It is often the case that missing people are recognized by members of the public
and they are able to direct investigators to the missing person. One would think then that, in the
case of missing celebrities, they are even easier to find, since they are far more recognizable.
But this isn’t always the case, as there are a number of celebrities
that are still missing today after vanishing years ago and their fates remain unknown.
5. Jimmy Robinson
“Sweet” Jimmy Robinson was a middleweight boxer with a not-too-memorable career, amassing only
8 professional wins, coupled with 25 losses. Out of those 25 losses, he was knocked out 16 times,
but he is remembered for one bout that he fought on the 7th of February, 1951
against Mohammad Ali, then still known as Cassius Clay.
Ali was supposed to fight Willie Gullatt that night,
but Gullatt was a no-show after learning that Ali was being paid $500 more than he was and so,
Jimmy was asked to be a last-minute stand-in in only his second ever professional bout.
Jimmy never made it through the first round as he was floored by Ali after just 1 minute and
34 seconds. He would, however, continue to box for the next 7 years, retiring once in 1963,
but featuring in a comeback fight against Kent Green in Miami in 1968.
He lost the fight in less than a minute.
Robinson was interviewed for the final time in 1979 by Sports Illustrated writer,
Michael Brennan after he tracked him down in Miami. In that interview, he revealed
that he only weighed 158 pounds for the Ali fight and not 178 as was officially listed.
He also stated that he and Ali used to be good friends and that the two would
often drive around in Ali’s pink Cadillac, but that they hadn’t seen each other since 1967.
That was the last time that anyone heard from or saw Jimmy.
In 2009, ESPN sports writer, Wright Thompson revealed in a piece that he wrote
that he had been looking for Jimmy for 6 years, but to no avail.
An avid Muhammad Ali collector named Stephen Singer also spent a number of years looking
for him, as Jimmy’s was the only signature missing from his collection of 50 fighters who faced Ali.
People in the Overtown part of Miami remember Jimmy
and some even remember seeing him in the last few years, but
no trace of the man seems to have remained and his whereabouts are still unknown.
4. Connie Converse
Missing celebrity, Elizabeth Eaton Converse, better known as singer-songwriter and musician,
Connie Converse, didn’t become well known until 2004 when her music was featured on a radio show.
A compilation album of her songs called “How Sad, How Lovely” was released in 2009,
expanding her fan base even further.
During the 1950s, she lived in Greenwich Village, Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem and started calling
herself Connie after being given the nickname in New York. It is then that she started writing
songs and composing accompanying music on her guitar, often performing her work for friends.
During this time, she started drinking and smoking despite her religious upbringing and her parents
were dead set against her ambitions as a musician, her father never hearing her sing until he passed
away. She made one brief appearance on The Morning Show on CBS, which was hosted by Walter Cronkite.
But she was struggling to find success in the music industry and by 1961,
she had moved to Ann Arbor in Michigan where she became a secretary and eventually worked
as Managing Editor for the Journal of Conflict Resolution but didn’t produce any new music.
By 1973, she was suffering from depression and the Journal where she was employed was moved to Yale,
leaving her without an income. Her ex-colleagues and friends collected money to send her on a
trip to England for 6 months, hoping that this would help her feel better, but to no effect.
Shortly after, her mother asked her to accompany her on a trip to Alaska
and she agreed to go, though she wasn’t happy to go along. It is believed that this trip had
a hand in her decision to vanish. Not too long after that, she was informed by doctors that
she needed to have a hysterectomy done and the news caused her to become even more depressed.
In 1974, shortly before her 50th birthday, she wrote a series of letters to her family and
friends in which she explained that she needed to make a fresh start. She packed all her belongings
into her Volkswagen Beetle and left Michigan for good, never to be seen or heard from again.
3. Barbara Newhall Follett
The unsolved mystery of the disappearance of Barbara Newhall Follett started on the 7th of
December, 1939 in Brookline, Massachusetts. Barbara was considered to be a child prodigy
in the 1920 when she published two books with Alfred A. Knopf (noff).
The first was called “The House Without Windows” and was written when she was just 8 years old,
her second, called “The Voyage of the Norman D” following when she was 14.
During her teens, she pursued a career as a crewman on a ship
sailing out into the Atlantic and upon her return, she had completed the second book.
Both her novels received critical acclaim, but after her father, who had always encouraged
her to become writer, left the family for a younger woman, her work started to dwindle.
When she was 16, she moved with her mother to an apartment in New York, but since it was during the
Great Depression and they didn’t receive any money from her father, times were hard.
