They walked into forests, boarded planes, and sailed across oceans. But they never returned.
From billionaires to musicians, these famous people vanished without a trace, leaving behind no crime scene, no body, and no final note in some cases.
To this day, their fate remains unknown. Here are 20 famous people who mysteriously disappeared.
Trigger warning: this article contains graphic details that may be distressing to some.
#1 Shelly Miscavige
Shelly Miscavige was seen as the de facto first lady of the Church Of Scientology as she was married to the group’s “ecclesiastical leader” David Miscavige, as per the church’s website.
However, she was last seen at her father’s funeral in 2007 and has not been publicly spotted since.
Actress Leah Remini found it odd that David was the best man at Scientology member Tom Cruise’s wedding to Katie Holmes in 2006 but Shelly was completely absent at the ceremony.
She since began raising questions about her disappearance.
Leah left the church in 2013 and filed a missing persons report with the LAPD over Shelly’s disappearance. But the church claimed at the time that she was doing fine.
“She is not a public figure and we ask that her privacy be respected,” a Scientology spokeswoman said in 2013.
Church officials said the missing persons’ report was “nothing more than publicity stunt for Ms Remini, cooked up with unemployed anti-zealots.”
They maintained that she has been working with the Church of Scientology but offered no additional information about her well-being.
Image credits: IMDB
#2 Jodi Huisentruit
Jodi Huisentruit was normally at work around 3 a.m. for her job as a morning anchor at KIMT-TV. But on June 27, 1995, she was late for her “DayBreak” at 6 a.m. segment.
“I called her twice. I talked to her and woke her up that first time,” DayBreak producer Amy Kuns said in a 2011 interview.
“The second time, it just rang and rang. I don't remember the times,” the producer added. “I had obviously woken her up. She asked what time it was. I told her. She said she'd be right in.”
The Iowa news anchor never made it to work that day and had vanished from her apartment complex.
Investigators found signs of struggle in her apartment and believed she was abducted. They also found a bent key outside her car.
In 1995, Christopher Revak was named as a person of interest in the case. He took his own life in prison after being arrested in connection with another case.
John Vansice, who was believed to be the last person to see Jodi before her disappearance, was also named as a person of interest.
Her case still remains unsolved after three decades.
Image credits: Find Jodi Inc.
#3 Glenn Miller
On Christmas Day in 1944, people woke up to the news of trombone player, conductor and composer, Glenn Miller, vanishing off the face of the earth.
Prior to him going missing, he grew to become one of music’s biggest stars. In the 1930s and ‘40s, his band was in charge of helping boost the morale of troops during World War II.
During his days as bandlander of the Army Air Forces Band, he and his mates would record and perform for up to 18 hours a day at dozens of military bases.
Glenn even enlisted as captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942.
On December 15, 1944, he boarded a military plane from Britain and departed for Paris, where he was expected to perform for US troops. However, he and the rest of the people onboard never made it across the English Channel.
“Guys, I don't know how to tell you this, but Glenn is unofficially missing. He never arrived in Paris,” Army lieutenant Don Haynes, the band’s manager, reportedly told the rest of the bandmates at the time.
No wreckage of the plane was discovered, and no answers about what happened to Glenn were ever found over the years.
Image credits: ullstein bild
#4 Patrick Mcdermott
“I don’t think I will ever really be at peace with it. I think there will always be a question mark,” said Grease star Olivia Newton-John about the mysterious disappearance of her ex-boyfriend Patrick McDermott.
Olivia and the cameraman dated on and off for about nine years before he went on an overnight fishing expedition, never to return, on June 30, 2005
His bag, wallet, and keys were found on the boat, and his car was still parked where Patrick had left it. But none of the 22 other passengers and crew members onboard reported him missing when they returned as per schedule the very next day.
The search for him began only a week later, when his ex-wife reported him missing on July 11, 2005.
With nobody seeing him go overboard, some speculated whether he faked his own tragic passing to flee from his financial woes. These theories were further fueled by alleged sightings of him in Mexico.
Some claimed he was living under a new identity; others claimed to have seen him living on a yacht off the coast of Sayulita or Acapulco.
On one occasion in 2017, a photograph was published claiming it was Patrick himself, posing with another woman. But this was disproved after a Canadian couple came forward and said they were the couple in the picture.
“Whether he had financial difficulties and staged his disappearance, whether it was a m**der or an abduction, no one seems to know,” Louise Pennell, a foreign correspondent for Seven Network Australia, told NBC News in a 2005 interview.
Image credits: Newsmakers
#5 Ambrose J. Small
Canadian theater Tycoon Ambrose J. Small began his career with humble beginnings, working as an usher at Toronto’s Grand Opera House. After some tussle with his supervisor, he began working for the Toronto Opera House and was eventually promoted to manager.
