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Lists about real and fictional mysteries and the people who solved them—or at least tried to.

Mysteries & Detectives

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True Crime

<p>Mysterious Disappearances of the 1980s. People who have gone missing and never returned. These <a href="https://www.ranker.com/list/emanuela-orlandi-disappearance/jacob-shelton" target="_blank">unexplained disappearances</a> often remain a mystery forever. The stories behind these 15 mysterious disappearances, are all very different, but they are all equally tragic, and interesting.</p>


Mysterious Disappearances of the 1980s

People Who Disappeared Mysteriously in 1980s

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Johnny Gosch

John David Gosch (November 12, 1969; disappeared September 5, 1982) was a 12-year-old paperboy in West Des Moines, Iowa, who disappeared without a trace between 6 and 7 A.M. on September 5, 1982. He is presumed to have been kidnapped.
As of 2019, there have been no arrests made and the case is now considered cold, but remains open.
His mother, Noreen Gosch, claimed that Johnny escaped from his captors and visited her with an unidentified man in March 1997. She claimed that her son told her that he had been the victim of a pedophile organization and had been cast aside when he was too old but subsequently feared for his life and lived under an assumed identity, feeling it was not safe to return home. Gosch's father, John, divorced from Noreen since 1993, has publicly stated that he is not sure whether or not such a visit actually occurred. Authorities have not located Gosch or confirmed Noreen Gosch's account, and his fate continues to be the subject of speculation, conspiracy theories, and dispute.
The case received huge publicity in 2006 when his mother claimed to have found photographs on her doorstep depicting Gosch in captivity. Some of the photos received were claimed to be children from a case in Florida, but one boy in the photos was never identified. Noreen Gosch insists that boy is Johnny.Johnny Gosch's picture was among the first to be featured on milk cartons as an attempt to help finding missing children.



Emanuela Orlandi

Emanuela Orlandi was a citizen of Vatican City who mysteriously disappeared on 22 June 1983. Sightings of Emanuela in various places have been reported over the years, even inside Vatican City, but all have been unreliable. The Orlandi case is still unsolved.

Kirsa Jensen case

Kirsa Jensen was a 14-year-old girl who lived in Napier, New Zealand when she disappeared on September 1, 1983, while riding her horse, Commodore. She never returned home that night and has never been seen again after 4pm. Her horse was found wandering near the Tutaekuri River but few traces of Jensen were ever discovered, and the case remains unsolved. Police believed that Jensen was abducted and murdered. The case is one of the few unsolved New Zealand murder mysteries and significant within a New Zealand context.

Tammy Lynn Leppert

Tammy Lynn Leppert (February 5, 1965 — disappeared July 6, 1983) is an American former child and teen model, actress and beauty queen who went missing under mysterious circumstances at the age of 18.

Kevin Andrew Collins

Kevin Andrew Collins (born January 24, 1974 — disappeared February 10, 1984) gained national attention as one of the first missing children to appear on milk cartons and on the cover of national publications, such as Newsweek magazine in 1984. His abduction from San Francisco city streets helped bring to light the plight of missing and exploited children in the U.S.



Edward L. Montoro

Edward L. Montoro (born 1928) was an American film producer and distributor known for releasing exploitation films and B-movies during the 1970s and 1980s through his company Film Ventures International. Montoro became notorious for producing and promoting films such as Beyond the Door (1974) and Grizzly (1976) which were highly derivative of the 1970s blockbuster hits The Exorcist and Jaws.

Boris Weisfeiler

Boris Weisfeiler (born 1941 – disappeared 1985) was a Soviet-born mathematician and professor at Penn State University who lived in the United States before disappearing in Chile in 1985. Declassified US documents suggest a Chilean army patrol seized Weisfeiler and took him to Colonia Dignidad, a secretive Germanic agricultural commune set up in Chile in the 1960s.  The Chilean Pinochet military dictatorship alleged that he drowned. He is known for the Weisfeiler filtration, Weisfeiler–Leman algorithm, and Kac–Weisfeiler conjectures.
Weisfeiler, a Jew, was born in the Soviet Union.  He received his Ph.D. in 1970 from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics Leningrad Department, as a student of Ernest Vinberg. In the early 1970s, Weisfeiler was asked to sign a letter against a colleague, and for his refusal was branded "anti-Soviet". Weisfeiler left the Soviet Union in 1975 to be free to advance his career and practice his religion. After a brief period under Armand Borel at the Institute for Advanced Study, near Princeton University, Weisfeiler became a professor at Pennsylvania State University. In 1981, he was naturalized as an American citizen.
Weisfeiler's research spanned twenty years, and he published three dozen research papers during his lifetime. According to his colleague Alexander Lubotzky, Weisfeiler was studying "the more difficult questions" of algebraic groups in "the case when the field is not algebraically closed and the groups do not split or—even worse—are nonisotropic". He is known for the Weisfeiler–Leman algorithm, the Kac–Weisfeiler conjectures, the Weisfeiler filtration, and work on strong approximation and on finite linear groups.Weisfeiler, an experienced outdoorsman, flew to Chile at Christmastime of 1984 to hike alone in the Chilean Andes.

Vladimir Alexandrov

Christopher Dale Flannery

Christopher Dale Flannery, nicknamed "Mr. Rent-a-Kill" (born 1948 – missing and believed murdered since 9 May 1985) is alleged to have been an Australian contract killer.

Suzy Lamplugh

Susannah "Suzy" Lamplugh was a British estate agent reported missing on 28 July 1986 in Fulham, southwest London, England. She was officially declared dead, presumed murdered, in 1994. The last clue of her whereabouts was an appointment to show a house in Shorrolds Road to someone she referred to as "Mr Kipper". Following her disappearance, police tested the DNA of 800 unidentified bodies and skeletal remains that matched Lamplugh's description.
In late 2010, police began a new search of a field off the B4084 between Pershore and Drakes Broughton. The area is about three miles away from the former Norton Barracks in Worcestershire which was searched in December 2000 and February 2001. In 2000, police had searched a nearby brickworks which several witnesses had mentioned in their original statements. The search proved unsuccessful and to this day, her remains have not been found.

Maja Vojvoda

Jacob Wetterling

Jacob Erwin Wetterling (February 17, 1978 – October 22, 1989) was a boy from St. Joseph, Minnesota who was kidnapped from his hometown and murdered at the age of 11 on October 22, 1989. His abduction remained a mystery for nearly 27 years.
On September 1, 2016, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) recovered human bones from a pasture near Paynesville, Minnesota, about 30 miles (48 km) from the site of the abduction. On September 3, the family announced that the bones were those of Jacob, and local law enforcement stated that the identity of the bones had been confirmed by dental records. The location was revealed by Danny James Heinrich, a long-time person of interest in the abduction of another boy, Jared Scheierl, in the nearby town of Cold Spring. On September 6, 2016, Heinrich confessed to kidnapping and murdering Jacob Wetterling, as well as abducting and sexually assaulting Jared Scheierl.



Mysterious Disappearances of the 1980s. People who have gone missing and never returned. These unexplained disappearances often remain a mystery forever. The ...