Ask MediaFeed: More famous people who vanished without a trace
One of our readers is asking one basic question about William Bradford Bishop, the man a reader recently wrote in to ask about: Is he even alive? His family was found dead in North Carolina back in March 1976, and Bishop himself was gone days later without a trace.
It’s the kind of question Viola Davis’s character built an entire first class around in How to Get Away with Murder, tossing “Can someone commit a crime and get away with it?” at a room of first-year law students before the show had even earned its title yet. Most true crime cases eventually answer that question with a no. A few don’t.
Bishop’s case, and six more (or less) like it, below.
Sneakers were the last thing anyone ever bought from William Bradford Bishop
A shop owner sold him a pair the day after his family turned up deceased in North Carolina, no idea at the time who he’d just rung up. That sale is the final confirmed sighting on record, and close to fifty years of silence have followed. Officials added Bishop to the Ten Most Wanted list in 2014, and to this day maintain nothing points to him being dead.
The note D.B. Cooper handed a flight attendant asked for exactly three things
$200,000. Four parachutes. No police involvement. He got all three, released the passengers, and stepped out of the rear stairs of a Boeing 727 into the dark somewhere over southwest Washington on November 24, 1971. What happened after that jump is where the case actually falls apart. Nobody has ever been able to confirm whether the fall itself killed him, and the file has stayed open in one form or another for over fifty years since.
A payphone call is the last confirmed trace of Jimmy Hoffa
He told his wife on July 30, 1975, that he’d been stood up at a scheduled meeting. That sentence is everything investigators have from him after that point. Seventy volumes of FBI paperwork followed, along with informant statements and forensic evidence lifted from his own car, and none of it ever pointed to where he actually went.
Judge Joseph Force Crater cashed two checks, had dinner, and stepped into a cab
August 6, 1930. The checks totaled $5,150, close to $55,000 today, cashed just hours before he vanished. No confirmed sighting of him exists past that cab ride, and the phrase “pulling a Crater” is older now than most people who still use it without knowing where it came from.
Radio contact near Howland Island simply ended mid-transmission
Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were attempting to close a circle around the globe on June 2, 1937 when the signal cut out. Search planes and ships launched within hours, covering a wide stretch of open Pacific over the following weeks. Nine decades of expeditions since, funded by governments and private explorers alike, have changed nothing about that original outcome.
Glenn Miller’s plane took off for Paris and never arrived
He was flying ahead of his own orchestra in December 1944 to arrange a Christmas broadcast for American troops overseas. Weather over the English Channel that day was reportedly poor. No wreckage tied to that flight has ever surfaced, and the case remains an open question attached to one of the era’s most famous musical careers.
“I think I can make it” were reportedly Michael Rockefeller’s last words
He said this to a companion before attempting to swim toward shore after his boat capsized off Dutch New Guinea in November 1961. He was 23 at the time. His family, among the wealthiest in the country, funded a search that covered the surrounding coastline for weeks and came back with nothing to show for it.
The bottom line
Seven names. Seven files still technically open. Not one closed by an arrest, a confession, or a body ever recovered. Money and federal resources bought exactly none of these families an answer, and what’s left instead is a record that simply stops mid-sentence and never picks back up.
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Related:
- Historical “discoveries” that turned out to be elaborate hoaxes
- Some of the most surprising record deals in music history
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