50 Creepy & Unsolved Disappearances – Part 2

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41 Disappearance of Terrance Williams & Felipe Santos

Disappearance of Terrance Williams & Felipe Santos

Terrance Williams and Felipe Santos went missing in 2004 and 2003, respectively, under similar circumstances in Naples, Florida. Both men were last seen being arrested by former Collier County Sheriff’s deputy Corporal Steve Calkins for driving without a license. Steve claims he changed his mind about both arrests and last saw the men after he dropped them off at Circle K convenience stores. Actor Tyler Perry offered a $100,000 reward for any information leading to the location of the men or leading to an arrest in the case. Al Sharpton, of the National Action Network, and Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, also joined Perry in raising awareness of the cause.


42 Campden Wonder

Campden Wonder

In 1660, a 70-year-old Englishman named William Harrison was walking a few miles to the next village when he disappeared. Later, they found his clothes covered in blood, including his hat which looked like it had been slashed open. Harrison’s servant, John Perry plead guilty to his murder and was executed along with his brother and their mother. Two years later, William Harrison returned to his village alive, having found his way back to England on a ship from Portugal. He claimed to have been sold into slavery in Turkey. To this day, nobody has any idea why the servant confessed to the murder he didn’t commit, or what really happened to Harrison.


43 Disappearance of Andrew Gosden

Disappearance of Andrew Gosden

In 2007, 14-year-old Andrew Gosden appeared to be a happy, quiet, studious boy destined for great academic success. He was described as absent-minded, shy, and happy with his own company but with a small group of friends. Then, on the 14th of September, just a week after school began, he disappeared. He had a perfect attendance record but skipped school on that day to go to a train station to buy a one-way ticket to King’s Cross in London on his own. As soon as he left the station, he seemingly vanished in an area crawling with CCTV cameras. None of the CCTV cameras in the entirety of London had saved footage of him as the police waited 2 weeks before asking local businesses if there was any footage of him saved, and there’s no evidence of him ever leaving the city. He had a PSP on him when he disappeared but Sony confirmed no PSN account had ever been made on his device, he had no access to the internet at home, and didn’t even have a mobile phone. Strangely, he left the charger for the PSP at home, suggesting he possibly intended to come back.


44 Disappearance of Johnny Gosch

Disappearance of Johnny Gosch

In 1982, a 12-year-old boy named Johnny Gosch was kidnapped while he was on his morning paper round. This case involved a lot of bad police work, mostly due to the policy they had at the time which was to wait 72 hours before investigating a missing child. The police were convinced that he ran away, even when all the evidence said otherwise. His grieving mother went to hell and back to get justice for her son and other missing children. She helped to get the “72-hour” policy lifted. She also claims that, in 1997, she was visited by Johnny who had grown up, and said that he was abducted by a pedophile ring. He told her that he can’t return because if he did, he would be killed. He talked with her for an hour while another man watched, and they both then vanished again.


45 Disappearance of Henry McCabe

Disappearance of Henry McCabe

In 2015, 32-year-old Henry McCabe, a Liberian immigrant who worked as an auditor for the Minnesota Department of Revenue, lived in Mounds View with his wife, Kareen, and their two daughters. While his family was away in California, on September 7, at 2:28 AM, his wife Kareen McCabe received a call from Henry’s cell phone and heard her husband screaming in distress and saying someone shot him. The voicemail had all sorts of noises which people speculate could have been the sound of waterboarding or getting tased. His family also apparently misled the police a few times and his friends, who were last seen with him, made a series of poor decisions which led to his disappearance.


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46 Disappearance of Ben Padilla

Disappearance of Ben Padilla

In 2003 a man named Ben Padilla and a mechanic climbed into a Boeing 727 that was collecting dust at an Angolan airport, taxied silently to the runway, and took off. No trace of the plane or the men has ever been found. The plane, formerly owned by American Airlines, had been converted into a diesel fuel transport to sell fuel to mining companies, but the whole business deal sounds rather shady, and most of the mechanics who came over from the U.S. to work on the job went home without being paid, except for Ben Charles Padilla.

