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5 Unsolved Cases of Stranger Abduction Where the Child is Still Missing

MARK HIMEBAUGH - 25 Nov 1991 from Del Haven, NJ

11-year-old Mark was last seen by his mother at around 4.00PM when she left to go run an errand.

Mark was possibly seen with a young girl near a local park about 20 minutes prior. The girl, who had dishwater blonde hair and would have been around ten years old in 1991, is still unidentified. An unconfirmed sighting later placed Mark with two unidentified men.

Authorities later found one of his shoes and some footprints at Sunray Beach, at a location ~75 yards from his home.

In 1993, a male prostitute approached the police, claiming that man named Thomas Butcavage had shown him a video of him raping a young, redheaded boy who looked like Mark. The boy was bound and gagged. When he asked Butcavage if the boy in the video was Mark, Butcavage allegedly said yes and that he had planted Mark’s shoe at the beach to throw off the police. He strongly resembles the sketch made of one of the two men allegedly seen talking to Mark. Butcavage has since been convicted of several drug offenses and the rapes of multiple male children. He has never been charged in Mark’s case, but in mid-2015, authorities made a public appeal for anyone who knew Butcavage in the 80s and 90s to contact them.

Mark’s disappearance remains unsolved. Authorities believe the girl he was talking to that day may have important information about Mark’s presumed abduction and would like to identify her.

MARY LOZANO - 13 Feb 1969 from Venice, CA

Mary was a 4-year-old girl living in Venice, CA at the time of her disappearance. She was last seen in her bedroom that evening at around 9.30PM.

When her parents woke up the next morning, she was nowhere to be found. A neighbor reported seeing a man standing in front of the Lozanos’ door at around 3 AM… and that’s pretty much all we know about her disappearance. There were never any suspects and there is little information about her case, but police do believe she was abducted that night.

JONELLE MATTHEWS - 20 Dec 1984 from Greely, CO

12-year-old Jonelle Matthews’s last point of contact was at 8.30PM on December 20th, 1984, when she took a phone message from one of her father’s friends. She was home alone. When her father arrived at 9.30PM, Jonelle was gone.

Authorities believe that Jonelle was sexually assaulted and kidnapped from her home. Her shoes and stockings were strewn on the floor, and a set of unidentified footprints were found in the garage and backyard. It’s possible that the abductor was already in the house when Joelle arrived, but this has never been proven.

Joelle has never been seen or heard from again. She is presumed dead and her adoptive parents held a memorial service ten years after her disappearance

JOSHUA SIERRA-GARCIA - 12 Aug 2003 from Mexico City, Mexico

1-year-old Joshua was being babysat by a teenaged cousin when he was abducted on 12 Aug 2003.

When his came returned home, they found that the cousin who had been babysitting him had been strangled and Joshua was missing.

The family later received a ransom demand that came out to about 10,000 US dollars. The money was paid, but Joshua was never returned to his family and he has never been seen again. His case is being investigated by both Mexican police and the FBI.

TRICIA KELLETT - 7 May 1982 from Chicago, IL

In this case, witnesses actually saw the abduction happen. 8-year-old Tricia was last seen being pulled into a 1979 Pontiac or Dodge vehicle by an unidentified man she was seen talking to shortly before the kidnapping. She has never been seen again.

The driver of the vehicle has never been identified, and apparently, there were never any suspects. The car is described as a blue, 4-door Pontiac or Dodge with a damaged passenger door and a license plate that possible started with “QR”. The man she was seen speaking with prior to her disappearance is described as a white male in his early 30s, 6’0 to 6’3 in height, with brown hair and a mustache.

Her family didn’t realize she was missing until about 4PM that afternoon. Her father publicly pledged his support for the 1984 Missing Children’s Assistance Act, which would have established a toll-free phone number for people giving information on missing children, helped disseminate information more quickly, and allowed grants to be made for programs that would help recover missing children and educate parents/communities on prevention, among other things. The bill never passed. Tricia’s case remains unsolved.

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It’s worth mentioning that stranger abduction, although it tends to get a ton of media coverage when it happens, is an extremely rare occurrence. The most recent publication of NISMART, the US Department of Justice’s decennial study on missing and abducted children, shows that there are only ~100 stereotypical stranger abductions per year in the US. A child is many times more likely to be victimized by someone s/he knows.

1. ONE OF THE FIRST ‘MILK-CARTON KIDS’

It was a fateful May morning in 1979 when six-year-old Etan Patz’s parents finally felt safe letting him walk to the bus stop alone in Manhattan. They’d given him a dollar for lunch, and he said he wanted to buy a soda with it. Wearing an Eastern Airlines cap and clutching his dollar, he skipped off toward the bus stop, never to be seen again.

Etan’s face was one of the very first—if not the first—to be used on milk cartons in the early 1980s in a nationwide campaign to help locate missing children.

In 2012, 53-year-old Pedro Hernandez told police that he had lured little Etan into his bodega with the promise of a free soda, whereupon he dragged him down to the basement, choked him to death, wrapped the boy’s cadaver in a body bag, stuffed it in a banana box, and dumped him in the trash. Hernandez later recanted his confession, and a trial this past May ended in a hung jury.

“Etan is larger than his very little important life,” Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon had said during the trial. “He represents a moment in this city where there was a loss of innocence.”