She then met an outdoorsman named Nickerson Rogers and the couple fell in love,
eventually marrying in Massachusetts in 1934. But after 5 years of marriage, the couple started
having problems in their relationship when she started to suspect that he was cheating on her
and on December 7th they had a fight and she decided to leave.
Barbara left their apartment on foot with $30 to her name
and simply disappeared. Nickerson didn’t report her missing for 2 weeks.
When he eventually did so, he filed the missing persons report under her married name – Robertson,
and the media didn’t realize that it was, in fact, the former child prodigy who was being sought.
When she remained missing for a number of years, her father, with who she still had no real
relationship, wrote a letter pleading with her to return and it was published in The Atlantic.
It would take a further 25 years before the media realized that Barbara was missing
and by that time, she could have moved to anywhere in the world or passed away.
Many theories have been put forward as to what happened to Barbara.
Some believe that a tragic accident may have happened during the fight with Nickerson,
explaining why he took so long to file a missing persons report.
Others think that she may have followed the plot in her first novel
in which a girl runs away from home to live by herself in the wild.
But that is all mere speculation and we will likely never know what really
happened to the promising young novelist who vanished when she was just 25 years old.
2. Scott Smith
On the 30th of November, 2000, Scott Smith, bassist for the Canadian rock band Loverboy,
joined the ranks of missing celebrities who have never been found. Smith was studying at
the University of Manitoba in 1979 when he was given the opportunity to play bass for the band.
Before long, they became a success and in less than two years, they found fame
after the release of their self-titled debut album. Their second album called “Get Lucky”
enjoyed just as much success when the song “Working for the Weekend” was released as
the album’s lead single, reaching the number 2 spot on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Chart.
The band continued to tour throughout the 80s, but didn’t find as much success due
to changing music tastes and didn’t record much music during this time.
They would start recording again in the 90s and would promote their new music through touring,
but in 2000, everything changed in one fateful moment.
After performing at a benefit concert for Juvenile Diabetes Research in Vancouver,
Smith, his fiancée and two friends decided to use his 37-foot sailboat to sail from British
Columbia to Mexico. As they reached choppy waters about 4 miles from San Francisco’s Ocean Beach,
something went very wrong.
Smith’s longtime friend, Bill Ellis recalls that he went down below to
change into foul weather gear so that he could relieve Smith at the wheel,
but while he was changing, a massive wave hit the vessel and it capsized.
He ran upstairs only a few seconds later to find that Smith had been washed overboard
and was nowhere to be seen. They turned the boat around and tried to locate him in the rough surf,
but neither he, nor any debris or the man overboard pole could be located.
They immediately contacted the Coast Guard who deployed helicopters within 20 minutes
of receiving the report. Two vessels were also sent out and a 133-square mile area was searched,
but when rough seas and fog intervened, the search was called off at 2 pm the next day.
His friends and family continued to search for him with the help of Weststar Marine
service, who they had hired, but he was never found and he remains missing to this day.
1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (ex oo puhr ee)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry won not only the United States National Book Award, but several of the
highest literary awards available in France before he became a missing person on the 31st of July,
1944. He was known as a poet, aristocrat, journalist and pioneering aviator,
but is mostly remembered for his novella titled “The Little Prince”.
Before the outbreak of World War II, he was a successful commercial pilot
and at the start of the war, he joined the French Air Force. Here, he would be involved
in several reconnaissance missions until France’s armistice with Germany in 1940.
Thereafter, he was demobilized from the Air Force and he travelled to the United States
to aid in persuading the US government to enter the war against the Nazis. He would
spend a further 2 years and four months in the US, during which time he wrote three more novels.
He then joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa, though by this time,
his health was failing and he was 8 years over the cutoff age. In 1943,
he received an assignment to fly an unarmed P-38 Lockheed Lightning with his former unit,
though the plane was far more sophisticated than the ones he was used to flying.
On his second mission, his plane experienced engine failure and he crashed, resulting
in him being grounded for 8 months. During this time, he was accused by French General,
Charles de Gaulle of being a Nazi sympathizer which caused his health and depression to worsen.
He started drinking heavily, causing his mental and physical health to suffer further,
but he was eventually cleared to return to service. On the 31st of July, 1944,
he was sent on what was to be the last of his missions and he departed from Corsica.
But he would never return and to this day, no one is certain what really happened to him
during the flight. Some people believe that he must’ve been shot down while others think that
he may have lost control of his aircraft, since he was known to be an undisciplined pilot who
often read books while he was flying and he had little interest in aircraft complexities.
But whatever the case may be, his true fate remains a mystery.