Most missing person cases are quickly resolved with the missing person in question
returning home safe and sound but some cases have bizarre twists and strange conclusions.
5 - Dennis Rarick Dennis Rarick of Bethesda, Maryland walked
out of his apartment on a warm afternoon in August 1976 and became a part of the bizarre phenomena
of missing people who return years later with a completely new life. The exact details of Dennis’
mysterious disappearance are hard to find and it appears that his disappearance did not gain much
media attention at the time. There are only a few newspaper reports and second-hand accounts of what
happened to Dennis and the only people who were tirelessly fighting for answers was his family.
To the outside world, Dennis had everything going for him. He was a great mathematician
and computer scientist and had given speeches on linear computing in The Netherlands.
But deep down inside, Dennis was battling with his own demons.
He continued to put on a brave face to everyone around him,
however, in August 1976 he snapped and decided that it was time to leave his current life behind.
Dennis walked out of his apartment leaving behind his ID documents, wallet and his car.
When his wife returned home later that day she found a note that read
“I’m going on the kind of trip where you never come back.” His family feared the worst and
began searching for him throughout Bethesda and the rest of Maryland but to no avail.
As the hours turned into days, Dennis’ wife realised that her husband wasn’t coming home.
It appears that Dennis had left of his own accord and there wasn’t much that anyone
could do since he had left voluntarily. There is no documented evidence to suggest that Dennis was
the subject of an official missing person case or that he was even reported missing at all.
Then in 1990 the unthinkable happened, Dennis’ father received a letter from his son,
stating that he was alive and well and was ready to reunite with them.
In the letter, he explained that for the past 14 years he had been living under the name of Leonard
Cohn and had remarried a woman named Martha Weaver and that the pair went on to have two children.
The family had been living in San Marcos, California for almost a decade
and to the local community, they were an unassuming, quiet family.
During a Christmas dinner, Dennis took his new wife to one side and confessed that he had been
living a lie. Over the course of a few weeks, he told her everything, explaining every minute
detail and even revealed that he was 7 years older than the DOB on his driving license.
He told the Los Angeles Times “There was no single event or critical thing. But it took a number of
years to get over my emotional problems and quite a few more years to gather the strength to come
forward and tell the world what I had done. I’m a mathematician. I’m an algorithm design engineer,
I solve problems.” Dennis and his father regularly talked over the phone and spent
the years they had together trying to rekindle their relationship and make up for lost time.
4 - David MacDonald
25-year old David Bigelow MacDonald, a Korean War veteran and a nightwatchman in Hartford,
Connecticut stunned the local community when he vanished under mysterious circumstances
on April 10th 1956. On April 10th 1956, David withdrew $265 from his bank account
and told his wife, Lydia, that he was headed to Boston to look for a new car. The couple
were expecting their first child and required something more suitable for a young family.
His pregnant wife waited for him to return but sadly, he never did. When he hadn’t
returned by the next morning he was reported as missing and the Hartford Courant newspaper
ran several stories about him and appealed to anyone with information to come forward.
In a bizarre twist, David’s family who lived in Massachusetts were not informed
that he had gone missing until months later. David’s father was a politician
and would have had useful connections to help spur on the search for his son.
After that fateful day in April 1956, David’s case went cold and Lydia gave birth to their daughter
in May 1956. For years, Lydia wondered what had happened to her husband and above all, wanted his
case to be resolved. She would have to wait until 2007 to find out the truth of what happened to her
beloved David. According to the Hartford Courant, a woman named Gladys Vance and her family welcomed
a man they knew as Eric Nils Sonnegaard into their lives shortly after he arrived in Seattle in 1956.
Sonnegaard’s relationship with Gladys was never romantic and her children and grandchildren even
referred to him as “Uncle Eric”. He became a key part of the Vance family and was always by Gladys’
side, through the rough and the smooth. Years passed and Uncle Eric as he became affectionately
known struck up a strong bond with Gladys’ children. So when he was diagnosed with cancer
in 2007, the whole family was devastated to learn that he had just weeks to live.
40-year-old Heather, one of Gladys’ grandchildren took the news especially
hard and vowed to be at Uncle Eric’s side until the end as he had no family to speak of.
