Six teenage boys, gone without a trace. A body found at the side of the road, beaten. For most,
spring break is a time of leisure, but each of these stories ended in tragedy.
Every story of a murder or disappearance that happened over spring break is tragic, but the
case of Rachel Taylor is one that made history. Taylor was the first Penn State student murdered
in the history of the school. According to Derek J. Sherwood's Nittany Nightmare,
in 1940, the Pennsylvania college was in a bad place financially in
part because of a string of horrific murders.
The first of those took place in March, when Taylor was returning
to campus at the end of spring break. According to the Centre Daily Times,
Taylor was seen getting off a bus and into a car at 1:30 a.m., headed back toward her
dorm. A few hours later, her body was found on the side of the road, beaten and bloodied.
From there, the investigation took many twists and turns. Police had suspects,
but they couldn't prove anything conclusive. They looked for the murder weapon and the car
that was believed was used to dump Taylor's body, but couldn’t find it to any avail. Then,
miraculously, an inmate named Jack Ray confessed to the crime, only for the whole thing to be a
ruse. It was just a desperate attempt to drum up drama and attention for himself.
In the decades since, other investigators have taken up the case, but due to differences in
police procedure, the case is as much a mystery as it was back in 1940.
Not all spring break murders take place miles away from the victim's school or home. In 1973,
Sarah Ann Ottens turned down a trip to Mexico to stay in the dorms at the University of Iowa and
work. According to The Guardian, nothing initially seemed awry, but on March 13,
two other students happened to notice something strange about the dorm she was staying in:
The door was left open. They found Ottens strangled to death on the floor,
covered by a bedsheet. A couple of months later, The Bryan Times reported that James Hall – a
former football player at the same school – had been accused and convicted of the murder.
Case closed, right? Well, not really. The National Registry of Exonerations gave
some problematic details. The case was rife with prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecutors
withheld evidence, making claims that one of Hall's fingerprints was found at the scene,
though they never actually submitted proof of its existence to the court.
Witness testimony also came under scrutiny. The prosecution claimed
that two witnesses had picked out Hall in a police lineup, though in reality,
they hadn't. Other witnesses could only provide testimony that ranged from vague to completely
contradictory. Though the prosecution was able to sway the jury to their side at the time,
the discovery of all of these issues led to Hall's exoneration about a decade later.
"This court is now adjourned."
As for the case itself? A number of other suspects were identified, but according to
Iowa Cold Cases, Ottens' murder is among a number that police are still investigating.
The case of Karen Wilson is one where it's pretty accurate to say that someone quite
literally vanished without a trace. According to the Charley Project,
on March 27, 1985, Wilson, then a student at SUNY-Albany, was preparing to spend her
spring break relaxing at the sunny beaches of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
She'd been out shopping that day and potentially gone for an appointment at a local tanning salon,
but later that evening, she disappeared. No one has heard from her since, and investigators
have never even been able to locate any of the belongings she was carrying with her.
In trying to piece together the crime, police began to consider that she had been abducted
somewhere on the way to Fort Lauderdale. But according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel,
later information seemed to narrow the search. Around 8:15 p.m., she was reportedly seen
walking back to campus, leading investigators to speculate that she never even left New York. They
thought perhaps she was abducted in the short walk from the tanning salon to the university.
But it's just speculation, like most other thoughts surrounding the
case. No one even knows whether Wilson survived; most have assumed the worst,
but there's little closure in an assumption.
Hitchhiking is largely a thing of the past. There are a number of reasons for that,
but fear is a pretty big one, and that's not unwarranted. After all,
it might have played a part in the disappearances and deaths of Kim Vaccaro and Lisa Eisman.
According to The New York Times, back in March 1985, both Vaccaro and Eisman were
on spring break from the State University College at Buffalo. The roommates decided
to use their vacation to hitchhike their way down to Fort Lauderdale,
Florida. They began their journey on March 29, and their last known location was Hagerstown,
Maryland, where they bought a postcard they sent to a friend on March 30.
They'd intended to meet another friend in Florida on the 31st, but suddenly,
there was just radio silence. And then, two days later, on April 2, two bodies
were found dumped in Florida's Hillsborough River, stripped of most of their clothes,
possessions, and money. Autopsies revealed that both Vaccaro and Eisman were likely in
the water for two days, and blunt force trauma had been the cause of death.
"911, where's your emergency?"
A year later, police provided a reenactment of the crime,
hoping it might turn up new leads, but the case remains unsolved today.
On April 26, 1986, Susan Jacques disappeared. Not exactly without a trace, but without any
clues left behind to track down who likely left her body floating in a Delray Beach
canal. An 18-year-old high schooler at the time, Jacques was visiting Fort Lauderdale,
Florida, with a group of nine friends. The night before, the group hit the town,
staying out until 2 a.m. At that point, Jacques and a few of her friends headed back to the motel.
But about an hour and a half later, Jacques said she wanted to take a walk on the beach.
