There was a time when people would vanish into thin air and that was
that. We had no way of knowing where they were or what the circumstances
were surrounding their stepping off into the unknown. With the advent
of technology we now have myriad and numerous security and surveillance
cameras set up all over the place, at times capturing every move we
make. With this new advancement in technology we are sometimes offered
glimpses into the last moments of people who have mysteriously
disappeared, and while this may not always do anything to solve the
enigmas surrounding these cases it is usually enough to add another
layer of creepy bizarreness to it all.
At 11PM on the evening of September 12, 1987, 50-year-old Dale
Kerstetter began his graveyard shift at the Corning Glassworks plant in
Bradford, Pennsylvania, where he had worked as a security guard and
maintenance man for 27 years. The shift started as always, and it was a
routine Dale had been through countless times before, yet when the next
guard came in to relieve him as always, Kersetter was nowhere to be
seen, even though his truck was still in out in the parking lot with all
of his personal belongings, including a carton of his beloved
cigarettes, lying untouched within. There was even a lunch pail
carefully set out on a table along with the food totally uneaten, along
with a set of car keys. A complete search of the plant turned up no sign
of him and he had just inexplicably seemingly vanished without a trace.
When authorities arrived on the scene it was found that along with
Dale Kersetter, a load of platinum pipe estimated to be worth around
$250,000 had also mysteriously gone missing, leading to the conclusion
that the missing man had simply stolen the valuable platinum and made
himself scarce. When police dogs were brought in, they traced
Kersetter’s movements to the 2nd floor and right up to the door of the
large glass furnace where the piping had been stored, a place he had no
business being as it had not been part of his security route, further
incriminating him in a possibly heist. This did not sit well with his
co-workers, who insisted that Dale was an honest, hard-worker and loving
family man who would not have stolen the platinum and then abandon his
family.
Dale Kerstetter
Things got interesting when the police turned their attention to the
plant’s surveillance camera footage, which would only serve to baffle
authorities. In the footage, an unknown masked man can be seen entering
the plant from a back entrance, and the unidentified individual is later
seen talking with Kersetter, after which the two make their way through
the plant to where the platinum was kept. At one point in the footage,
Dale looks up directly into the camera for a time, but police could not
tell if he was signaling for help or not. Nothing in the footage
indicates whether Dale was being forced along by the masked man or if
they were conspiring together. It is difficult to tell if Kersetter is
under duress or not, although the plant manager has made it clear that
he thinks the look into the camera was in fact a way to taunt them,
saying of this:
I think the fact that he did everything in front of the
cameras was once again just Dale Kerstetter saying to us, ‘Look, hey,
here I am. I’m taking your platinum and there isn’t a thing you can do
about it.’
Regardless, the masked man can then be seen leaving while carting off
a large, unwieldy bag, which could contain the platinum or possibly
even Dale’s body. Dale Kersetter was not seen on the footage to leave
the plant at any point. A lot of speculation raged at the time. Had he
been in on the robbery and working together with the masked man? Had he
been forced to hand over the platinum and then been kidnapped and
possibly killed and disposed of? No one knew for sure. Investigators
soon found that Kersetter had been in some amount of debt, to the tune
of around $30,000 or possibly $40,000, further bolstering the idea that
he may have been in on it, but once again family members and friends
dismiss this sinister possibility, pointing out what an honest, loving
person he was. Dales’s daughter, Wendy Kerstetter, has always adamantly
denied her father’s willing involvement in any sort of crime, and has
said:
If he had planned on taking off anywhere, why would he
bother packing a lunch? I mean, just little things like that. And a
whole carton of cigarettes, and he smoked all the time. I mean, he
would’ve taken his cigarettes. Also he had six kids, two grandkids. And
to do something like that and take off, and not call any of them–you
know, just take off and never talk to your kids again? I just… can’t
believe it.
