Why did famous people who disappeared disappear?

1. Why did famous people who disappeared disappear?

2. Virginia Dare/Ambrose Bierce • As the first child born to English parents in the New World, Virginia Dare became a poster child for early American colonialism following her birth in 1587. Her family was part of just 120 Englishmen and -women to settle on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. The colony's governor — and Virginia's grandfather — left for England soon after she was born to secure more financial and material resources for the foundering settlement. When he finally returned three years later, he couldn't find a trace of the toddler — or any of the other settlers. Only one clue remained: the word Croatoanhad been carved on one of the settlement's posts, leading many to believe that the Native American Croatoan tribe had kidnapped or killed the settlers. Roanoke Island became known as the Lost Colony. • Best known for his short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," the journalist and author earned the nickname "Bitter Bierce" for his sarcastic, biting wit. ("Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think.") The Civil War veteran also had a morbid fascination with horror and death, both of which became recurring themes in his writing. Bored with life in the U.S., he moved to Mexico in 1913 to witness Pancho Villa's revolution. He was 71. In a letter to his cousin Lora, Bierce didn't attempt to assuage his family's fear about such a trek, writing: • "Good-bye — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!" • Some scholars believe he was killed in the siege of Ojinaga in January 1914. Others speculate that Bierce's final letters were a ruse and that he never actually went to Mexico but instead committed suicide.

3. Anastasia Romanov • While most historians believe Bolshevik revolutionaries killed the grand duchess of Russia in 1917 following the October Revolution, several women claimed her identity, along with the vast Romanov fortune held in Swiss banks. But because Anastasia's remains were never found, rumors persisted. The Discovery of a grave just north of Ekaterinburg where the remains of two children have been found and it is believed they are the tzars 2 missing children!! The remains of tzarivich and Marie. While the story goes that Anastasia is the child missing it has almost been proven that it is actually her older sister Marie. On July 29, 2007, certain items were discovered by S.O. Plotnikov and L.G. Vakhmyakov.  In the bore pit that had been located and explored, coals, bone remains, nails and fragments from a ceramic vessel were unearthed.  The spot where the remains were found this summer appears to correspond to a site described by Yakov Yurovsky, the leader of the family's killers, said Sergei Pogorelov, deputy head of the archaeological research department at a regional center for the preservation of historical and cultural monuments in Yekaterinburg.The deputy director of the Center of protection and use of the cultural heritage of Sverdlovsk, Andreï Grigoriev, told  journalists that the researches had begun after the discovery of archival documents." I learnt that the former regional archives of the Communist Party received documents speaking about the murder of the imperial family and about a fruitless attempt to hide corpses ", clarified Mr Grigoriev.These documents had allowed the specialists to establish the place where the tsarevich Alexis and the grand duchess Marie would have been buried. Following the search organized on a site of 100 square meters, the researchers had discovered the remains of human bodies, bullets, fragments of wooden boxes and fragments of ceramic which, according to preliminary estimations, represented fragments of amphoras used to hold some acid. An area of 100 square meters was laid out for further investigation.  The work was carried out according to archeological methods, with the use of drainage trenches.  As a result of this exploration, a large spot of coal was exposed.  Upon further examination, this spot was determined to be T-shaped.  After removing the layer of coal, the shapes and sizes of two overlying pits became evident in the subsoil.An area discovered along the Old Koptyaki Road presented double bonfire sites, spread between pits, which contained bone remains in various degrees of preservation and condition; bullets; iron nails and angles, fragments of a ceramic vessel and other objects. Initial anthropological analysis determined that the bone remains were human, subjected to varying forms of destruction – including burning.  The bones belong to two young individuals – a young man between the ages of 10-13 years, and a young woman about 18-23. Ceramic vessel fragments are identical to those found in the original burial site found in 1991, and appear to be fragments from ceramic amphorae containing Japanese sulfuric acid. Analysis matches these to be identical to the ones found in the burial site of the other bodies.  Yurovsky et al all describe the procuring and use of this acid during the attempted burning and burial process. Iron angles and nails, apparently, appear to have held together the wooden crates containing the vessels with the sulfuric acid. The metal jacket bullets are of different calibers, from cartridges for short-barreled firearms.  Analysis matches these to be identical to the ones found in the burial site of the other bodies discovered in  1991.The Forensic Director of Medicine of Sverdlovsk Mr Nevoline clarified that the forensic scientists had also received seven fragments of teeth, three bullets of a weapon with short standard cannon and a fragment of fabric of garment.G.I. Sukhorukov, who was assigned to go help dispose of the corpses of the Royal Family the next morning in 1918. On April 3, 1928 his memoir:... "It was necessary to begin digging up the corpses (after the attempt to burn them the previous night)...the first thing we came across was the leg of the last Nicholas.  He was removed successfully, and then all the others. To be precise, it can be said that everybody was naked, except for the heir, who had on a sailor shirt but no trousers. “The three bullets also match exactly those found in the "mass grave" previously found in1991. “The remains have been exposed to extreme heat, and the bullets were found close to the bones and must have hit the victims’ bodies. Using a metal detector the very first object that was found was a bullet. Addium= In January 2008 Russian scientists announced that the charred remains of a young boy and a young woman found near Ekaterinburg in August 2007 are most likely those of the thirteen-year-old Tsarevich and one of the four Romanov grand duchesses. Russian forensic scientists confirmed on April 30, 2008 that the remains were those of the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his four sisters. DNA information, made public in July 2008, that has been obtained from Ekaterinburg and repeatedly tested independently by laboratories such as the University of Massachusetts Medical School, USA, reveals that the final two missing Romanov remains are indeed authentic and that the entire Romanov family housed in the Ipatiev House, Ekaterinburg were executed in the early hours of 17 July 1918.

