The Most Disturbing Unsolved Disappearances

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to security. Interesting in this video,
we're gonna go for two disappearances that simply don't make sense.
These are the types of stories that will make your
head hurt because they're just so strange. One was even
caught on video, but despite this, it's still a complete
mystery to this day, and the video itself is just
extremely weird. Y'll see what I mean, and as always,

(00:20):
viewer discussion is advised. Lauren Ann Ron was born in Manchester,
New Hampshire, on April third, nineteen sixty six. We don't
know much about her childhood, but her parents' divorced when

(00:41):
she was still an infant. Lauren also didn't have much
contact with her father growing up, and she and her mother, Judath,
moved to Miami, Florida when she was just four years
old because after the divorce, her mother wanted a fresh start.
Things unfortunately didn't work out like she planned, and she
and Lauren would end up moving back to Manchester in
nineteen seventy six. By four years later, in nineteen eighty,
they they have done a third floor apartment and Lauren

(01:01):
attended Junior High a few blocks away, and despite the
somewhat inconsistent home life. What was constant Throughoutlauren's life was
that she was a dreamer and a free spirit, and
she absolutely loved singing and dancing. She often even told
her closest friends that she wanted to run away and
make it big as an actress and performer. She was
also close to her mother too, but like many people
her age, unbeknownst to her mother, Lauren began drinking and

(01:22):
smoking while she was still in junior high. By the
spring of nineteen eighty, her mother, Judith, was dating a
professional tennis player, and as she often did, she planned
to accompany him to an out of town match over
the weekend on Saturday, April twenty six. Lauren usually went
with her mother when she traveled with her boyfriend, but
that weekend she was on spring break and she begged
her mother to let her stay in the apartment by herself.

(01:42):
Judith hadn't been hot about this, but eventually agreed. After all,
it was only a few weeks before Lauren's fourteenth birthday,
and she planned on getting back to Manchester early in
the morning of Sunday, April twenty seventh. It would just
be one night alone after her mother left Lauren spent
most of the day in the apartment doing chores, watching TV,
and talking to the phone with her friends. Several family
members drop by to check on her, and then that
afternoon she walked to a nearby liquor store to stock shelves.

(02:05):
Lauren didn't actually work there, but one of her friends
said she occasionally did odd jobs around the store in
exchange for free drinks, and in fact, she had a
bottle of wine and a six pack of beer when
she got back to the apartment later that afternoon. Shortly thereafter,
she called a male friend and a female friend and
asked if they want to drink, hang out, and listen
to music at the apartment. They were reluctant at first,
but they said they'd be right over when Loreen told

(02:25):
them her mother was out of town and that they'd
have to place themselves. The three friends then spent the
next several hours talking and listening to music, nothing really
out of the ordinary. At about twelve thirty am, they
heard loud voices in the hallway. They didn't know exactly
who it was, but it seems they all panicked and
thought it was her mom coming home early. It seems
that having a boy over late at night might get
them in trouble, and her male friend either panicked and

(02:46):
left out the back door or Loreen told him to leave.
Whatever the case, the boy also apparently heard the door
lock behind him. Here's where things start to get weird,
as it turns out it wasn't Judith and her boyfriend
in the hallway after all, but either way, Loreen's mail
friend was long gone by the time she realized it
was a false alarm. Judith and her boyfriend would end
up showing up about forty five minutes later, but when
they arrived something was off. When they got there, the

(03:09):
first thing they noticed was that the hallways on all
three floors were totally dark. They initially thought the power
was out, but after taking a closer look, they realized
that someone had intentionally unscrewed all of the light bulbs.
This was odd, but not necessarily alarming just yet. They
initially suspected it was some sort of prank or something,
but then when they got to the apartment, they were
surprised to find that the front door was unlocked. Judith's

(03:30):
boyfriend then immediately went to the back of the apartment
while she walked to Lauren's bedroom. At that point, she
just wanted to make sure her daughter was okay, and
maybe to admonish her for being so careless. From the doorway,
she saw a dark figure sleeping in her bed. Then,
moments later, her boyfriend walked down the hallway and told
her that the back door was open. By then, Judith
was more confused and a little annoyed about the unscrewed