Whether Dale Kersetter was the victim of a robbery or a participant,
the fact remains that he has not been seen since, he remains missing,
and all we have to go on is that piece of creepy footage. Equally creepy
is another vanishing that occurred in the year 2000, in Dublin,
Ireland. On December 8, 2000, 22-year-old Trevor Deely went out drinking
at a hotel with some co-workers from his job at the Bank of Ireland
Asset Management, after which they headed off to a nearby nightclub to
keep the party going. At around 3:30 AM, Deely headed back to his
office, where he had coffee with co-worker Karl Pender, after which he
picked up an umbrella and made his way out into the rainy night. He
would then place a call to his friend Glen Cullen, leaving a voice
message saying that he had enjoyed the party and was on his way home,
but he would never arrive and has not been seen since.
When authorities investigated the disappearance, they found some
curious hints in the CCTV footage of that night. Footage shows that when
Deely entered the building there was another unidentified man lurking
in the doorway of the building, as if taking shelter from the heavy
rain, and Deely can be seen talking briefly with him, after which the
stranger goes off to cross the road. Footage then shows Deely some time
later leaving the office and walking off, perhaps because a taxi strike
had been in effect at the time. The last known CCTV footage of Deely
shows him walking past an ATM at 4:14 AM, and there can also be seen a
man walking directly behind him carrying an umbrella. After this, Deely
proceeds to vanish off the face of the earth.
Investigators believe that the person Deely can be seen speaking with
and the one seen in the ATM footage could possibly be the very same
person, and that he may have followed the missing man, although there is
no evidence to connect him to any wrongdoing at this point. All that is
known is that this mysterious figure is seen when Deely enters the
office building, after which he crosses the road, possibly to wait for
him to leave, and then there is another unknown figure, perhaps the same
unidentified individual, seemingly following behind Deely in the ATM
footage. Investigators have spent a lot of time trying to track down who
this enigmatic stranger could be, believing him to hold a crucial piece
of the puzzle, but so far he remains unidentified, his connection to
the vanishing unclear, and Deely has not been seen since.
CCTV image of the person allegedly following Deely
In 2002 there was also the mysterious disappearance of 65-year-old
Mari Ann Fowler, which also involves some rather chilling surveillance
footage. On Christmas Eve of 2002, Fowler was seen standing outside a
strip mall near Port Allen, Louisiana, where she had stopped for some
food at a fast food joint on her way to visit her husband Jerry Fowler, a
former elections commissioner who was doing time in prison for bribery.
Soon after this sighting Fowler was reported missing, and in the
parking lot of the mall there were found various personal belongings of
the missing woman strewn about, including some fake nails that had
possibly been torn off in some sort of struggle. Her car was found to
contain her purse, including wallet and cash, as well as the food she
had bought and some wrapped Christmas presents.
When security footage was reviewed, it showed a pick-up truck
speeding away from the location at around the same time Fowler
disappeared, leaving behind skid marks, and authorities believe that
this was likely the vehicle of someone who had abducted Fowler. At one
point in the footage the unidentified man’s face can even be seen, but
there was no way to enhance the image enough for a positive
identification and he remains unidentified. Police have since speculated
that Fowler may have been the victim of the infamous Baton Rouge Serial
Killer, Derrick Todd Lee, who was suspected of being behind the murders
of at least seven women in the region, and who happened to have owned a
pick-up truck very similar to the one seen in the video footage. Lee’s
phone records at the time also showed that he had been in the Port Allen
area at around the time of the vanishing, but despite all of this there
has never been enough concrete evidence to solidly connect him to the
disappearance, and the case remains unresolved. Although it is highly
suspected that she was abducted and possibly murdered, the man and the
pick up truck have never been located, and Mary Ann Fowler has never
been found.
In another strange case, in 2006 a 19-year-old communications major
at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Jesse Ross was in Chicago to
attend a model United Nations meeting at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel
& Towers, along with 1,200 other college students from around the
country. On the final day of the 3-day conference there was a
celebratory dance starting from 10 PM at the nearby Four Corners
Sheraton, and later that evening there was a sudden United Nations
Security Council meeting, which Ross attended. He then reportedly left
the meeting at 2 AM, and although he had been drinking alcohol witnesses
say that he did not seem to be particularly intoxicated. He told the
others that he was going to take a short break and would be back in 30
minutes, but he never did return and has not been seen since.