4. The Lindbergh Baby • “Anne, they have stolen our baby,” Charles Lindbergh reportedly told his wife on the night of March 1, 1932, when the couple discovered that their 20-month-old son, Charlie, had been taken from his crib. A ransom note read, • "Dear Sir, Have $50,000 ready ... Have them in two packages. Four days we will inform you to redeem the money. We warn you for making anything public, or for notifying the police, child is in gut care." Though the Lindberghs eventually paid the ransom, the child was not returned and the hunt continued. Seventy-two days later, the baby's decomposed body was discovered in a wooded area near the Lindbergh's home in Hopewell, N.J.; he had been clubbed to death shortly after his abduction. Two years later, investigators traced the ransom money to German carpenter Bruno Hauptmann, who proclaimed his innocence up until his death by electrocution. The tragedy inspired Congress to pass the Federal Kidnapping Act, also known as the Lindbergh Law, which made kidnapping across state lines a federal offense.

5. Amelia Earhart/D. B. Cooper The Kansas native achieved a number of firsts as an aviator, becoming an icon to women around the world in the process. By the time she was 40, Earhart had become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, the first woman to fly nonstop across the U.S. and the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross award. But there was still one record that alluded her — she wanted to become the first female aviator to fly around the world. On June 1, 1937, Earhart and co-pilot Fred Noonan set off in their "flying laboratory" from Miami and headed toward Howland Island, some 2,550 miles away. They never reached their destination. (The plane's navigation equipment, it turned out, had been malfunctioning before their departure.) Almost immediately, Earhart's husband, publisher George Palmer Putnam, sent a telegram to President Franklin D. Roosevelt requesting the help of the U.S. Navy. At a cost of $250,000 a day, military ships scoured the ocean for any sign of Earhart, her co-pilot or the plane. Two years later, her death was officially declared. To this day, no one knows his real name but on Nov. 24, 1971, everyone in America was talking about the mysterious man who called himself D.B. Cooper. That day, Cooper hijacked Northwest Airlines Flight 305 and its 36 passengers using a briefcase that he said contained a bomb. "We will ask you to stay there until we get coordinated with our friend in the back," the pilot told the control tower after the plane landed in Seattle. Once $200,000 and several parachutes were delivered per Cooper's request, he demanded the plane fly him to Mexico. He also asked for the rear door to remain unlocked and the plane to be flown low and slow. Cooper clearly had a plan, although officials didn't realize what it was until it was too late. While the plane flew to Reno, Nev. (ostensibly for a refueling stop), Cooper parachuted into the night. Despite the fact that law-enforcement officials in five different planes were tailing the jetliner, no one witnessed the jump. Though the FBI contends that Cooper couldn't have survived, it released new composite sketches in 2007 in hopes of closing the case. that claims to name the source of the new information in the D.B. Cooper skyjacking. ABC says unnamed and unspecified sources have confirmed that a woman named Marla Cooper provided the FBI with a guitar strap for fingerprint testing. NPR is trying to independently confirm ABC's claim. The FBI has yet to respond to a request for comment. Marla Cooper told the network that she believes the skyjacker is her uncle, a deceased man named L.D. Cooper, who returned bloodied and bruised from what he said was a hunting trip just after the Thanksgiving eve hijacking in 1971. Marla Cooper says she was eight-years-old at the time and at her grandmother's house in Sisters, Oregon. That's a 260 mile drive from Ariel, Washington, which is where D.B. Cooper parachuted from a Northwest Airlines jet. He had a $200,000 ransom with him when he jumped. "I heard my uncle say we did it, our money problems are over, we hijacked an airplane," Marla Cooper told ABC News Correspondent Pierre Thomas, who covers the Justice Department for the network. Cooper said another uncle was involved. "My two uncles, who I only saw at holiday time, were planning something very mischievous. I was watching them using some very expensive walkie-talkies that they had purchased," she told Thomas. "They left to supposedly go turkey hunting, and Thanksgiving morning I was waiting for them to return.