There are hundreds of thousands of missing persons cases every year in the U.S. We can hear it on the news regularly, and sadly, a lot of those people go into human trafficking or are never found again. Here are five really creepy missing persons cases.
The Sodder children
Source: Thought Catalog
George and Jenny Sodder were parents to 10 children. Nine of the children lived in the family’s house. On December 24, 1945, the house was burned to the ground. The parents and four of the children escaped. Upon investigation, the other five children’s bodies were never found.
The family transformed the site of the demolished house into a memorial for their lost children. The Sodders never lost hope that their children were still out there.
Some suspect that because of George’s forthcoming on his dislike for Benito Mussolini, that the Sicilian Mafia may have been responsible for the children’s disappearances.
Joan Risch
Source: Morbidology
On October 24, !961police entered Joan Risch’s residence to find blood and a roll of paper towels in the kitchen. Joan’s daughter originally had found the blood and exclaimed to a neighbor “Mommy is gone and the kitchen is covered in red paint!”
Some suspect that the disappearance was staged because police discovered that Joan’s library records were all books about fictional disappearances. One in particular detailed the exact same crime scene found in the Risch’s home.
Brian Schaffer
Source: medium.com
Brian Schaffer, an Ohio State University medical student, disappeared from a bar on March 31, 2006. The bar’s security camera caught Schaffer talking to two women around two in the morning. There was no other entrance available to the public at the bar, and the camera never caught him leaving through the main door. The women were never asked to take a polygraph test. A note in his father, Randy Schaffer’s, obituary read, “To Dad, love Brian (U.S Virgin Islands).” The note was deemed to be a hoax because the sender was traced back to a public computer in Franklin County.
Bobby Dunbar
Source: All That Is Interesting
In August of 1912, the Dubar family went on a fishing trip on which Bobby Dunbar, age four, went missing. Eight months later, police discovered a child who they thought to be the missing child. The Dunbars took in the child and claimed him as their son.
A woman named Julia Anderson challenged the Dunbars and told police that the child was hers. Julia did not have enough money to pay for a lawyer, so the court ruled that the child belonged to the Dunbars.
In 2014, DNA testing conclusively found that the boy had no genetic relation to the Dunbar family. The real Bobby Dunbar was never found.
Dorothy Arnold
Source: wikipedia.org
On December 12, 1910, Dorothy Arnold disappeared. Her father was a wealthy perfume buyer. She was shopping in New York to find a dress for a party. After being absent from dinner, a friend of Dorothy called the family residence to check in on her. Mrs. Arnold told the friend that Dorothy was home with a headache.
The Arnolds concealed Dorothy’s disappearance and did not call the police for weeks because they did not want the negative media attention. Her body was never recovered. Many believe that she died during a botched, illegal, abortion and her body was secretly cremated. The Arnold family heavily denied this theory.