Jesse Ross
The last known sighting of Jesse was security footage made on the
hotel’s elevator, after which he steps out into the lobby and apparently
off the face of the earth. Authorities suspected that he had left the
hotel in order to walk back to his own hotel and that somewhere along
the way he had stumbled and fallen into the nearby Chicago river,
possibly because he was inebriated. The problem with this theory is that
Jesse’s hotel was a 10-minite walk away along a well-lit street lined
with security cameras, yet there is no footage of him taking this route
and indeed no footage of him even leaving the hotel. As far as the
surveillance footage is concerned, Jesse Ross never left that hotel, and
strangely there is no footage of him anywhere on the premises after
that taken in the elevator and lobby, yet a complete search of the
grounds turned up no sign of him.
Police had divers search the Chicago River multiple times just in
case, but no body was ever found. The Police were frustrated by the
disheveled state of the crime scene, as the vanishing had happened just
before Thanksgiving, most potential evidence had been tampered with, and
most potential witnesses were gone by the time the investigation really
started. Some of the hotel staff from the time and the other students
at the conference were eventually tracked down and questioned, but this
did little to shed light on anything. There was also the fact that
everyone at the party had been drinking and no one had been really
paying attention to their surroundings, which has caused one detective
on the case to lament:
When you have teenagers, young adults, you have alcohol
and the freedom of being out of town or somewhere new — that in itself
can be trouble right there in the making.
Final security camera footage of Ross in the hotel lobby
Where did Jesse Ross go, and why didn’t he turn up on more security
camera footage around the hotel after leaving that elevator into the
lobby? Was he the victim of foul play or did he run off for reasons
unknown? No one has the slightest idea, and he has never been seen
again. Another missing person who seems to have just disappeared into
thin air and likewise persistently evaded any video camera footage to
prove where he went was another college student named Brian Shaffer. On
April 1, 2006, Shaffer, a 2nd year medical student at Ohio State
University, was at a nearby bar called the Ugly Tuna Saloona with some
friends to celebrate the coming of Spring Break.
While he was there, Shaffer is said to have downed copious amounts of
alcohol, and at some point he began talking to two young women at the
bar. His friends went to the restroom and when they came back he was
simply gone. When the bar closed they all waited outside, but Shaffer
never showed up. At the time, nothing much was thought of this. The
friends just figured that he had had too much to drink and gone home, or
that he had gone off to drink somewhere else. Yet the following day
Shaffer was still nowhere to be found, his truck was found still parked
at his nearby apartment, and all calls to his cell phone went
unanswered.
Things got truly weird when authorities examined the security camera
footage of the bar. Although in the footage Shaffer can clearly be seen
entering the bar, he is never seen to actually leave. Baffled police
went through every frame of the footage and were able to identify every
patron at the bar that night on the camera except Shaffer. Even the
emergency exit camera turned up nothing at all. It was utterly baffling
that he could manage to so thoroughly evade all of these cameras, and it
was thought that even if he had managed to somehow leave the bar
undetected surveillance cameras on the street would have certainly
picked him up, yet there was nothing. He had simply evaporated.
Brian Shaffer
The vanishing did not make any sense at all, as Shaffer had been a
young, good looking upstanding medical student with his whole future
ahead of him, and additionally he had been planning to propose to his
girlfriend at the time, who he had had plans to take a trip with to
Miami during Spring Break. Although his mother had passed away from
cancer three weeks earlier, Brian was described by friends as holding up
rather well all things considered, and certainly not unduly depressed
or suicidal in any way. In the wake of the vanishing there were myriad
strange leads that came in claiming that Shaffer was living in Sweden or
the Virgin Islands, but these led nowhere and were mostly thought to be
hoaxes. To this day know one has a clue as to what happened to Brian
Shaffer or how he could have possibly pulled off his vanishing act with
the cameras.
One of the creepiest and most bizarre of all of these cases is the
spooky disappearance of 28-year-old German tourist Lars Mittank. In July
of 2014, Lars was in Bulgaria on a month-long vacation with a group of
friends, with their main destination being a place called Golden Sands,
known for its young, hard-partying crowd from all over Europe.
Practically as soon as they arrived there was drama. At a beach party
Lars got caught up in a violent brawl with another group, which resulted
in his ear being seriously injured in the altercation. Despite this
injury, the group went ahead with their plans and partied hard for the
rest of their vacation, yet when Lars was set to return to Germany he
was told by his doctor that it was not safe to fly yet as his ear had
not healed enough to handle the pressurization of the plane cabin. Lars
decided to stay behind for a few more days while his friends headed home
without him.