“ According to Thomas, "Marla Cooper says that her two uncles wanted to return to search for the cash, but her father refused. She believes this was because the FBI search was just beginning to take shape.“ Just before Cooper's father died in 1995, he mentioned "his long lost brother, my uncle L.D. ... he said 'don't you remember he hijacked that airplane?'" Cooper told ABC. Cooper also told the network that her uncle was obsessed with a comic book character known as "Dan Cooper" and had one of the comics pinned to his wall. "Dan Cooper" is actually the name the skyjacker used. His name became "D.B." because of a mistake in one of the earliest news reports of the hijacking. FBI Special Agent Fred Gutt told reporters yesterday that the guitar strap agents received did not yield fingerprints. Gutt said agents were trying to obtain other belongings from their new suspect's family. The skyjacker left behind partial prints and saliva on a necktie that has apparently provided DNA evidence to investigators. But writer Geoffrey Gray, who spent three years reviewing the case and the evidence, told NPR, "The forensic evidence that they had to use is incomplete.“ Gray is skeptical that the new information will result in firm identification of D.B. Cooper. "The fingerprints themselves are partial," Gray says. "The DNA strain that they have and that they retrieved from saliva found on the hijacker's clip on tie Are also partial and may not even be the hijackers."

6. Abbie Hoffman/ Jimmy Hoffa Hoffman co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies") in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War and the American economic and political system. A master of the publicity stunt, he gained national attention in 1969 by interrupting The Who's performance at Woodstock to protest a fellow activist's arrest and incarceration. "I think this is a pile of shit! While John Sinclair rots in prison ...," he screamed, high on LSD, after grabbing the microphone from a shocked Pete Townsend. The following year, he was convicted for crossing state lines to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, though the conviction was later overturned. In 1971 he made headlines again with his best seller Steal This Book. After being arrested in New York City for trying to sell $36,000 worth of cocaine, Hoffman jumped bail in 1974 and vanished. (He made for a flamboyant fugitive, personally reporting his disappearance to police.) Seven years later, he resurfaced in upstate New York with an entirely new name (Barry Freed) and an entirely new face (thanks to plastic surgery). He served one year in prison and later worked as an environmental activist until his death in 1989. Before being pardoned by President Richard Nixon in 1971, the infamous labor leader spent four years in prison for the crimes he committed as president of America's largest union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. (The list of crimes included jury-tampering, mail fraud and bribery.) Two weeks before Hoffa's disappearance, on July 30, 1975, federal investigators discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars had been stolen from the Teamsters' largest pension fund. Their attention immediately turned to Mafia bosses Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone and Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, both of whom reportedly agreed to meet with Hoffa on the very day of his disappearance. While the suspects and motives were clear, evidence proved far more elusive. (Officials later resorted to hypnotizing suspects and witnesses to gather evidence against the Mob; it didn't work.) The FBI began its search anew in 2006 at a horse farm in Michigan; the investigation yielded nothing. Hoffa's body has never been found. His son, James P. Hoffa, now presides over the Teamsters.

