From a man who entered a bar and was never seen or heard from again to a teenage girl
who disappeared while on spring break, here are 7 people who vanished without a trace:
Number 7 Brian Shaffer On March 31, 2006, Brian Shaffer, a medical
student from Ohio State University, was out drinking with friends to celebrate the beginning
of spring break.
They started their night at a bar called the Ugly Tuna Saloona and then went bar hopping.
After midnight, they returned to the Ugly Tuna, where Brian was separated from his friends,
who eventually assumed he’d gone home.
Brian was recorded by a security camera at the Ugly Tuna Saloona at 1:55 AM on April
1.
He was talking to two young women and saying goodbye.
Shortly afterwards, at 2:00 AM, Brian entered the bar but was never recorded leaving.
In fact, he was never seen or heard from again.
The puzzling aspect is that there were no other entrances to the bar accessible to the
public and the surveillance video hadn’t been tampered with.
The case received media attention throughout the US.
Even though he’d recently lost his mother, Brian was doing well in school and made plans
to go on vacation with his girlfriend.
Columbus police considered many possibilities, including, briefly, that he might have been
a victim of the Smiley Face serial killer.
While this hypothesis was later abandoned, foul play hasn’t been ruled out.
Some suspicion fell on one of Brian’s friends who’d been out with him that night and who
later refused to take a lie detector test.
There’s also a theory that he might be alive and living somewhere else.
The truth, so far, is that no one knows-or is unwilling to talk about- what happened
to Brian Shaffer.
Number 6 Barbara Bollick In July, 2007, Barbara Bollick, from Corvallis,
Montana, went on a hiking trip in the Bitteroot Mountains.
She was joined by her friend Jim Ramaker, who was visiting from California.
At one point, as they were approaching an overlook, Jim stopped to admire the view.
In doing so he turned his head from Barbara, who was about 20 to 30 feet behind him at
the time, for less than a minute.
However, when Jim turned his head back he found that Barbara had completely disappeared.
Jim alerted the authorities who launched a thorough search of the area but never found
any trace of the 55-year-old woman.
Naturally, Jim became the main suspect when foul play was proposed as a hypothesis.
Nevertheless, there was no obvious motive or any evidence linking him to her disappearance.
Moreover, the man was reportedly very cooperative with the investigators and, had he been the
one responsible, a better story would be expected than that she vanished into thin air.
Jim was ruled out as a suspect.
More than a decade since Barbara Bolick disappeared, there’s still no explanation for what happened.
Number 5 Maura Murray Maura Murray disappeared in February 2004,
after emailing her employer and professors at the University of Massachusetts that she
had to take a week off due to a family emergency, a claim her family couldn’t corroborate.
On the evening of February 9, she crashed her car into a tree near Woodsville, New Hampshire.
A bus driver returning home, stopped and asked Maura if she was hurt and if she needed him
to call the police.
According to one report, the woman pleaded with him not to call the police and assured
him that she was all right and that she’d already called AAA.
In reality, no such call was ever recorded.
The bus driver knew reception in the area was bad, so he called the authorities when
he got home.
When the police arrived at the site of the accident, about 20 minutes later, Maura’s
car was there but the young woman was gone.
There was no sign of a struggle.
Her cellphone, debit and credit cards were missing but haven’t been used since.
Nobody knows for sure what happened to her, but the next day, Maura’s fiancé in Oklahoma
received a voicemail, which could have been from her.
There were no words and all the man heard was sobbing at the other end.
In 2009, Murray’s case was given to New Hampshire’s cold case division but some
suspect that she’s disappeared on purpose.
Number 4 Brandon Swanson On May 14, 2008, Brandon Swanson was returning
to his hometown of Marshall, Minnesota, after celebrating the end of the spring semester.
Shortly after midnight, the 19-year-old veered off the road and drove his car into a ditch.
Brandon wasn’t hurt but he didn’t know exactly where he was, so he called his parents
on his cellphone.
He asked them to come pick him up and that he thought he was somewhere near Lynd.
His parents were unable to locate Brandon, who stayed on the phone with them for about
45 minutes.
Then, the phone call ended abruptly with Brandon exclaiming ‘Oh, shit!’
That was the last time he was ever heard from.
The following morning, his parents went to the police to report him missing but were
told to be patient, as this type of behavior was common for young men his age.
