The Unsolved

On May 3, 2007, a British family was on vacation at a resort in Praia da Luz, a sunny beach town in southern Portugal. Kate and Gerry McCann, both doctors, had three kids with them. Their daughter Madeleine, who was days away from turning 4, and 2 year old twins. That night, they put the kids to bed in their ground floor apartment and went to dinner with friends at a tapas restaurant inside the resort. About 55 meters away. They could almost see the apartment from their table. The parents took turns walking back to check on the kids. Around 10 p.m., it was Kate's turn. The twins were asleep. Madeleine's bed was empty. The bedroom window was open. She screamed. And the biggest missing child search of the modern era began. Within days, Madeleine's face was everywhere. Billboards, TV, soccer stadiums. Celebrities and world leaders made appeals. Then the investigation turned on her parents. Portuguese police named Kate and Gerry formal suspects. It took nearly a year before they were cleared. In 2011, Scotland Yard opened its own investigation. Millions of pounds. Thousands of leads chased across Europe. Then in 2020, German prosecutors made a stunning announcement. They had a prime suspect. A convicted German sex offender who'd been living in vans around the Algarve back in 2007. They said his phone was near the resort the night Madeleine vanished. They said they believed Madeleine was dead. But they never charged him. In 2023, investigators dug around a reservoir in Portugal connected to him. In 2025, he walked out of a German prison after serving time for a separate crime. He's never been charged in Madeleine's case. And just this week, the private investigator the McCanns hired back in 2008 issued a new plea. He believes Madeleine may have been taken by a human trafficking network. He says solving it could come down to one name. Her parents have never stopped searching. 19 years later, Madeleine McCann would be 23 years old. She vanished from her bed while her family ate dinner just down the path. And the world still doesn't know where she went.

On November 21, 2022, 11 year old Madalina Cojocari stepped off her school bus in Cornelius, North Carolina, a quiet lake town just outside Charlotte. The bus camera recorded her walking toward her home. It's the last confirmed image of her. Two days later was Thanksgiving. Then the long weekend. Then a week of school. Madalina never came back to class. Her school counselor called her stepfather. Left five voicemails. Sent emails. Nobody at the house reported her missing. Finally, on December 15, almost three and a half weeks later, the school pushed hard enough that her mother came in. Only then did police learn Madalina was gone. Her mother said she'd last seen her daughter in bed on the night of November 23. Her stepfather said he'd left for Michigan the next day, and when he came back, she wasn't there. Neither of them called police. Within days, both were arrested for failing to report a missing child. Then search warrants revealed something chilling. Investigators said some of Madalina's belongings had been burned in a fire pit at the house before she was ever reported missing. The FBI and state investigators joined the search. Woods, lakes, landfills. Tips came in from across the country. Nothing. In 2024, police officially named her mother as a suspect in Madalina's disappearance. Her mother pleaded guilty to failing to report her missing. Then she left the United States. Her stepfather was convicted at trial. This May, an appeals court upheld his conviction. Nobody has been charged with what happened to Madalina. This April, police set up a box outside their station for people to drop off birthday cards. She turned 15. There's a $25,000 reward. Nearly four years later, an 11 year old girl got off her school bus, walked toward home, and was never seen again. And for more than three weeks, nobody who lived with her told anyone she was gone.

In the early morning hours of February 26, 2024, 15 year old Sebastian Rogers vanished from his family's home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, just north of Nashville. Sebastian was a sweet, quiet kid with autism. He wore square black glasses. He liked routine. His dad says he wasn't the type to wander off, and he didn't even like walking around barefoot. He was last believed to be home late on the night of February 25. By morning, he was gone. He was last known to be wearing a black sweatshirt and black sweatpants. Within hours, Tennessee issued an Amber Alert. What followed became one of the largest searches for a missing child in the state's history. Deputies, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, dogs, drones, helicopters, and hundreds of volunteers combed the woods, ponds, and neighborhoods around his home. Nothing. Not a shoe. Not his glasses. Not a single confirmed sighting. A year later, the Amber Alert was still active. Investigators had received more than 240 tips. Then the case turned into something else entirely. Internet sleuths and YouTubers descended on Hendersonville. Dog the Bounty Hunter joined the search. Accusations flew online. There were protection orders, an arrest, and a stack of lawsuits between family members, content creators, and strangers. Through it all, the sheriff's office has said it hasn't ruled anyone out as a suspect, but also hasn't found evidence of foul play. Then this July, Sebastian's dad filed two federal lawsuits, seeking $10 million from the sheriff's office and the state's child services agency. He says the investigation was mishandled. He also says the state had investigated concerns about Sebastian twice before he disappeared, and never told him. The sheriff's office insists the case has never been closed, and that every credible tip is still being followed. The FBI is offering up to $50,000 for information. Sebastian would be 17 now. His dad still believes he's alive. A 15 year old boy walked out of his house in the middle of the night, and in a town of 60,000 people, nobody saw where he went.