In a plot twist fit for a blockbuster movie, Ambrose became successful and wealthy enough to buy the Grand Opera House.
His theater empire grew to include theaters in over 30 locations and control bookings in dozens more. By 1919, he decided to sell his empire Trans-Canada Theaters Limited.
Striking up a million-dollar deal, he sold his entire chain of theaters for $1.7 million (nearly $30 million today). He received a check of $1 million from Trans-Canada and deposited the same in his bank.
“He received the initial payment, which was a large sum of money and it was immediately deposited,” Ambrose’s attorney, E.W.M Flock of London, said during an interview with the Star.
“I was with Mr. Small about an hour at his office and he was never more pleasant or genial and was full of pep and vim,” he added.
Ambrose walked out of his Toronto office that day for one last time, never to be seen again.
His money was untouched. His body was never found. And his case remains unsolved to this day.
Image credits: Toronto Star Archives/Toronto Star
#6 Michael Rockefeller
One of the most disturbing mysteries in modern history is the disappearances of Michael Rockefeller.
Heir to one of America’s most powerful families, Michael was one of the five children born to then-New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller.
The 23-year-old had everything, from wealth and education to power and good fortune. But he set out on the adventure of a lifetime to the island of New Guinea to collect art and artifacts, only to vanish without a trace.
Was he eaten alive by sharks or crocodiles? Did he make it to shore, only to be kidnapped and kept prisoner by the island’s indigenous tribes? Was he eaten by the cannibals living on the island?
These were the questions raised after the privileged son’s disappearance.
Michael set out on his trip to the continent 9,000 miles away with an anthropologist companion.
When his catamaran capsized, he could see land and decided to swim towards it.
“I think I can make it,” were his final words to his friend.
The young billionaire heir vanished without a trace after swimming towards the island on November 19, 1961.
Michael’s governor father and his twin sister Mary were among the people who had flown to the island in a chartered 707 plane, an object that the indigenous people would have rarely seen.
“We were there about 10 days,” twin sister Mary recalled to People in 2014.
The days-long searched ended with the belief that Michael likely drowned.
“In a seaplane over the dense jungle coastline, I realized how unbelievably difficult it was to make it to shore,” Mary told the outlet.
“Michael's companion, anthropologist Rene Wassing, who survived and was later rescued, told us that their catamaran had begun to get swept out to sea,” she continued.
She said Rene and Michael spent a day trying to padde and had lost all their food and water before her twin brother decided that swimming to shore was the only thing that could possibly save him.
“Rene didn't swim and knew he would never make it. So Michael started off for the shore. Nobody has ever seen him since,” she said.
While theories of being eaten by sharks or cannibals have emerged since his disappearance, his official cause of passing was deemed as “drowning.”
A Westchester County judge declared on February 2, 1964, that Michael Rockefeller passed away “by drowning … while on exploration off the coast of Dutch New Guinea.”
Image credits: T. Nielsen/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
#7 Pierre Bianconi
Pierre Bianconi was known for his fiery temper on the soccer field.
While playing as a defender for various European teams, the French player from Corsica had received numerous red and yellow cards in his career.
On one occasion, he was granted the red card for slapping a player. But instead of silently walking away, he reportedly ripped the card up and headbutted the referee.
He was 31 years old when he mysteriously disappeared on 29 December 1993. He had left his home in Corsica and drove away, disappearing forever. His abandoned car was found near the port of Bastia with no sign of him.
Many wondered whether his link to Corsican criminal circles led to his disappearance. But there was no body and no clues that could give any answers.
Image credits: Histoire du PSG
#8 James R. Hoffa
American labor leader and icon James ‘Jimmy’ Hoffa was last seen in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in a Detroit suburb.
Some claimed he was scheduled to have a meeting at the restaurant with Anthony Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamsters official and former Mafia figure, and Detroit mobster Anthony Giacalone. However, they both later claimed they never showed up to the restaurant.
His disappearance was treated as a missing case for seven years before officials declared him deceased in 1982.
Fifty years after he vanished, the FBI said they are still committed to the case.
“As the 50th anniversary of Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance approaches, the FBI Detroit Field Office remains steadfast in its commitment to pursuing all credible leads,” Cheyvoryea Gibson, special agent in charge of the FBI Detroit Field Office, said in a July statement this year.
Image credits: Bettmann
#9 Alain Kan
French glam rock icon Alain Kan became a cultural rebel before he disappeared into thin air in Paris.
The provocative artist, inspired by David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Marc Bolan, pushed boundaries with androgynous style and raw lyrics.
His career peaked in the 1970s, and some reported claimed he not only managed to meet David Bowie but was even whisked away in his black Mercedes and gone for 10 days.
The singer was last seen at the Rue de la Pompe metro station.
He vanished from the city of millions without a note and no corpse turning up.
