Only a few cases of missing people reach the headlines, the most disturbing cases are the ones without notes or apparent motives for vanishing. Some were maybe victims of foul play but others just chose to leave their former lives. Many people along history like Margie Profet and Lucy Ann Johnson were found having a new life and like Jacques Vergès (who vanished for 8 years) said:
“It’s highly amusing that no one, in our modern police state, can figure out where I was for almost ten years”
That was 1970-1978, but still these days people disappear without a trace, as the ones mentioned above sometimes the vanished person is found. Remember our post about Agatha Christie? In 1926, Agatha left her home in her car (later found near a lake with her clothes and driving license). She was found eleven days later under a fake name at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel.
This post is about 4 famous women who vanished:
1910
Dorothy Arnold, vanishing or abortion
When Dorothy was 24 she went shopping one morning (for chocolate and books) and vanished on Fifth Avenue in New York. As she was a socialite her family was not interested in making public her disappearance for weeks! All her belongings were in her room, also some folders for transatlantic streamliners and postcards from other countries. They also found a rejected manuscript burned in the fireplace. Abduction theories were dismissed as she was walking on busy streets in mid-afternoon. In a letter to George (a guy she was in a relation with) she mentioned suicide after the rejection of her manuscript:
“Failure stares me in the face. All I can see ahead is a long road with no turning. Mother will always think an accident has happened”
Some weeks later his father received a postcard from NY: “I am safe” and was signed “Dorothy“. It was Dorothy’s handwriting but her father thought someone copied it from a newspaper. 75 days after she went missing, police decided to stop the search thinking that probably she was dead.
Six years later an abortion clinic was investigated, a few women who visited were secretly cremated after dying during the illegal abortion. A doctor said that Dorothy was one of them. But her father dismissed it as impossible.
Same year a man admitted he was paid to bury her by 2 men after she died during an operation. One looking like George, the other going by the nickname Doc. Police couldn’t locate the body. Twenty years after her death the Bureau of Missing Persons claimed that Dorothy’s family already knew what happened to her. The next day they said they were misquoted. Weird isn’t it? Dorothy’s mother was convinced she was alive somewhere until her death in 1928.
1939
Barbara Newhall Follett, the girl who didn’t like civilization
This child prodigy novelist wrote her first novel at 12, she was 8 when she began writing it! (I don’t know you but the most productive thing I did when I was 8 was probably playing with my Jem & The Holograms dolls…). The House Without Windows
At 25 she became depressed with her marriage and walked out of her apartment with 30 dollars. Her husband didn’t report her disappearance to police until 2 weeks later and took 4 months to request a missing-persons bulletin! As she was depressed no true effort to find her was ever made by anyone, sad isn’t it? I like to think she moved to a cabin in the woods somewhere far away from people, like the main character of her first novel.
“She would be invisible forever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see”
1974
Connie Converse, the singer who drove away
This popular singer and songwriter was depressed, she was also a heavy drinker. Connie was a misunderstood artist ahead of her time, her songs in the 60s had lyrics about promiscuity, depression and many other controversial subjects that, at the time, nobody sang about.
In 1974 she wrote goodbye letters to family and friends, talking about her plans to start a new life somewhere else. Connie packed her belongings and disappeared in her Volkswagen Beetle. Her family thinks she just drove her car into a lake to kill herself. But you don’t take your belongings with you to do that, in my opinion she just left to start a new life. You can listen to Connie’s ‘We Lived Alone‘ and most of her songs online.
In between two tall mountains
there’s a place they call Lonesome.
Don’t see why they call it Lonesome;
I’m never lonesome when I go there.
1994
Ylenia Carrisi, missing on a trip
I remember this case from tv back in the day it was in the news for months, as her parents are huge in Italy, Spain and few other European countries. Ylenia is the daughter of Italian singers Albano and Romina Power (Ylena is granddaughter of Tyrone Power). In 1994, when she was 23 Ylenia went backpacking solo in America to write a book, her brother Yari wanted to surprise her with a visit for Christmas so he went to Mexico just to find out she left 24 hours earlier to New Orleans. Her notebooks, camera and passport were found in her hotel room in New Orleans. There are a few disturbing details about her disappearance.
In 1996 an anonymous call claimed that she was alive in an unknown location. In 2011 Ylena went back to headlines when a journalist claimed she was living in the Sant Anthony’s Greek Orthodox convent near Phoenix. When police called there they were told a woman working there just left to Asia in a hurry.
Romina thinks she’s still alive but her father believes the story of a security guard who spotted a girl (the night she went missing) jumping off a New Orleans bridge after telling him “I belong in the water” (that body was never found). He declared her presumably dead in 2013.
You can read this NY Times article about her from February 1994, just after she went missing. Ylenia’s case is a very strange one, she wanted to travel alone, but unlike Converse she never said she wanted to start a new life somewhere else, unlike Barbara she wasn’t depressed. Could it have been foul play? Hope not, I agree with her mother in thinking she is alive somewhere maybe in a convent or a cult, or with people she met… She would be 44 today, so really hope she’s alive and maybe eventually she will let her family know about her whereabouts.