Sad outcome

On the morning of April 21, 2016, 19 year old Martin Roberts told his roommates he was heading to the library. He lived in Boone, North Carolina, a small mountain town that's home to Appalachian State University. He'd been an App State student. He'd joined a fraternity. He loved soccer, and hiking and camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He had three mountains tattooed on his left forearm. He'd hit a rough patch the year before. He got in trouble for drinking and driving, took a semester off, and moved back home. Then he came back to Boone and started taking classes at a community college to get his grades up. It was working. He was set to go back to App State in the fall. That morning, on his way across campus, he ran into his cousin. They talked for a while. He walked her to a bus stop on Rivers Street. He told her he was heading to his fraternity house. Around 12:30 p.m., a camera on the bus captured Martin walking away from the stop. That's the last image anyone has of him. He never made it to the library. He never made it to the frat house. His roommates weren't too worried at first. A few days later, his dad got concerned and called the landlord. When they checked Martin's room, they found a note. It was vague. He wrote that he was leaving, that he hadn't taken advantage of the opportunities he'd been given, and that he was disappointed in himself. Police and his family have never been willing to call it a goodbye note. Nobody knows what he meant. He didn't have a car. Someone thought they might have seen him near a lake off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Searchers sent helicopters, divers, dogs, and cadaver dogs into those mountains. Nothing. Two years later, when investigators finally got into his phone, they found something strange. The day before he vanished, he had turned off his location services. His dad has said they still have hope, because they've never been given a reason not to. Martin would be 30 years old now. 10 years later, nobody knows where he was walking when he left that bus stop.

In June 2017, Ashley Loring HeavyRunner was 20 years old. She was a member of the Blackfeet Nation, living on the reservation in Browning, Montana, in the shadow of Glacier National Park. Tiny, about 90 pounds, with a checkmark shaped scar on the top of one hand. Her family says she was close with her siblings and was trying to build a future. Sometime in early June, she stopped answering her phone. Her friends hadn't heard from her either. Her family went to the police. They say nobody took it seriously at first. So her older sister, Kimberly, started searching herself. She drove back roads. She walked the hills. She knocked on doors across the reservation. The story that came back was murky. According to one account, after a party, Ashley spent a few days with an acquaintance. He said he was giving her a ride home when she asked him to pull over along a remote stretch of Highway 89, so she could meet up with another man. He said he was exhausted. He fell asleep in the car while they waited. When he woke up, Ashley was gone. Nobody knows if she got into another car. If someone picked her up. Or if she walked off toward a fire lookout cabin up on a ridge, a place she'd talked about wanting to see. Nobody knows if that story is even true. And then there was the jurisdiction problem. On reservation land, cases bounce between tribal police, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the FBI. Her family says precious time was lost while agencies sorted out who was in charge. Ashley became one of the most recognized faces of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement. Her family has spent years searching the mountains and plains of the reservation on their own. The FBI still has her on its missing persons list. Nobody has ever been charged. 9 years later, Ashley Loring HeavyRunner would be 29. She vanished from the side of a Montana highway while the man she was with was asleep. Somebody knows who she met that day.

