supervisor that she would be away for a week because of a death in the family. No family member had died. She had also packed belongings in her dorm room.

Murray left items behind in and around the disabled car, but she herself has never been located. New Hampshire State Police still list her as a missing person, and the case remains assigned to the agency’s Cold Case Unit.

Brian Shaffer was a 27-year-old second-year medical student at Ohio State University when he disappeared during a night out at the start of spring break. In the early hours of April 1, 2006, surveillance cameras recorded Shaffer and friends at the Ugly Tuna Saloona near campus. At about 1:55 a.m., he was seen near the entrance talking with two women before moving out of that camera’s view. It was the last confirmed sighting of him.

The mystery became famous because the main public entrance was monitored, yet investigators did not identify footage clearly showing Shaffer leaving. There were other possible routes through service and construction areas, however, and surveillance coverage was not complete. Searches and reviews of nearby camera footage produced no confirmed trail.

The Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Columbus Police have continued seeking information in the case. Shaffer remains missing, and an age-progressed image was released in 2021 in hopes of generating new leads.

On June 22, 1983, 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi left Vatican City for a music lesson in Rome and never returned. Before disappearing, she phoned her sister and described a lucrative job offer she said had been made to her near the music school by someone claiming to represent Avon. It was the last known conversation between Emanuela and her family.

Orlandi was the daughter of a Vatican employee, and her disappearance quickly became an international story. Anonymous callers later tried to connect the case to demands for the release of Mehmet Ali Ağca, the man who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, but no such connection was ever proved. Over the decades, theories involving organized crime, Vatican figures, and other groups have drawn attention without producing a definitive explanation.

In January 2023, the Vatican’s Promoter of Justice opened a new investigation and later transferred relevant documentation to prosecutors in Rome. Italy also established a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the disappearances of Orlandi and Mirella Gregori. The commission continued holding hearings in 2026. Emanuela’s fate remains unknown.

French inventor Louis Le Prince was producing moving-picture sequences in Leeds, England, in 1888, years before the better-known motion-picture systems associated with Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers. His surviving Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed on October 14, 1888, is among the earliest surviving motion-picture sequences.

In 1890, Le Prince was preparing to return to the United States to promote his work. After visiting family in France, he boarded a train from Dijon to Paris in September and disappeared. Neither Le Prince nor his luggage was ever conclusively located, and the circumstances of his disappearance remain unresolved.

Le Prince’s family later suspected that commercial competition surrounding early motion-picture technology might have played a role and at times pointed toward Edison, but no evidence has ever established that Edison or any business rival caused his disappearance. Le Prince was declared legally dead in 1897. His disappearance helped leave his pioneering work in the shadow of inventors whose systems became commercially successful after he vanished.