Three days later, her body was found 35 miles away, dumped in a canal. Investigators were
stumped. For one, the water of the canal left her body so decomposed that autopsies couldn't
reveal a cause of death. In addition, toxicology results were unreliable, and there were few signs
of physical injury. On top of that, no one knows for sure just where she went before she
died. Authorities suspected foul play, but with so little information, the case has gone cold.
Even when victims of a violent crime survive to tell the tale, that doesn't
necessarily mean that investigators have all the answers. After all,
in the case of the murder of Amy Gellert, there are a lot of things still left unknown.
"A brutal attack during spring break has been left unsolved—"
On March 20, 1994, Bunny and Bob Lehton walked into their home,
only to come face to face with a masked stranger holding a dagger and gun. According to CBS News,
the Lehtons were told to lie on the floor while the intruder waited with them in the
living room. But as soon as a car pulled up outside, the masked man began stabbing
the Lehtons and pursued them as they tried to escape. The man stopped in the driveway,
but he attacked the driver of the newly arrived car: the Lehtons' daughter, Amy Gellert,
home for spring break. Ultimately, both the Lehtons survived their wounds. Gellert didn't.
But in all the years since,
investigators have never identified the masked assailant or his motive.
Was this a targeted attack? Or was it a random act of violence? All police have
are a few strange pieces of evidence. The gun was found to actually be a prop gun,
the kind of thing used on movie sets, and the dagger was also unusual,
described by the Lehtons as being "ornate." But neither of those has led to a conviction. Yes,
there are a couple of suspects, but the case is far from solved.
"They say it's solvable. They just have to have somebody come forward."
On March 17, 1995, the city of Pickering, Ontario, was the site of a rather odd mystery. Private
investigator Bruce Ricketts told Mysteries of Canada that it all started with a pretty normal
party for some students celebrating spring break. But a little while after midnight, Jay Boyle,
Michael Cummins, Daniel Higgins, Chad Smith, Robbie Rumboldt, and Jamie Lefebvre decided to
leave the party. While no one is quite sure what their intentions were, it's speculated that they
stole a motorboat and took it on a joyride. And then they were never heard from again.
A couple of the boys' girlfriends reported them missing, and search parties went out,
only to recover very few clues. Nonetheless, there are some details about these lost boys
of Pickering that have piqued the interest of investigators and armchair detectives alike.
Ricketts explains that surveillance video actually captured three of the boys just before 2 a.m. They
were positively identified by family members, but it's hard to make out what they were doing.
Then, a few years later, a male body washed up on the banks of the Niagara River wearing
startlingly similar red pants to those worn by Jay Boyle. People speculated that the body was,
in fact, Boyle; later DNA testing seemed to prove otherwise, but the
investigation was also colored by some strange controversy.
Medical school is hard, right? But despite the stress that typically comes with student life,
that's not to say that there isn't anything to live for. On the contrary, Brian Shaffer had a
lot to look forward to, which is part of what made his disappearance on April 1, 2006, so strange.
Shaffer was a medical student at Ohio State. At the start of spring break, Shaffer headed out to
a bar with a friend. After a couple of rounds and a trip through town, CCTV footage showed
Shaffer outside the bar at 2 a.m., chatting with a couple of women. After a short conversation,
he was seen headed back toward the bar's entrance. But no footage ever showed him leaving.
Calls to his cell phone went unanswered, and he was officially
declared a missing person that Monday. Investigators have since been stumped;
maybe the angle of the cameras just meant that they missed Shaffer's exit. Or maybe
he took the back exit from the bar, which led to a construction site.
In that case, maybe he did it to intentionally disappear,
though there's never been any discernible motive for him to do so. To make things even stranger,
the two women he was last seen talking to were never brought in for lie detector tests,
and his roommate similarly refused. In the years since,
sightings of Shaffer have been reported, but those leads have never really panned out.
"I think the main question always came down to, is he dead or did he run away?"
When spring break rolls around, students often want to vacation somewhere warm and sunny.
That was the case for Reny Jose, who took a trip with a bunch of friends to Panama City, Florida,
on March 1, 2014. Just a few days later, he was reported missing, and he hasn't been seen since.
But there are a lot of things about this case that just don't seem to line up. For one,
investigators suspect he went missing around 7 p.m. on March 3,
but his friends didn't report him missing until 11 a.m. the next morning. They claimed that the
delay was because they thought he would return, but that still doesn't clear up other details.
They also said that they called because they found his clothes on the beach at that time, but a beach
cleanup crew had been by just five hours earlier, and apparently, none of them had found anything.
What's more, one of those friends claimed that Jose had taken LSD and hinted at suicidal
thoughts, though Jose's family maintains that such things would've been completely out of character.
And to top things off, many of Jose's friends refused to talk to the family. Some even left
the city before the police were able to question them. In the years since,
quite a few of those students have lawyered up, providing no real answers as to what happened.
"We didn't get no leads."