However, phone records subsequently revealed that he’d been near Porter, 25 miles in
a different direction from where he said he was.
That’s when the circumstances of his disappearance got more complicated.
His car was eventually located near Taunton, but there was no sign of Brandon.
Foul play wasn’t ruled out but there’s also a theory that he might’ve accidentally
fallen in the Yellow Medicine River and drowned.
After years of extensive searches, his body was never found.
Number 3 Nicole Morin The day was July 30, 1985.
At 10:30 AM, 8-year-old Nicole Morin left her mother’s penthouse apartment in Toronto,
Ontario.
She went to the lobby of the 20-story West Mall apartment building to get the mail.
Afterwards, she returned to the apartment and spoke to a friend on the intercom, whom
she’d made plans with to swim in the building’s pool.
At 11:00 AM the little girl said goodbye to her mother and left the apartment.
About 15 minutes later, her friend called the intercom to ask why Nicole hadn’t arrived.
She was last seen in the hallway of the penthouse or, according to one report, entering the
elevator.
More than three decades after she vanished, after one of the largest police investigations
in Toronto’s history, there’s still no evidence to indicate what might have happened
to her.
One popular theory is that she was abducted as soon as she left the penthouse, but it
seems unlikely that such an act, committed in broad daylight in a building of many tenants,
would have gone unnoticed.
Number 2 Michael Negrete 18-year-old Michael Negrete attended UCLA
on a music scholarship and was reportedly a popular freshman.
On December 10, 1999 he went to a party on the floor he lived on at Dykstra Hall.
Michael then returned to his room where he played an online game with his friends until
about 4 AM.
He briefly went to congratulate another player and was last seen returning to his own room.
What’s strange is that, when his roommate woke up at 9 AM, Michael’s keys, wallet,
shoes, clothing and musical instruments were still there.
However, Michael was nowhere to be found.
Nobody had seen him since 4 AM, and, as of November 2018, there still haven’t been
any confirmed sightings of Michael Negrete.
Extensive searches were carried out with bloodhounds and over 500 leads were submitted.
Michael’s parents hired private detectives and offered a $100,000 reward for any information
leading to his whereabouts.
Nothing ever panned out.
There was just one promising lead several students had given, a Caucasian man who no
one could account for.
He was on the floor the night of Michael’s disappearance.
A sketch was released and the police urged the man to come forward, stressing that he
wasn’t under investigation.
No one ever did.
Theories regarding Michael’s disappearance have included abduction and homicide, possibly
connected to the illegal trade of human organs.
Number 1 Brittanee Drexel While on spring break in April 2009, 17-year-old
Brittanee Marie Drexel disappeared from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, while she was on spring
break.
The teenager had told her mother that she was going to stay at a friend’s house in
Rochester, New York, which was closer to home.
Brittanee was last seen at about 9:00 PM, on a surveillance camera, leaving the Blue
Water Resort.
At the hotel, she visited 20-year-old club promoter Peter Brozowitz, an acquaintance
from Rochester.
Brittanee was texting with her boyfriend, John, on the way back to her hotel, which
was about a mile away.
Then the texts suddenly stopped and John’s phone calls went straight to voicemail.
That’s when he called Brittanee’s mother and told her that she’d actually gone to
Myrtle Beach.
Her parents were devastated when it soon emerged that their daughter had gone missing.
The last time her cellphone pinged was in an area rife with swamps and alligators.
Brittanee was never seen again and her body was never found.
Between 1:00 and 2:00 AM, Brozowitz abruptly left his hotel and returned to Rochester but
the four friends he’d been sharing a room with stayed behind.
However, none of the men were conclusively linked to Brittanee’s disappearance.
There’s a belief that she was abducted and fell victim to human trafficking.
The last report on the case came from a jailhouse confession, in 2016.
Taquan Brown was serving time for voluntary manslaughter in a different case and his story
on the matter was, for many, hard to hear.
It involved Brittanee being gang raped for several days and subsequently shot, killed
and fed to the alligators.
Brown named Da’Shaun Taylor as the man responsible and his story was corroborated by another
inmate who gave his account to an FBI agent.
However, both inmates’ stories lacked the substance necessary to build a case and Taylor
completely denied the allegations.
So far nobody has been charged in Brittanee Drexel’s disappearance.
Thanks for watching!
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