After her Uncle Eric had passed away, Heather was sorting through his personal belongings when she
made a discovery that turned her world upside down. Amongst his personal effects, she found
a handwritten card that read “My first name was David Bigelow MacDonald.” This handwritten note
had opened a gigantic can of worms that neither Heather nor the Vance family was prepared for.
After searching the internet, Heather’s aunt came across a missing person report of a man
named David Bigelow MacDonald who had disappeared from Hartford, Connecticut in 1956. They called
authorities who in turn contacted David’s brother, Herman MacDonald. Herman agreed to travel to
Seattle and in October 2007 he formally identified the deceased man known to authorities as Eric Nils
Sonnegaard and confirmed that it was indeed his missing brother, David Bigelow MacDonald.
Not content with a physical identification, authorities also cross-referenced military
fingerprint records from the Korean War and were able to conclusively say that Eric Nils Sonnegaard
was David MacDonald. David’s wife, Lydia was contacted by David’s family who broke the
news to her. In the years after her husband’s disappearance, Lydia was forced to get on with
her life as a single mother before remarrying and having 2 more children. She told the Hartford news
“Suddenly, he had a lot of responsibility. That might have been stressful. But to use another name
and stay hidden for so long, he must have had a lot of fear. Stress is a kind of fear.”
3 - Christina Davidson Christina Davidson mysteriously vanished from
her home located on the 500 block of Elder Road, Kilgore, Texas on May 15th 2014 and the conclusion
of her case is almost unbelievable. When Christina didn’t show up for her shift on May 16th 2014
co-workers became concerned as this was extremely out of character for her. They tried to call her
and text her but were unable to make contact with her, soon after they called the police and filed a
missing person report. Later that day, Christina’s purse was found on Loop 390 in Marshall, Texas
just a few miles away from her home in Kilgore, but there was no sign of Christina.
Her phone was missing from the purse and there was no sign of her 1992 Toyota Camry,
leading investigators to believe that Christina had possibly been abducted and taken in her
car. The Kilgore Police Department quickly found themselves at a dead-end and called in the help
of the FBI to help speed up the investigation and increase their chances of finding Christina alive.
FBI agents began combing through her home and were alarmed when they came across signs of a struggle,
this confirmed their theory of a possible abduction and were now racing against the clock
to locate Christina. Christina had previously been married to Craig Davidson and it is unknown
how long they had been divorced. Craig had a long list of prior convictions and Christina’s friends
testified that he had been violent towards her throughout their entire relationship.
The community of Kilgore, Texas were left stunned when on July 29th 2014,
Craig, Christina’s ex-husband was officially named as a person of interest
and was arrested in relation to a previous offence against her.
The exact details of this were never released to the public, however, the Kilgore Police
Department strongly suspected that Craig was responsible for Christina’s disappearance.
It wouldn’t be until late 2014 that investigators from both the Kilmore Department and the
FBI released just how wrong they had been. On Wednesday, September 3rd 2014
a woman fitting the description of Christina was arrested in a Lexington, Kentucky gas station
for being in possession of illegal substances. She was extradited from Kentucky back to Texas
to serve her sentence and appears to have been responsible for her own disappearance.
2 - David Stone Everyone who knew 29-year-old David Stone
had nothing but good things to say about the stock market analyst.
He was charming, successful and had everything going for him with the whole world at his feet.
So when he disappeared under mysterious circumstances those closest to David struggled
to understand just what could have happened to a young man who showed so much potential.
David’s case begins on October 28th 1988 when he threw a party at his (La Hoya) La Jolla,
California apartment for his friends. David was originally from El Paso, Texas
but had moved to La Jolla to attend the La Jolla Academy of Advertising Arts
where he fell into the New Age movement and began working towards what he considered
enlightenment. His friends told Police that he would regularly meditate
and often spoke about visiting Sedona, Arizona to embark on an important spiritual journey.
David seemed to have become somewhat obsessed with Sedona, mentioning it frequently in conversation
and enthusiastically discussing his plans to visit one day. Despite his interest in New Age
spirituality and meditation, David had anger issues that he struggled to keep under control
and these issues finally came to a head at the party on October 28th 1988.