Many have speculated whether he passed away due to illicit substances or even foul play. But no solid leads have hinted at what happened to him over the last three decades.
Image credits: JazzRockSoul.com
#10 Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince
Louis Le Prince is regarded as the “Father of Cinematography” for developing the first motion-picture camera, thus also possibly recording the world’s earliest motion picture sequence using a single-lens camera with a strip of film.
The French inventor had planned to travel to the US in 1890 to make a public debut of his camera technology. The plan also included reuniting with his wife and children in the States.
But before making the trip across the Atlantic, he visited his brother in Dijon, France. He then took a train to Paris on September 16 but never made it to his destination.
After police searches yielded no results, he was declared deceased about seven years later.
Image credits: The New York Public Library
#11 Forrest Schab (DY)
There was a sense of eerie irony when Forrest Schab, known by his stage name DY (short for D** Young), suddenly disappeared in 2010.
The family of the Canadian rapper reported him missing about three months after he departed for Mexico.
Nobody knew the reason behind his trip or whether he reached his destination. However, some reports claimed he was in Mexico shooting his music video That’s My Spot ahead of his disappearance.
“We haven't heard from Forrest since August. We are extremely worried about him. If anyone has information of his whereabouts, please help us by contacting the Toronto police department,” his family said in a statement at the time.
His sudden exit from the limelight remains one of hip-hop’s biggest mysteries.
Image credits: Fridae TV
#12 John Paul Sr.
John Paul Sr. and his son John Paul Jr. were known as a notorious father-son combo in the racing community, winning several races as a team in 1981 and 1982.
But John Paul Sr.’s racing career took a blow when he was sentenced to prison for a list of crimes, including the trafficking of illegal substances and ending the life of a federal witness.
While behind bars, John and another inmate attempted a prison escape by squirting a mixture of hot sauce and liquid floor cleanser in a guard’s face.
The guard quickly recovered and fired a shot at them, foiling their attempt to scale the 12-foot fence at the Baker County Jail. Their attempted prison escape was unsuccessful.
The racer married a woman named Colleen Wood, who unexpected disappeared during a boat trip with him in 2000.
The very next year, John also vanished without a trace, and his fate remains unknown to this date.
Image credits: Bettmann
#13 Hale Boggs
Congressman Hale Boggs, one of Louisiana’s most powerful political figures, was the youngest member of Congress when he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1940.
On October 16, 1972, he boarded a twin-engine Cessna 310 plane with Rep. Nick Begich and his aide Russell Brown.
Their agenda was to travel from Anchorage to Juneau to raise funds for Nick. However, the plane vanished with no sign of the wreckage or survivors being found.
While many blamed the foul weather at the time, the case remains unsolved as one of the most intriguing aviation mysteries in the US.
Image credits: Leffler, Warren K
#14 Princess Pamela
It is unclear what her real name is, but some believe she was born “Addie Mae” Strobel.
She claimed her real name was Pamela Strobel, while loyal patrons knew her as Princess Pamela.
Orphaned at 10 and having left home at 13, Princess Pamela was known for running an intimate, word-of-mouth supper club behind her apartment 2A in Manhattan in 1965.
Patrons like Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, and Gloria Steinem would frequently visit her restaurant to devour her fried chicken, oxtail stew with collards, and apple cobbler.
In 1969, she was cemented as a pioneer with her cookbook Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook, one of the first cookbooks to coin the term soul food.
But unexpectedly, by the late 1990s, her restaurant in East Village shut down and nobody knew why.
Friends and family lost track of her whereabouts, and those who tried looking for her found no success because she was like going by a name that wasn’t legally hers.
Image credits: South Carolina Public Radio
#15 Jim 'Slim' Robinson
Known as “Sweet Jimmy,” Jim Robinson was an American boxer who once fought Muhammad Ali, back when he was still known as Cassius Clay.
Jim wasn’t meant to fight Ali in the Miami Beach fight in 1961. But he wound up being a last minute replacement and fought for 94 seconds before losing to Cassius, who went on to become the legend Ali.
Sweet Jimmy had vanished in the 1960s, but it is believed he was reportedly captured in the '70's by a Sports Illustrated photographer.
“Tell [Ali] I ain't doing too good,” he apparently told the photographer.
Nothing about Jim’s whereabouts have been confirmed over the years.
Image credits: Philly Boxing History
#16 Joe Cripps
Joe Cripps was the longtime drummer of the Grammy Award-winning band Brave Combo, based in Texas.
Although he left the band in the 1990s, he stayed active in the music scene before moving back to his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas.
He was last seen in October, 2016, spurring a massive search that still remains unsolved. His brother revealed at the time that he was supposed to play a gig on October 21, 2016, but he never showed up.
“He missed a job playing music locally, that’s unlike him, I was called by band members to check on him,” said brother James Cripps at the time.