In the summer of 2021, 30 year old Lauren Cho was starting a new chapter. Her friends called her El. She was a former music teacher from New Jersey, a Korean American artist with tattoos of a lamb and a mushroom, who'd worked in a tattoo shop back home. She'd traveled across the country with a group of friends, including her ex-boyfriend, in a converted tour bus. They were dreaming about opening a restaurant. They were staying at a rental property in Yucca Valley, California, a desert town near Joshua Tree. On the evening of June 28, after an argument, Lauren walked away from the house. She was upset. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt and jean shorts. She left her phone, her belongings, everything. Even her little pet parrot named Porkchop. Her friends said she hated leaving him. It was around 110 degrees outside. Her ex-boyfriend reported her missing about three hours later. Search teams went out into the desert by air and on foot. They found footprints from her friends who'd gone looking for her. They never found a single footprint of Lauren's. After four days, the sheriff's department called off the search. Investigators later served a search warrant at the property. But for months, almost nobody outside her family and friends had heard her name. Then, in September, the whole country became obsessed with the disappearance of Gabby Petito. People started asking why some missing people get round the clock coverage, and others get nothing. Lauren Cho's name started showing up everywhere. Detectives joined the case. Searches started again. On October 9, searchers found human remains in rugged terrain in Yucca Valley. Weeks later, the coroner confirmed it. It was Lauren. Authorities have never publicly explained how she died, or how she ended up out there. 5 years later, her family is still waiting for answers. She walked away from a house in the desert on a summer night. And for months, almost nobody was looking.

In 1975, Jimmy Hoffa was one of the most powerful and feared men in America. For 14 years, he'd run the Teamsters, the biggest union in the country. Truckers, warehouse workers, more than a million members. Presidents courted him. The government hated him. And he had deep ties to the Mafia, which used the union's massive pension fund like a bank. In 1967, he went to prison for jury tampering and fraud. Four years later, President Nixon let him out, on one condition. No union activity until 1980. Hoffa had no intention of waiting. He was fighting to take the union back. And the men who now controlled it, and the mobsters behind them, didn't want him back. On the afternoon of July 30, 1975, Hoffa drove to a restaurant called the Machus Red Fox in the suburbs of Detroit. He was supposed to meet two reputed mob figures at 2 p.m. He'd been told it was a peace meeting. They never showed up. Around 2:15, Hoffa called his wife from a pay phone. He was annoyed. He told her he'd been stood up. A little while later, witnesses saw him in the restaurant parking lot. Some said he may have climbed into a maroon car. That was the last time anyone saw Jimmy Hoffa. His car was found the next morning in the parking lot, unlocked. The FBI launched one of the biggest investigations in its history. Over the decades, agents dug up a horse farm in Michigan, tore up a backyard, searched a landfill in New Jersey, and chased rumors that he was buried under a football stadium. Nothing. Years later, DNA tests found Hoffa's hair in a car that had been driven that day by a longtime associate, a man Hoffa had practically raised. He always denied any involvement. He was never charged. Old hitmen have claimed they did it. One of those stories became a Martin Scorsese movie. None of it has ever been proven. In 1982, Hoffa was declared legally dead. His body has never been found, and nobody has ever been charged with his murder. This July, on the 51st anniversary, his son wrote to the FBI. He asked them to keep the case open and name the people responsible, even if they're all dead now. The most famous labor leader in America walked into a restaurant parking lot in broad daylight. And vanished.

On the morning of September 29, 1982, a 12 year old girl in Elk Grove Village, Illinois woke up feeling sick. Sore throat, runny nose. Her parents gave her one Extra Strength Tylenol. By the next morning, Mary Kellerman was dead. That same day, a few miles away, a 27 year old postal worker named Adam Janus took some Tylenol for chest pain. He collapsed and died. That night, his grieving family gathered at his house. His brother Stanley and Stanley's 19 year old wife, Theresa, both had headaches from the stress. They took Tylenol from the same bottle. Both of them died. Over the next two days, three more people in the Chicago suburbs died suddenly. A young mother who'd just had a baby. A flight attendant. A woman who worked at a phone store. Seven people in all. Two firefighters started comparing notes and noticed the one thing every victim had in common. Tylenol. When investigators tested the bottles, they found the capsules had been opened, filled with potassium cyanide, and put back together. Someone had pulled bottles off store shelves across the Chicago area, poisoned them, and quietly put them back. Then waited for strangers to buy them. Panic swept the country. Police drove through neighborhoods with loudspeakers warning people not to take Tylenol. Johnson & Johnson pulled 31 million bottles off shelves nationwide. Days later, the company got a letter. A man demanding $1 million to "stop the killing." He was tracked down and convicted of extortion. He spent years in prison. Investigators always suspected him. He always denied having anything to do with the poisonings. He was never charged with the murders. He died in 2023. The killings changed America forever. That foil seal under the cap of every medicine bottle? The sealed boxes? The switch from capsules to caplets? That's all because of what happened in Chicago in 1982. 44 years later, nobody has ever been convicted of killing those seven people. Someone walked into ordinary drugstores, left poison on the shelves, and walked away.