A 727 requires a crew of three to fly it, and neither Padilla nor the other mechanic were accomplished pilots, so initial theories speculated that there was a hijacker aboard who forced Padilla to take off with the plane. No airport reported a mystery 727 in a dinged-up American Airlines livery landing on one of their runways. Odder still, no signs of a crash was reported anywhere over the Atlantic Ocean, or anyplace in the dense jungles of southern Africa, although it has been suggested that the FBI investigation into the disappearance turned something up that they aren’t letting the public know.


47 Disappearance of Leigh Occhi

Disappearance of Leigh Occhi

On the morning of August 27, 1992, Leigh Occhi, then aged 13, was left at her home in Tupelo, Mississippi. Her mother, Vicki Yarbrough, departed for her job at approximately 8:00 a.m. She tried to call Leigh once she arrived, but Leigh didn’t answer the phone. Her mom got worried and left work to make sure she was okay. When she returned, Leigh was missing and there was evidence of foul play, including a bloody nightgown, as well as a few missing personal items belonging to Leigh. She remains missing. She immediately called the police. Leigh has never been found, but her glasses were mailed to her ex-stepdad a few weeks after she disappeared.


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48 Disappearance of Dupont de Ligonnès

Disappearance of Dupont de Ligonnès

Dupont de Ligonnès was a French aristocrat, who had 4 kids, good life on the outside (but had amassed a lot of debt). In 2011, letters were delivered to his immediate family stating that Xavier and his family would have to “leave urgently for the US” because he had become a key witness for the Drug Enforcement Agency and now they all had to enter into the Witness Protection Program. After a couple of weeks, the concerned family members got the police involved. Investigation into Xavier’s recent purchases (bullets, cement, lime, a shovel) led the police to search his home. They found bodies buried under the patio in the back garden of the house. The investigators claimed to have found the remains of all four children and Xavier’s wife. They had been drugged and shot in their sleep.

The night after he murdered his family there is footage of him at a restaurant smiling and chatting with the waiter. There are some other oddities related to the case. Up to 9 people saw Xavier’s wife alive after the date the police say she was killed. She was seen walking the dog with the two youngest kids. Xavier left detailed letters to his family about what to do with the house, their belongings, the contracts, etc. He left the key to the basement, which you could only access through a door in the garden right next to where the bodies were. The autopsy was kind of botched. The individual death certificates were made on site without DNA testing or anyone to attest to their identity and the police released details to the family that was not consistent with the victims (eg. they mixed up the two sons, gave heights and weights that weren’t accurate, etc.)


49 Disappearance of Sandra Johnson Hughes

Disappearance of Sandra Johnson Hughes

Sandra Lyn Johnson Hughes loved the outdoors. She is what people would call a ‘survivalist’. Camping, hiking, and exploring were Sandra’s favorite hobbies. It would stand to reason then, that Hawaii was a great place for Sandra to live. But after the pandemic hit in 2020, Sandra decided to move to the mainland, so in June 2020, California would become her home. On June 26, she spoke to her family on the phone. Sandra was planning a solo camping trip and hiking, possibly up to Yosemite. She wanted to get away from the craziness of the world in its current state. Sandra, at the age of 53, was experienced in the outdoors, so no one was particularly worried about her.

Her family had nothing to worry about until July 5, when park officials found her campsite, which looked abandoned and in total disarray, definitely not like Sandra, who was exceptionally neat and organized. There were some odd sightings of her, bruised and barefoot, but she told the hikers (who didn’t realize she was a missing person) that she didn’t need help. A year later, a 3-year-old boy had a spooky encounter in the area where Sandra disappeared, an encounter that caught the attention of law enforcement. The child told his parents there was a woman lying face down with her legs straight up in the air in a nearby meadow. According to this kid, the woman was unable to speak or move and needed help. Yet still, two years later, Sandra remains missing.


50 Disappearance of Brandon Swanson

Disappearance of Brandon Swanson

Brandon Swanson was a 19-year-old from Minnesota who while on his way home from a party crashed his car into a ditch and called his parents for help. When they arrived there was no car or sign of Brandon. They called Brandon again to see if he could see headlights or hear the car horn, but Brandon couldn’t see or hear anything. Brandon was confident that he was giving his parents the correct directions, which led to frustration but he stayed on the phone with his mother. He remained on the phone with his parents for 47 minutes.

