Volume 12

Seven-year-old Lars Bense set off through the snow to meet friends at the cinema in Halle-Neustadt, East Germany — a planned city of numbered concrete blocks with no street names. He vanished in the final few hundred feet, and the strangest clue would be a crossword puzzle. Read the full story →

To her Pittsburgh-area church and school colleagues, Laurel Schlemmer was sweet, kind-hearted, and devout — a woman who had never wanted the children her husband Mark insisted on. One morning, with their grandmother watching television downstairs, Laurel ran a bath for the boys. Read the full story →

'Hi, how are you? I've seen your picture. You're very pretty.' The Facebook message that reached fifteen-year-old Kayleigh Haywood on Halloween 2015 came from twenty-seven-year-old Luke Harlow — and thirteen days of hidden messages convinced her she was loved. Read the full story →

Chef Daniel Brophy unlocked the Oregon Culinary Institute at 7:22 a.m., just as he always did. Minutes later, a colleague found the beloved instructor dead on the kitchen floor — two bullets aimed at his heart, a scene as calm as a calculated assassination. Read the full story →

The Champions were pillars of Cadiz, Kentucky — a farming family, an award-winning teacher, a Farm Credit director. Then police found a stranger named Vito Riservato dead at the family home, and son Ryan sitting beneath a tree in the yard, mumbling incoherently. Read the full story →

In 1957, Connecticut's George Davies answered a newspaper ad — 'French girl desires light housekeeping' — with devious intentions. Seventeen-year-old Gaetane Boivin left a note about a job opportunity and never came home; days later, nine-year-old Brenda Jane Doucette vanished walking to school. Read the full story →

Algebra teacher Colleen Ritzer stayed after class at Danvers High School to help any student who needed it. On October 22, 2013, fourteen-year-old Philip Chism — a quiet newcomer from Tennessee — was in her final class of the day. Read the full story →

Sierah Joughin pedaled her purple bicycle home through the cornfields outside Metamora, Ohio, after a lazy July afternoon with her boyfriend Josh, promising to call him that night. By 9:30, her bedroom light was on — but Sierah was nowhere to be found. Read the full story →

A Wolf Lodge, Idaho, man called 911 about a strange white truck on his property; hours later he called back, frantic, after finding blood smeared on his neighbors' door. Inside the Groene home, deputies found bodies bound with duct tape — and the youngest children gone. Read the full story →

Three-year-old Rosie Palmer bought an ice pop from the ice cream van outside her Hartlepool, England home and vanished within the hour. Police went door to door; a few houses away, Shaun 'Tony' Armstrong told them he hadn't seen her, and they moved on. Read the full story →

Since age seven, Esti Carranza had soothed herself with vivid fantasies of killing her abusive father. Years later, she and her husband Holger opened the Schleckeria, a Vienna ice cream shop with a cellar below — and a marriage curdling behind the counter. Read the full story →

Annie Laurie Hearin, wife of one of Mississippi's wealthiest men, vanished from her Jackson mansion one Tuesday afternoon in 1988 — leaving behind her shoes, purse, car, and the medication she couldn't survive without. A ransom note pointed to twelve names. Read the full story →