The worried brother told media outlets that it was unlike Joe to stay out of touch with everyone for a long time.
“We feel like he could have had a medical emergency and is ill or hurt somewhere and we can’t find him or perhaps foul play even,” he added.
Image credits: Joe Cripps Foundation
#17 Percy Fawcett
Veteran English explorer Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett was convinced there was a lost civilization thriving deep in the Brazilian rainforest.
So he made his way into the dense jungle of Mato Grosso in the 1920s to find a city he dubbed as “Z,” which he believed was an advanced and ancient city in the Amazon forest.
After two failed missions through the forest, his obsession took him on a third mission to find the city, accompanied with a small team that included his son Jack Fawcett.
Percy and his young team ventured into the jungle, but they never returned. Many speculated whether he began living in the jungle among the natives or whether he was being held prisoner.
The Royal Geographical Society’s George Miller Dyott launched an expedition in 1928 to search for the explorer and his companions. He was convinced they had perished in the jungle but couldn’t bring back any hard evidence.
“There is consequently still no proof that the three explorers are d**d,” Percy’s wife, Nina Fawcett, once told reporters after her husband and son’s disappearance.
She believed until her last breath that they would return some day.
Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
#18 Ian Mackintosh
Ian Mackintosh was hailed as the television writer-producer who forever changed the genre of spy drama. He was one of the first writers to give a realistic picturization of espionage in his series The Sandbaggers.
Nineteen days before his 39th birthday, his plane went missing over the Gulf of Alaska while flying from Anchorage to Kodiak Island in Alaska.
The pilot sent a call for help, saying the rented aircraft had lost oil pressure and was losing power.
The plane then went completely silent, vanishing without a trace on July 7, 1979.
“None of us here know what to make of it. Why, for example, there was no debris, unless, and here I am speculating, the aircraft impacted at a very high angle, broke up immediately and sank,” a spokesperson for the Rescue Co-ordination Centre on Kodiak Island said at the time.
Image credits: Alchetron
#19 Jim Thompson
The last thing American entrepreneur Jim Thompson told his friends was that he was going out for an evening walk through a jungle area. He was supposed to be gone for just an hour, but Jim went missing under mysterious circumstances.
The businessman, who set up a silk-weaving company in Thailand, was vacationing in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia when he disappeared.
Years before, Jim used to work for a major architecture firm in New York. He later joined the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which was the US Naval Intelligence Service that later became the CIA.
He was tasked with leading a group of trained guerrillas and building intelligence ties in Thailand to work against the Japanese Occupation. When the war with Japan came to an end, he set up the Thai Silk Company and stayed in the Asian country.
Following his disappearance, various theories were woven about his disappearance.
Some speculated whether he was kidnapped by Communists; some wondered if he was executed in a CIA mission. Others said he could have been eaten up by a tiger during his walk through the jungle.
Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
#20 Rudolf Diesel
On October 10, 1913, occupants aboard a Dutch ship spotted a lifeless body floating in the North Sea.
They retrieved the corpse, but the body was so badly decomposed that they dumped it back into the water. But before that, a member of the crew had fished out an ID card, a spectacle case, and a pocket knife from inside the pockets.
These items eventually helped a man named Eugen Diesel identify the body. He said it was his own father, Rudolf Diesel, the man who revolutionized the transport industry with his invention of the Diesel engine.
Many years before his disappearance, Rudolf patented a design for his engine on February 28, 1892. His invention gradually became a part of factories, generators, and even took over the railroad industry with time.
By 1912, there were more than 70,000 diesel engines working across the globe, and by World War II, they were found in trucks and buses.
While the advancement of diesel engels took a life of its own, Rudolf began preparing for a journey from Belgium to England in 1913.
The inventor left his wife with a bag prior to his departure and instructed her to only open it after a week.
Rudolf then boarded a steamship on September 29, 1913, had dinner by 6:15 a.m., and then retreated to his cabin.
He even asked for a wake-up call at 6:15 a.m., but when that wake-up call came, there was no response.
A crew member entered his cabin to find his nightshirt neatly laid on the bed, his coat and hat hanging on the side, and his wrist watch carefully placed in the room. But there was no sign of the inventor in the room or anywhere on the ship.
Days later, his corpse was found floating in the water, giving rise to a plethora of questions about his disappearance.
His wife found a sum of what would be $1.2 million today inside the bag Rudolf left with her.
Many believe he took his life due to imminent bankruptcy, a theory that they claimed was evidenced by the X marked on the final page of his diary.
Others speculated whether his life was taken by a competitor.
If you or someone you know is struggling with self-harm, help is available: International Hotlines
Image credits: SSPL/Getty Images
If you thought these cases were baffling, wait till you read Part 1: These 30 Famous People Mysteriously Disappeared And Were Never Found