Around 2:30 a.m on May 14, 2008, Brandon screamed “Oh Sh*t” before the call ended. His father tried to call him back several times but Brandon never picked up. His vehicle was found 25 miles away the next day. A team of bloodhounds picked up a 3-mile scent trail that largely followed the field roads west-northwest to an abandoned farm, then along a river to a point where it appeared to enter the stream. There was no further trace of him whether it be physical evidence such as finding Brandon’s cell phone on the ground somewhere, a piece of clothing, or something else.


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21 COMMENTS

  1. RE #1: Gary Mathias – I have an easy explanation, and it has to do with the guy in the car, but doesn’t involve foul play.

    If they were lost in the mountains at night, even if they were on a highway, it’s possible they were looking for someone to ask for directions. They may have saw the lights of Shones car, since he admittedly left it running; also, if he was seriously in need of help, would have left them on to make himself more visible. Maybe they decided to drive up that road thinking it would be easier to get to the car and ask for directions. It also may have seemed closer than it was at night.

    It says in the original article that the driver’s side window was down in the boy’s car. I think if someone was driving up a road like that, at least if I was, hanging out the window to see where I was going would make it rather easy not to damage the car. You take it slow, and you watch where you are going out the window.

    But then they get stuck. At this point, they get out of the car, maybe one of them goes out to take a piss. All of a sudden some guy starts screaming for help up the mountain. If the wind was blowing (maybe this explains the whistles that Shones heard), or there was recent snow, then that plays hell with echoes and it is hard to tell where sound is coming from. The calls for help may have very well sounded like they were coming from another direction uphill and out in the woods. The article states that one of the boys would help anyone in need. This may explain why they didn’t continue on to Shones car, but perhaps thought someone had left that car and was now lost out in the woods.

    At that point, all it would take is one of them running out into the woods in the wrong direction and the others chasing off after him for the group to get lost; this seems even more plausible with their mental capacity – one of them could have just bolted thinking that someone needed help out in the woods. It’s night, possibly windy, and there is fresh snow. Whoever was yelling for help has gone silent, and now you are in the woods. They kept going uphill looking for whoever was yelling for help, got lost, there was a fresh snow, and the rest is history. Three of them died from exposure, the other two made it to a cabin. However, since three of them were already dead, it makes sense that the remaining two would have been in dire straits at that point. I think they got in the cabin, ate what was available, and Mathias, in the best condition somehow, took the best pair of shoes available, wrapped his friend up, and tried to get to help. They probably didn’t even check for more food or for heat, or didn’t have the mental capacity at that point to work it out. There is a note about a mysterious watch with a broken crystal, but that could have been discarded by a camper and found in the cabin – it was broken, after all.

    2958
    • RE #1: Gary Mathias – We will never truly have an answer to what actually happened that night, but a lot of the strange behavior is familiar to me since I work in a group home for this exact population. It’s a group home for men with mild intellectual disabilities, just like the men here. They can do a lot of things, but their lives and capabilities rely heavily on rules and routines and exact steps. They may be able to cook a grilled cheese sandwich, but if you tell them to cook a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, they will stand there utterly perplexed unless you stand next to them and walk them through step by step.

      What I can’t figure out is why and how they ended up where they did. Did the driver just get turned around somehow from a missed exit, road construction, or traffic detour? These things are minor annoyances to a neurotypical person but can be devastating to someone with mental problems or intellectual disabilities.

      Aside from how they ended up so far away from home, a lot of the behavior is familiar to me because of where I work. The abandoned car. When the guys at the group home I work at become stressed out and agitated, they will often run away from home. We then have to call the police to bring them back. The reasons they run away from home often don’t make logical sense or they seem like an overreaction. Like if a storm is coming a guy who is afraid of thunder storms will then run away from home…. Into the storm lol. So, I’m thinking that the guys somehow became lost and ended up far out of their way… For whatever reason. Lost, they then began to panic. The car got stuck in the snowbank. Now, completely panicked, they decided they are afraid of the car since driving is what got them lost, and decided to bail from the car and just walk instead. That, or they simply were too panicked to figure out how to push the car out and thought the snowcats tracks would lead them to civilization.

