An enforced disappearance is the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person by a state or political organization. In case of a third party, it has the authorization of another state or political organization; it is usually followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate and whereabouts with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law.
Bourtreehill is a large housing estate built by the Irvine Development Corporation (IDC) in the late 1970s which forms part of the Irvine New Town in North Ayrshire, Scotland. The estate has two main parts, known as Bourtreehill North and Bourtreehill South. Along its southern border runs the Broomlands estate. The Bourtreehill South area has suffered from anti-social behaviour. However, with more frequent police and Community Warden Patrols, this has gone down, though the area still suffers from the lack of employment opportunities in North Ayrshire.
Renee MacRae was a Scottish woman who disappeared on 12 November 1976, together with her 3-year-old son Andrew. Their case was the United Kingdom's longest-running missing persons case, and within Scotland is as notorious as Glasgow's Bible John murders. In September 2022, William (Bill) MacDowell was found guilty of the murder of MacRae and her son. Their bodies have never been found.
On 24 July 1991, Ben Needham, a 21-month-old English child, disappeared on the Greek island of Kos. After initial searches failed to locate him, he was believed to have been kidnapped. Despite numerous claims of sightings, his whereabouts remain unknown.
Maura Murray is an American woman who disappeared on the evening of February 9, 2004, after a car crash on Route 112 near Woodsville, New Hampshire, a village in the town of Haverhill. Her whereabouts remain unknown. She was a 21-year-old nursing student completing her junior year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst at the time of her disappearance.
Kristen Deborah Modafferi is an American woman who, at the age of 18, in the early summer of 1997, disappeared in mysterious circumstances after leaving her work at the Crocker Galleria Mall in San Francisco, California. The soon-to-be college sophomore at North Carolina State University was spending the summer in the Bay Area; Modafferi had relocated from her native North Carolina to Oakland only recently and was expected to start summer photography classes at UC Berkeley on the day after she vanished.
Peter Britton Tobin was a Scottish convicted serial killer and sex offender who served a whole life order at HM Prison Edinburgh for three murders committed between 1991 and 2006. Police also investigated Tobin over the deaths and disappearances of other young women and girls.
Jessica Edith Louise Foster, is a Canadian woman who disappeared in the Las Vegas Valley in Nevada, United States, in 2006. Her parents are Glendene Grant and Dwight Foster. Jessie Foster had spent some time living in Calgary, Alberta. In 2005, Foster and a friend of hers visited Florida together, and then stopped by Las Vegas on the way back in May where Foster decided to stay. Before disappearing the following year, Foster became involved in prostitution, was arrested once for solicitation, and was the victim of battery on several occasions.
Ayla Reynolds is a child from Waterville, Maine who disappeared, aged 19 months, on December 16, 2011. She was last seen at 8 p.m. that night in her bed by a family member, but was not there when her father checked the next morning. The case was the largest criminal investigation in Maine's history and the third largest search for a missing child in the state's history, perhaps exceeded by the intensive search for the Mott children in Baxter State Park in August 1965.
Emma Fillipoff is a Canadian woman who has been missing since November 28, 2012, last seen in front of the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, at the age of 26.
On February 25, 1957, Mary Jane Barker, an American 4-year-old girl from Bellmawr, New Jersey, went missing along with her playmate's dog. After an extensive search throughout the city, dubbed by the press as "the largest search in South Jersey", her dead body was discovered by her playmate in the closet of a vacant house near her home on March 3. The dog bounded out of the closet, seemingly unharmed.
William Tyrrell is an Australian boy who disappeared at the age of three from Kendall, New South Wales, on 12 September 2014. He had been playing at his grandmother's house with his sister, and was wearing a Spider-Man suit at the time of his disappearance. For the first seven years of the investigation, Tyrrell was believed to have been abducted. On 12 September 2016, a reward of A$1 million was offered for the recovery of Tyrrell and did not require the arrest, charging or conviction of any person or persons.
Cheryl Gene Grimmer was a three-year-old toddler who was kidnapped from Fairy Meadow Beach in Wollongong, Illawarra, New South Wales, in January 1970. She had been in the shower block at the beach when witnesses claim a man took her and ran off.
Mary Boyle was a six-year-old Irish girl who disappeared on the County Donegal-County Fermanagh border on 18 March 1977. To date, her disappearance is the longest missing child case in the Republic of Ireland. The investigation into her disappearance has been beset by allegations of political intervention and police incompetence.
The Fort Worth Missing Trio refers to an unsolved missing persons case that began on December 23, 1974, when three girls – Mary Rachel Trlica, Lisa Renee Wilson and Julie Ann Moseley – went missing while Christmas shopping at the Seminary South Shopping Center in Fort Worth, Texas, United States. The car the girls were driving was left behind in the parking lot at the mall; the girls have not been seen since.
On 8 December 2000, Irishman Trevor Deely disappeared in Dublin. He had been walking home around 4 am from his office's Christmas party, and had needed to go to the bank, where he worked, to retrieve an umbrella as well as to get certain things in order for his shift the next day. He was seen on a security camera at his bank and in front of another bank he passed as he headed home on foot; both also captured a man clad in dark clothing who has yet to be identified and is considered likely to have played a role in Deely's disappearance.
Tammy Lynn Lamondin-Gagnon was an Ojibwe woman who disappeared in Newmarket, Ontario in 1999. As of 2022, Lamondin-Gagnon's whereabouts and the circumstances of her disappearance remain unknown.
Dylan Ehler is a Canadian boy whose disappearance on May 6, 2020, became the subject of much media interest. His parents, Ashley Brown and Jason Ehler, criticized what they regarded as shortcomings in the initial police investigation. They also filed suit under provincial cyberbullying law against two administrators of a social media group that had hosted messages suggesting the parents were negligent or responsible for the death of their son.