7. Oscar Zeta Acosta/ Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin The Mexican-American lawyer and activist played a prominent role in Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as "Dr. Gonzo" (the moniker came about after Acosta refused to allow Thompson to use his real name, especially considering Thompson's less-than-flattering portrayal of the "300-pound Samoan"). Describing his friend, Thompson wrote: "Any combination of a 250 lb. Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach — but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of 33 — just like Jesus Christ — you have a serious piece of work on your hands." Acosta vanished in 1974 while traveling in Mexico. He was 39. Dubbed "the Rock" for its formidable location in the middle of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz held prisoners during the Civil War. But after the Lindbergh kidnapping, FDR's Attorney General turned the island into a Fort Knox–like fortress for the nation's most horrific criminals — Al Capone, "Machine Gun" Kelly and Robert Stroud, the infamous "Birdman of Alcatraz." During the 1960s, it also held three men who later defied the odds and managed to escape: Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin. Morris and the Anglin brothers spent more than two years planning their getaway. The scheme was a complicated one that involved MacGyver-like ingenuity. Using what little materials they could buy or steal, the men drilled holes in the air vents of their cells, fashioned lifelike dummy heads made of plaster, flesh-tone paint and real human hair, and created a raft. On the night of June 11, 1962, they shimmied through the air vents and into a utility corridor. From there, they made it to the prison's roof and later scaled down a smokestack to reach the shore. After prison officials learned of their escape, authorities launched one of the largest manhunts since the Lindbergh kidnapping. The trio were never found, though most believe they drowned. The FBI officially closed the case in 1979.

8. Percy Fawcett/Flight 19 • When British archaeologist and explorer, Percy Fawcett, together with his eldest son, Jack, and friend Raleigh Rimmell, set out for the jungles of Brazil in search for a hidden “city of gold”, who could have imagined that something could possibly go wrong? As was wont to happen when people set off on adventures of this nature, they were never heard from again and their fate remains unknown to this day. Several unconfirmed sightings and many conflicting reports and theories explaining their disappearance followed, but despite the loss of over 100 lives in more than a dozen follow-up expeditions, and the recovery of some of Fawcett’s belongings, their fate remains a mystery. • The legend of the Bermuda Triangle was born on December 5, 1945, when five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers comprising Flight 19 took off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. • Two hours later, the leader of the squadron reported that his compass and back-up compass had failed and that his position was unknown. The other planes had experienced similar instrument malfunctions. Meanwhile, radio facilities on land scrambled unsuccessfully to pinpoint the exact location of the lost squadron. After two more hours of confused messages from the fliers, a distorted radio transmission was heard in which the squadron leader instructed his men to ditch their aircraft simultaneously because of lack of fuel. • By this time, several land radar stations finally determined that Flight 19 was somewhere north of the Bahamas and east of the Florida coast, and a search and rescue Mariner aircraft with a 13-man crew was dispatched to find it. But the Mariner, like Flight 19, was never heard from again. The disappearance of the 14 men of Flight 19 and the 13 men of the Mariner led to one of the largest air and seas searches to that date, and hundreds of ships and aircraft combed thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and remote locations within the interior of Florida. No sign of the bodies or aircraft was ever found. • Naval officials maintained that the remains of the six aircraft and 27 men were never uncovered because stormy weather destroyed the evidence. Still, the story of the “Lost Squadron” popularized the supposed perils of the Bermuda Triangle, an area of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and aircraft are said to vanish without a trace.