      From there things become more easy to explain. They followed the snowcat trail to the trailer. Sterling and Madruga succombed to the elements along the way. Weiher and Huett made it to the trailer. Now, being familiar with this population I kind of understand what happened. There was a fireplace, matches, and books to use to burn to keep warm. But, if they had been told their whole lives that setting things on fire was unsafe and inappropriate, they would have not been able to put together that it was a good idea to do in that situation. The food rations. If they were unfamiliar with what they looked like, they may not have even recognized it as food. Or maybe they didn’t know how to open the packaging. Or how to prepare it. The clothes in the trailer. They may have only recognized their own winter clothes as the appropriate things to wear when they get cold. Or they may have feared legal consequences for taking someone else’s property without permission. The guys at our work have to be told and taught how to pick weather appropriate clothing. Even when they are sooooo high functioning that you kind of forget about their intellectual disability. Then it will be an unseasonably warm day in the 60’s or 70’s and they’re still wearing their winter jackets. Why? Because no staff told them it was okay not to. Like, you forget what you’re dealing with but then something like that happens and you’re like, “Ope. There it is.”

      I don’t know. Some things about this case are a mystery like how they got out to the mountain in the first place or the unexplained sighting from the guy having a heart attack. But then there are so many behaviors that seem familiar to me that make me learn more towards thinking the whole thing was just an accident that ended in tragedy. I think Mathias probably succombed to the elements and his body was just never found. It’s a lot of wilderness to get lost in and several months of animal scavenging may have scattered and lost his remains

      916
    • Except… it is said that he died in the cabin after 8-13 weeks, and having lost 80-100 pounds. Some of the food was eaten, but there was enough food left to feed 5 men for a year. Would it not occur to him during those 8-13 weeks to check the locker to see if there was more food? He had some food that he rationed and ate during those weeks, or he would’ve died after ~2 weeks due to starvation. So why did he think there was so little food in the first place? Why not build a fire to prevent his frostbite? There were matches, material to sustain a fire and even a propane tank. It makes no sense at all.

      823
      • This sticks out: “The growth of beard on his face showed that he had lived apparently, in starving agony inside that trailer, for anywhere from eight to 13 weeks.”

        The growth of the beard?

        Couldn’t that have happened outside the trailer? I’d like to know how they came to the 8 to 13 weeks number, because if it was only due to the growth of the beard then that means nothing, he could have grown that while starving to death and losing all that weight out in the wilderness trying to find shelter.

        Another source said that when they found him he was wrapped in the sheet “like a shroud” and indicated that they thought someone else would have had to have done it. His head was wrapped too, according to that article.

        I just don’t understand why they thought they were in that trailer for so long. I mean, the weight loss could have happened before they go to the trailer, same with the beard growth. If there are other reasons they think they were in that trailer for so long, I don’t see them listed. Maybe I am missing it.

        950
        • I just don’t see them (or just him) walking around in the wilderness for 8-13 weeks without dying quickly. It was february and there was snow, so it must’ve been very cold (he had frostbitten toes, too), there are many hungry predators about, there’s probably little to nothing to eat, so you’d think that he’d have starved way sooner.

          But even if you believe that he was only in the trailer during his last few days, why would he not immediately eat the food and make a fire? He was strong enough to climb through the broken window to enter the trailer, and someone went to the shed to get food. But for some reason, that person didn’t take the huge amount of food in the locker. If they’d just used that food and made a fire or use the propane tank, the probably would’ve been fine.

          885
  2. RE: #4 Beatriz Winck – How sad, it’s crazy how many things can go wrong with tourists. If she was feeling unwell, is it possible she was disoriented and got lost somewhere? This basilica sounds like a big tourist destination. Looks like there’s a river very close to the church, as well as forests and open vegetation. Maybe she intended to go back to the hotel and got disoriented. How was the weather that day, could she have been dehydrated?