On the night of March 2, 1998, 19 year old Suzanne Lyall finished her shift at a computer software store in a mall outside Albany, New York. She was a sophomore at the University at Albany. She'd transferred there to study computer science. She was smart, quiet, and loved computers. After work, she caught the bus back to campus. Around 9:30 p.m., she stepped off at the Collins Circle stop. Her dorm was a few minutes' walk away. She never got there. The next morning, her boyfriend called her parents. Suzanne hadn't come home. Her dad jumped in the car and raced to the school. Then came the first real clue. That afternoon, someone used Suzanne's ATM card at a convenience store near campus. Her boyfriend later told police only he and Suzanne knew her PIN. A few weeks later, an old ID card of hers turned up on campus. Nobody could say how it got there. Then her coworkers told police something chilling. About a month before she vanished, Suzanne told one of them she thought someone had been stalking her. She didn't know who. Searchers combed the woods around campus. Police chased lead after lead. Nothing. And Suzanne wasn't the first. Thirteen years earlier, another student at the same school had vanished from campus too. She was never found either. Suzanne's parents turned their grief into action. Back then, police often waited before taking missing persons reports for young adults, because technically they were grown ups. The Lyalls fought to change that. In 2003, Congress passed "Suzanne's Law," requiring police to immediately report missing people under 21 to the national database. Today, the campus police department still keeps Suzanne's photo on its bulletin board. Her mom has barely changed her bedroom. 28 years later, Suzanne Lyall has never been found. She stepped off a bus a few minutes from her dorm. Who was using her bank card the next day?

On the night of February 13, 2000, 9 year old Asha Degree went to bed in her family's house in Shelby, North Carolina. She was a shy, careful fourth grader. Her parents described her as a rule follower who was afraid of the dark and afraid of dogs. That weekend, her basketball team had lost its first game of the season. Asha had fouled out and cried. Other than that, nothing seemed wrong. Around 2:30 a.m., her dad checked on her and her brother. Both were asleep in their beds. At some point in the next hour, Asha got up, packed her book bag, and walked out the front door. Into a cold, rainy, windy night. Around 4 a.m., two different drivers saw a little girl walking alone along the side of Highway 18 in the dark. One of them turned around three times to check on her. When he pulled up, she ran off the road into the woods. When her mom went to wake her for school that morning, her bed was empty. Searchers later found candy wrappers, a pencil, a marker, and a Mickey Mouse hair bow in a shed near the highway. They were hers. A year and a half later, construction workers dug up her book bag, 26 miles away. It had been double wrapped in plastic trash bags and buried. Inside was a library book that wasn't hers. And a New Kids on the Block T-shirt that wasn't hers. A witness said they'd seen a girl matching Asha's description being pulled into an old dark green car near where she was last seen. For 24 years, the case barely moved. Then in 2024, the FBI and sheriff's deputies searched properties belonging to a local family the Degrees didn't even know. Investigators wrote in warrants that they now believe Asha was killed and her body hidden. DNA on a hair found on Asha's undershirt matched one of that family's daughters, who was a teenager in 2000. A witness told investigators that years ago, he heard another daughter, drunk and sobbing at a party, say she had killed Asha Degree. The family has denied any knowledge of what happened to her. Nobody has been charged. The reward is now $100,000. 26 years later, Asha's parents still keep the porch light on. Where was a 9 year old girl who was afraid of the dark going, alone, in the middle of a storm?