9. Joseph Force Crater • The disappearance of New York Supreme Court judge Joseph Force Crater captured so much media attention that the phrase “pulling a Crater” briefly entered the public vernacular as a synonym for going AWOL. On August 6, 1930, the dapper 41-year-old left his office, bought a ticket to the Broadway play “Dancing Partner” and dined with an acquaintance at a Manhattan chophouse. He was last seen walking down the street outside the restaurant. The massive investigation into his disappearance captivated the nation, earning Crater the title of “the missingest man in New York.” • His prominent position notwithstanding, Crater was infamous for his shady dealings with the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine and frequent dalliances with showgirls. In the days leading up to his disappearance, he had reportedly received a mysterious phone call, visited Atlantic City with a mistress and cashed two large personal checks. These intriguing details spawned rampant speculation that the judge had fled the country with his lover or been a victim of foul play. He was declared legally dead in 1939. • In 2005, New York police revealed that new evidence had emerged in the case of the city’s most famous missing man. A woman who had died earlier that year had left a handwritten note in which she claimed that her husband and several other men, including a police officer, had murdered Crater and buried his body beneath a section of the Coney Island boardwalk. That site had been excavated during the construction of the New York Aquarium in the 1950s, long before technology existed to detect and identify human remains. As a result, the question of whether Judge Crater sleeps with the fishes remains a mystery.

10. To this day, no one knows his real name but on Nov. 24, 1971, everyone in America was talking about the mysterious man who called himself D.B. Cooper. That day, Cooper hijacked Northwest Airlines Flight 305 and its 36 passengers using a briefcase that he said contained a bomb. "We will ask you to stay there until we get coordinated with our friend in the back," the pilot told the control tower after the plane landed in Seattle. Once $200,000 and several parachutes were delivered per Cooper's request, he demanded the plane fly him to Mexico. He also asked for the rear door to remain unlocked and the plane to be flown low and slow. Cooper clearly had a plan, although officials didn't realize what it was until it was too late. While the plane flew to Reno, Nev. (ostensibly for a refueling stop), Cooper parachuted into the night. Despite the fact that law-enforcement officials in five different planes were tailing the jetliner, no one witnessed the jump. Though the FBI contends that Cooper couldn't have survived, it released new composite sketches in 2007 in hopes of closing the case. that claims to name the source of the new information in the D.B. Cooper skyjacking. ABC says unnamed and unspecified sources have confirmed that a woman named Marla Cooper provided the FBI with a guitar strap for fingerprint testing. NPR is trying to independently confirm ABC's claim. The FBI has yet to respond to a request for comment. Marla Cooper told the network that she believes the skyjacker is her uncle, a deceased man named L.D. Cooper, who returned bloodied and bruised from what he said was a hunting trip just after the Thanksgiving eve hijacking in 1971. Marla Cooper says she was eight-years-old at the time and at her grandmother's house in Sisters, Oregon. That's a 260 mile drive from Ariel, Washington, which is where D.B. Cooper parachuted from a Northwest Airlines jet. He had a $200,000 ransom with him when he jumped. "I heard my uncle say we did it, our money problems are over, we hijacked an airplane," Marla Cooper told ABC News Correspondent Pierre Thomas, who covers the Justice Department for the network. Cooper said another uncle was involved. "My two uncles, who I only saw at holiday time, were planning something very mischievous. I was watching them using some very expensive walkie-talkies that they had purchased," she told Thomas. "They left to supposedly go turkey hunting, and Thanksgiving morning I was waiting for them to return.“ According to Thomas, "Marla Cooper says that her two uncles wanted to return to search for the cash, but her father refused. She believes this was because the FBI search was just beginning to take shape.“ Just before Cooper's father died in 1995, he mentioned "his long lost brother, my uncle L.D. ... he said 'don't you remember he hijacked that airplane?'" Cooper told ABC. Cooper also told the network that her uncle was obsessed with a comic book character known as "Dan Cooper" and had one of the comics pinned to his wall. "Dan Cooper" is actually the name the skyjacker used. His name became "D.B." because of a mistake in one of the earliest news reports of the hijacking. FBI Special Agent Fred Gutt told reporters yesterday that the guitar strap agents received did not yield fingerprints. Gutt said agents were trying to obtain other belongings from their new suspect's family. The skyjacker left behind partial prints and saliva on a necktie that has apparently provided DNA evidence to investigators. But writer Geoffrey Gray, who spent three years reviewing the case and the evidence, told NPR, "The forensic evidence that they had to use is incomplete.“ Gray is skeptical that the new information will result in firm identification of D.B. Cooper. "The fingerprints themselves are partial," Gray says. "The DNA strain that they have and that they retrieved from saliva found on the hijacker's clip on tie Are also partial and may not even be the hijackers."