    3062
    • Hi. I tried finding info about the surrounding area but can’t tell you for sure the type of vegetation around the Basilica, if it’s large enough to get lost etc . Only by pictures we can have some idea. It looks like she could get lost in the vegetation our get to the river you found, but only if she walked a lot to leave the urban area. With so many people around, it’s hard to believe no one noticed her. But yes, it could happen. I’ve never been to Aparecida but I know some people who have. I’ll ask them if they think it’s easy to get lost in city..

      880
  3. RE: #10 – Lars Mittank – I still think he died of dehydration somewhere in the nature and his body hasnt been found yet..maybe at some obvious location.

    2953
    • This is the most likely scenario in my opinion. Perhaps the fight he got into caused a brain injury, or he had another kind of undiagnosed mental disorder.

      842
      • The fight might not have even happened. No one saw the fight Lars ended up split up from his friends after arguing with some football fans and when they found him later he told them that those fans hired people to beat him up. Ears can rupture through travel or infection. It’s possible that was unrelated and it was simply a mental issue. Of course people with serious delusional disorders are at high risk of being harmed by others because they can come across threatening to others so i wouldn’t be surprised if he was attacked. The story about fans hiring people is almost certainly nonsense though.

        849
        • I have read that for the injury he was given antibiotics. It makes me wonder if the ear rupture was caused by an infection. It’s not typical to prescribe antibiotics for that unless there’s sign of infection, and unless there’s other injuries that haven’t been mentioned, no other reason to prescribe antibiotics. Take out the rupture, and the other injuries are as explainable by a drunken fall as they are by a fight.

          872
          • Antibiotics aren’t strictly indicated for rupture, but are fairly commonly prescribed anyway. Especially if contamination is suspected.

            910
    • I remember hearing about other photos that were found as well. I found them here the sheriff does seem to feel sure of his belief about what happened

      868
      • Wow. The picture from Albuquerque really resembles the boy in the original Polaroid. Why have police never spoken about these letters?? Did they ever identify the boy in either of the photos? I’ve heard about the Calico case many times but never have I heard about this part of it & the possible connection!

        849
      • So the bike was never found. I think this probably lends to the theory of hit-and-run. I can’t see a kidnapper bothering to take a bike if he only wanted the girl.

        961
        • I wonder if the kidnapper hit her in order to capture her, hence the reported broken pieces of her tape player and skidmarks, then took both her and the bike to limit evidence? (For example, in case paint from his car was on the bike.)

          940
          • This is what happened in a case in my town. Mickey Shunick was riding a bike and was hit by her abductor (at low speeds). He pretended it was an accident. He convinced her let him give her a ride. He put her bike in his truck bed. If you believe you’ll return home, you don’t want to just leave your bike.

            910
  4. RE #7: – Tara Calico – The local police have always stuck by the theory that Tara Calico was accidentally run over by two local teenage boys, whose parents then helped them cover it up by hiding the body. They believe they know who it is, but evidence is lacking. That seems plausible. The boys might have been tailing her for fun and then something went wrong. It is unlikely that the parents will ever admit the truth, should that be the case, though siblings if there are any, might very well figure it out and decide to turn them in. So it is possible someone will eventually confirm that theory.

    I think the photograph has nothing to do with the case. One thing that does strike me is that given how heavily publicised it has been, no one has come forward to identify the two youngsters, neither have they emerged. The person who dropped the photo hasn’t claimed it. I suppose it’s possible the right people just missed all the fuss. Or they didn’t want to associate themselves with the circus round the photograph if it was just a prank picture. Being known as the kids who weren’t kidnapped after all might be something they didn’t want to live down especially if they came from a small town.

    2740
    • Yes, when I went down the rabbit hole on this case a few years ago I realized it’s pretty much solved. I’m pretty sure there’s an extensive case report out there from one of the later Sheriff’s assigned to the case with interviews etc. I also thought the main suspects were deceased, and at least one was related to the Sheriff a the time. There have been a few write ups on this sub over the years which likely have more details.

      789

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