On the first night of his stay alone, Lars purportedly made a
strange, panicked call to his mother, in which he ranted about how he
was being followed around by four men and that they were out to kill
him, although he gave no further details. Rather than wait the few days
as originally planned, after this harrowing call the following day he
made his way to Varna Airport, from where he intended to fly home to
Berlin, doctors orders be damned. When he arrived, he was seen by
witnesses and on CCTV cameras to walk calmly through the airport with
his luggage in tow, after which he visited an airport clinic to check
his ear.
Lars Mittank walking with his luggage shortly before his vanishing
The doctor would later claim that although Lars was rather calm at
first, he suddenly flew into an uncontrollable panic as soon as what was
described as a “construction worker” walked into the clinic. This
seemingly completely derailed Lars, who then reportedly ran off as fast
as he could, leaving all of his baggage and belongings behind in a mad
dash. The disturbing CCTV footage would show Lars sprinting off at full
speed through the airport without his luggage and out to the parking
area, and this is the last anyone has seen of him. The only potential
lead that has come forward over the years is the odd testimony of a
Bulgarian trucker, who claims that he had picked up a scared-looking,
ragged hitchhiker who he thought resembled the image in the police
posters for the missing man, but this has inevitably led nowhere. It is
thought that Lars may have been on the bad side of some nefarious
elements in Bulgaria, that he had made enemies, or even that he had
simply panicked from paranoia, somehow lost his memory, and is alive
somewhere out there confused and alone, but no one knows for sure.
Lars Mittank dashing out of the airport and off the face of the earth
What happened to these people? Where did they go and why? We will
likely be left to wonder and ponder on these questions, but this
speculation is especially put into focus by the existence of this
baffling camera footage. Here we have the last fleeting images of the
vanished, and a peek into what their final moments entailed, yet we are
left to grasp at what it all means. Technology has offered us a way to
gaze into the circumstances surrounding these unsolved mysteries, yet it
has fallen short of giving us a clear answer to the many questions we
have. All we are left with are these last images of the vanished,
tenuous glimpses into their unsettling last moments and what became of
them, which have only gone on to further fuel debate and discussion.
Ultimately, despite these images we are left perplexed, and despite our
cameras really the only ones who will ever truly know what has happened
are the vanished themselves.
Posts
It is interesting to note that Casida was last seen in Lovelock,
which is where the last gasoline purchase had been made by Nan Dixon
decades earlier. Eerily, another mysterious vanishing happened in the
same exact area in 2011. On April 13th of that year, 86-year-old World
War II veteran Patrick Carnes was driving along I-80 on his way back to
his home in Reno, Nevada after visiting family in Ohio, and along for
the ride was Lucky, his 100-pound Akita/mixed-breed dog. At
approximately 9 PM that evening, Patrick was pulled over going westbound
on I-80 near the town of Wells, Nevada, by a highway patrol officer
after failing to change lanes when he passed the officer’s parked
cruiser, which had been stopped in order to pull over a big rig truck
and trailer. It soon became apparent that Patrick had actually been
following the big rig for some reason, which he would explain to the
officer thus:
With the sheer empty remoteness of vast stretches of I-80 and the
myriad options for disposing of bodies in the bleak desert wilderness,
the highway is undeniably an attractive hunting ground for killers. This
is some of the most remote land in the United States, where one can
drive hours without seeing a single sign of civilization or another
human soul and patrols by police are infrequent. This is a desolate,
lawless wasteland where one could be stalked by a serial killer,
murdered, and disposed of without anyone ever being none the wiser or
ever even finding the corpse at all. Could serial killers or sadistic
truckers be using I-80 as a hunting ground? Definitely. Is it possible
that the cases that we have looked at here are similarly the result of
human predators and are even connected? Absolutely. However, there has
been so little evidence to any of these vanishings or deaths that there
has been very little progress made towards solving any of them or
finding any meaningful connection between them, and they remain cloaked
in shadow, their culprits still free and prowling this moonscape of a
road.