The exact details of what occurred that evening are unknown, however, sources tell us
that David and one of his friends got into a disagreement that quickly became heated.
The two shouted back and forth until the argument turned into a physical altercation.
Those at the party said that David “lost it” and began hitting his friend repeatedly.
Thankfully, the fight was broken up and David told everyone that he was going to take a walk
to think about his actions, this would be the last time that his friends and family saw him,
however, this wasn’t the last official sighting of him.
According to David’s friends and family, he told them that he intended to be gone
for no more than a few days and needed to take some time out to realign himself
and calm down. On October 31st 1988, Halloween, David was seen by a farmer
walking into the desert 145 miles east of Tucson, Arizona close to the border with New Mexico.
The two had a brief conversation
and the farmer recalled that David told him that he was “looking for the beast.”
It is unknown whether David was referring to something within the New Age spirituality
or whether he had a psychological break. His car was found 5 days later on November 5th 1988
on New Mexico Highway 80, there was no sign of David and he had seemingly vanished into thin air.
His car had been abandoned near pyramid-shaped mountains and investigators found the Fibonacci
sequence written in the sand close to where his car had been abandoned, however, David had written
18 instead of 21. Police began to wonder whether David had left them a trail of crypt clues as
his car was found close to mile marker 18 and 18 was a number he often gravitated towards in life.
As if David’s disappearance isn’t bizarre enough, he also left the following note for his parents:
“They think the WORD is in the safe. Six knives in Rob’s room. Yous buys your tea
and yous take your chances Halloween.” As previously mentioned, Halloween 1988 was the last
time that David was seen alive and many people believe that this cryptic note alludes to that.
On February 23rd 1992 two hikers travelling near the Granite Gap in New Mexico
came across the skeletal remains of an adult male.
These remains were confirmed to be the remains of missing 29-year old David Stone,
however, the coroner was not able to conclude his cause or approximate time of death. David’s
case has remained a mystery ever since and we are left with more questions than answers.
1 - Vera Lorene Roberts Vera Lorene Roberts, who was known to
her family as Lorene, had lived a turbulent life and by February 1964 she was working as a waitress
in Austin, Texas. Between 1957 and 1961, Vera had been admitted to the Texas State Mental Hospital
at least 5 times and her family noticed that her mental state was rapidly deteriorating
and they did everything that they could to support her. Vera married her husband in 1949
just 10 days after meeting him and the pair went on to have three children together.
Sadly, the marriage was not meant to be and in 1956 the pair got divorced with Vera taking
custody of the children. According to Vera’s family, her new in-laws did not approve of her and
gave her a hard time and put a significant strain on the relationship between her and her husband.
After the divorce was finalised, her family began noticing that her mental health was slowly
going downhill and as mentioned before, she was admitted to the mental hospital at least 5 times.
Unable to cope with her mental health issues and the pressure of being a mother,
Vera placed her three children up for adoption, telling her family that it was
only fair that the children had a happy and stable upbringing. Years passed by and Vera worked hard
to overcome her mental health issues, however oftentimes relapsed and ended back in treatment.
The last time that Vera Lorene was seen alive was on February 12th 1964 when she admitted herself
into a different mental institution. After this, Vera never made contact with her family again
and simply faded away and became a distant memory. It wasn’t until Vera’s mother passed away that her
family realised that she was well and truly missing. When Vera’s mother passed away, she
left $100,000 to each of her children, the only problem was, was that nobody could locate Vera.
Vera’s family appealed to the TV show Unsolved Mysteries to help them get answers and in 1991
they aired an episode that contained details about Vera’s untimely disappearance.
You’ll never guess who was watching that exact episode when it
aired for the first time in 1991, none other than Vera Lorene Roberts herself.
Vera contacted the show to tell them that she was safe and well and had been living in Little Rock,
Arkansas since she vanished in 1964. She also explained that she had been using her first name,
Vera instead of her middle name, Lorene. Vera and her sisters were reunited shortly
after the show aired and were ecstatic that they finally had their sister back.