On April 6, 1970, two American combat photographers rode motorcycles down Highway 1 in Cambodia, straight toward an enemy roadblock. One of them was Sean Flynn. He was 28, and he was Hollywood royalty. His father was Errol Flynn, the swashbuckling movie star. Sean had acted as a young man too. He walked away from all of it. He went to Vietnam with a camera instead. He became one of the gutsiest photographers of the war. He went out with the troops, got as close to the fighting as anyone, and was wounded in the knee in 1966. He kept going back. Riding beside him was his friend Dana Stone, 30, from a small town in Vermont. Another fearless combat photographer, now shooting for CBS News. His wife was waiting for him back in Saigon. That spring, the Vietnam War had spilled into Cambodia. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were moving through the countryside. That morning, a group of journalists drove out of Phnom Penh toward the Vietnamese border. Up the road, they spotted a communist checkpoint. Most of the reporters stayed back. Sean and Dana wanted the shot. Maybe even an interview with the guerrillas themselves. Before they rode off, a colleague snapped one last photo of the two of them on their bikes. Then they rode forward. Witnesses watched as men at the checkpoint took their motorcycles and marched them off into the treeline. They were never seen again. Over the next few months, dozens of journalists were captured in Cambodia. Intelligence reports later suggested Sean and Dana were alive and held prisoner well into the next year. The most widely believed theory is that the Viet Cong held them for a year, then handed them over to the Khmer Rouge, who killed them. Nobody knows for sure. Sean's mother spent a fortune searching. She kept his apartment exactly as he left it for more than 20 years, waiting for him to come home. In 1984, she finally had him declared dead. In 2010, a team dug up remains in Cambodia they believed were Sean's. DNA said they weren't. 56 years later, neither man has ever been found. The son of a movie legend and a kid from Vermont rode into the jungle chasing one more picture. And the war swallowed them both.

In the summer of 1944, a 31 year old Swedish businessman named Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Nazi occupied Budapest. He'd been sent as a diplomat on a secret mission backed by the United States. His job was to save as many of Hungary's Jews as he could. Hundreds of thousands had already been deported to Auschwitz. Those left in Budapest were next. Wallenberg went to work. He designed official looking Swedish protective passports and handed them out by the thousands. He rented buildings across the city, hung Swedish flags on them, and declared them neutral territory. Jews hid inside by the hundreds. He chased deportation trains to the station and climbed onto the cars, passing protective papers through the doors while guards fired shots over his head. He bluffed, bribed, and threatened Nazi officers to their faces. By the time the war in Budapest was over, he's credited with helping save tens of thousands of lives. In January 1945, the Soviet Army took the city. On January 17, Wallenberg left Budapest under Soviet escort, headed to meet a Red Army commander. Before he left, he told a colleague he didn't know yet if he was going as a guest or a prisoner. He never came back. For years, the Soviet Union claimed it knew nothing about him. Then in 1957, Moscow announced that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in a Soviet prison in 1947. There was no body. No autopsy. Just a short note. Almost nobody believed it. For decades afterward, released prisoners from Soviet labor camps reported seeing him or hearing about a Swedish prisoner. Some sightings came from the 1960s, 1970s, even the 1980s. Later, researchers digging in Soviet archives found records of a prisoner being interrogated days after the date the Soviets said Wallenberg died. The United States made him an honorary citizen. Israel honored him as Righteous Among the Nations. In 2016, Sweden finally declared him legally dead. 81 years later, nobody knows what really happened to him. The man who saved tens of thousands from the Nazis vanished into the Soviet prison system. And never came out.

In June 1997, 18 year old Kristen Modafferi was living out a dream summer. She'd just finished her freshman year at NC State, back home in North Carolina. She'd flown across the country to take a summer photography class at UC Berkeley. She rented a room in a house in Oakland, and got two jobs in San Francisco. Weekdays at a coffee shop in a downtown mall, weekends at a café inside the Museum of Modern Art. On June 23, she finished her shift at the coffee shop around 3 p.m. Before she left, she asked a coworker how to get to Baker Beach. About 45 minutes later, people saw her on the second floor of the mall. She was talking with a blonde woman nobody recognized. The woman was holding a green backpack. Just like Kristen's. That was the last time anyone saw Kristen Modafferi. The next day, she didn't show up for the first day of the photography class she'd already paid almost $1,000 for. Her parents flew in from Charlotte. But because Kristen was 18, police treated her like a runaway. It took a week before they really started investigating. When they went through her things, they found a newspaper personal ad. Nobody knows if it had anything to do with her disappearance. Then, a couple weeks later, a man called a San Francisco TV station. He said Kristen had been killed by two women and her body was hidden under a wooden bridge near Point Reyes. Police searched. They found nothing. The blonde woman from the mall has never been identified. Kristen's parents spent years pushing to change how police handle missing adults. In 2000, Congress passed "Kristen's Act," funding help for families searching for missing adults. In 2017, private investigators said they'd found new evidence and a possible DNA lead. They believe she may have made it back to Oakland that day. She still hasn't been found. 29 years later, Kristen Modafferi would be 47. Who was the blonde woman?