The Vanishing

On the evening of November 10, 1981, six-year-old Cassie Hansen was at a family night program with her mother at Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Shortly before 7 p.m., she went to use the bathroom a short distance away and did not come back.

The next day her body was found in a dumpster behind an auto repair shop at Grand Avenue and Grotto Street, about three miles from the church. She had been strangled. Investigators came to focus on Stuart Knowlton, a cab driver. Dorothy Noga, a massage therapist who knew him as a regular client, learned he was a suspect and, against police advice, kept in contact with him. During phone calls that fall he admitted to her that he had killed Cassie. Early on December 14, 1981, a day after one of those calls, Knowlton came to her workplace and stabbed her more than thirty times. She survived.

Police also built a case from witness sightings, taxi dispatch records and hair and other physical evidence. Knowlton was indicted in September 1982, waived a jury, and was convicted of first-degree murder in 1983 and sentenced to life in prison. The Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1986. Knowlton died in prison in 2006. In 2017, the St. Paul police chief formally honored Noga and three retired officers for solving the case.