Without a Trace: 4 Famous Missing People

Everyone loves a mystery. It’s the reason why Sherlock Holmes is still prominent in pop culture after more than a century and shows like “Dateline” and “48 Hours” present true crime stories every week.

Out of all of life’s mysteries, however, nothing gets the conspiracy theorists’ juices flowing like trying to figure out why someone disappeared. Ancestry has a huge trove of death records documenting time and place of burial, but over the centuries, there have been plenty of famous cases of people who vanished without a trace and were never heard from again.

In a cases like these, where no body or remains are recovered, people can let their imaginations run wild, as in the cases of these four famous deaths.

Jimmy Hoffa

One of the two most famous missing corpses in American history (we’ll get to the other one in a moment), Hoffa was the leader of the Teamsters Union and went missing in 1975. Known as a tough customer and someone who fought undue influence on the union he led, speculation raged after his disappearance that he ran afoul of the mob. Alan Greenblatt of NPR attributes that rumor to good timing: “It was not long after the first two ‘Godfather’ films had been released, bringing mob culture to the forefront of broad American consciousness.”

For many years, Hoffa was rumored to be buried under an end zone of the original Giants Stadium, rumors finally laid to rest when the stadium was razed in 2010. Movies have been made about Hoffa’s life; both Sylvester Stallone and Jack Nicholson have played him on screen. Even as recently as 2013, Hoffa watchers were all verklempt when remains that could have possibly been his were found outside Detroit, but DNA testing proved otherwise.

Amelia Earhart

Earhart is probably, along with Hoffa, the most famous missing American ever. We know her achievements, as laid out on an Ancestry page dedicated to her: She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to Oakland. But when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, attempted an around-the-world solo flight in 1937, her plane disappeared somewhere over the Pacific. She was declared legally dead in 1939.

According to History.com, the “official” scenario is that the two couldn’t find their landing spot at Howland Island, ran out of fuel, crashed in the ocean, and sank. But others thought Earhart and Noonan were caught spying and were executed by the Japanese; the investigation of this theory is documented on the Ancestry page. Still others thought the two touched down on a remote, uncharted island and lived the rest of their days there. But no concrete evidence of what happened has been unearthed, even though more than 75 years have passed.

D.B. Cooper

In 1971, a man named Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient flight, declared he had a bomb, exchanged the passengers for a $200,000 ransom and some parachutes, took off again, then jumped out of the rear of the plane somewhere between Seattle and Reno.

Thus the legend of “D.B. Cooper” was born, immortalized in books, FBI case files, and even an episode of the sitcom “NewsRadio.” While the case remains open, the Feds maintain that it’s likely that Cooper didn’t survive the jump. “The parachute he used couldn’t be steered, his clothing and footwear were unsuitable for a rough landing, and he had jumped into a wooded area at night, a dangerous proposition for a seasoned pro—which evidence suggests Cooper was not.” Still, they’re willing to listen to evidence gathered by the public with 21st-century technology like GPS.

Oh, and where does “D.B.” come from? “It was apparently a myth created by the press,” writes the bureau in its blog. “We did question a man with the initials ‘D. B.’ but he wasn’t the hijacker.”

Glenn Miller

During World War II, it didn’t matter whether you were an average Joe or a famous trumpeter and bandleader, as Glenn Miller was; you were proud to serve the U.S. however you could. So the composer of “In the Mood,” “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” and other big band standards was an Army major in 1944 when he boarded a small transport plane in England, headed to a performance with the Army Air Force band in France. He was never heard from again.

Researcher Dennis Spragg wrote a book theorizing—with military documents to back him up—that the plane he was likely on iced over while flying low over the English Channel, giving the pilot very little time to react. Because of the materials the plane was made of, it disintegrated on impact. Miller’s body was never found, and no definitive evidence has surfaced in the 70 years since. Miller was only 40 when he disappeared, leaving fans to wonder what else he might have accomplished had he lived.

—Joel Keller

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