(03:51):
light bulbs and the open and unlocked doors, So to
get to the bottom of it, she went into Laurren's
bedroom to ask her what was going on. At that moment,
she realized the room smelled like alcohol and that the
young woman in Lauren's bed was actually her friend. The
friend would then go on to say that she and
Lauren fell asleep together there sometime between till thirty and
one am, but for some reason, Lauren took a pillow
and blanket and went to sleep on the living room

(04:12):
couch shortly after. This was obviously even more alarming because
Lauren clearly wasn't on the couch or anywhere else in
the apartment. There weren't any signs of a struggle or
a break in, and it didn't look like anything value
had been taken, but panic slowly began to creep into Judith.
Lauren's friend said that she was wearing jeans, a blue
plaid blouse, and a light colored V neck sweater earlier
in the evening, which were still missing, but oddly, Judith

(04:32):
found her purse and her shoes next to the living
room couch. Judith then got even more panicked and began
repeatedly asking the girl what happened and who else was
there that night. The friend eventually told her about the
boy who'd been there, but other than that, she said
she was too intoxicate to remember anything. By then, Judith
was fully panicking. Her boyfriend did his best to calm
her down and suggested that she start calling friends and

(04:52):
family members to see if Lauren was with any of them.
She wasn't, so Judith and her boyfriend eventually got back
into the car and drove her on town to see
if Lauren had gone out for a walk or passed
out somewhere, but again they didn't find anything, so by
four am, Judith flagged down a police officer and told
him that Lauren was missing. Police officers began searching for
Loreen within the hour, and later that morning investigators interviewed
dozens of friends, family members, and neighbors to see if

(05:14):
anyone knew anything. Investigators quickly cleared the two friends who
were with Louren that night, but after hours and hours
of interviews, the only thing they came up with was
that she regularly told her friend she wanted to run away.
Officers also visited a number of local businesses in the
hope that someone would remember seeing Loreen, but nobody had. Then,
just when it looked like they reached a dead end,
a bus company employee told them that he sold a

(05:35):
ticket to a girl who looked a lot like Loreen
the day she disappeared. One of the company's drivers we
even claimed that she was on his bus and that
she got off at the terminal in Boston, about fifty
miles south. This was a potential game changer, but investigators
were never able to determine if the girl was Louren
or where she went after getting off the bus. In
the meantime, the next few weeks were absolutely unbearable for
Loreen's family and friends. They still hoped that the bus

(05:58):
company angle would eventually pan out, and investigator eventually showed
the driver a more recent picture of Loreen a few
weeks later, he said that the pasture in question might
have been another young one who just looked like her,
So in the absence of any evidence of foul play,
the authorities ultimately concluded that Laurien finally made good on
her promise to run away. They then assured her mother
that most runaways came back within a week or two
when they realized that life on the run wasn't as

(06:19):
exciting or glamorous as they thought it would be. This
definitely wasn't consolation to Judith, because she never believed Loaurien
ran away in the first place. They were just too
close for her to do that without at least reaching
out to let her know she was okay. And even
if Lauren had run away, her mother knew she would
have taken her clothes, her purse, and her new shoes.
As time went on, Judith knew that it was becoming
increasingly unlikely that she had ever see her daughter again.

(06:41):
But then on October one, nineteen eighty five, months after
her disappearance, she got a phone bill that included charges
for three calls made from hotels in Santa Anna and
Santa Monica, California, since she didn't know anyone in or
have any connection to California. Judith concluded that Lauren must
have made the calls, and after a little digging, she
found out that the call from Santa Ana was made
to a cruel assistance hotline for US and explored teens,

(07:03):
many of whom were runaways. Judith immediately forded this information
to the authorities, and a detective contact to the doctor
who operated the hotline shortly thereafter, but he denied knowing
anything about or having any record of the call. To
add to the strangeness, sometime around this time, Judith began
receiving mysterious phone calls, and these were extremely strange. She
got most of the calls at approximately three forty five am,

(07:24):
and this continued for years, but the caller never actually spoke.
Judith was initially sure that it was Loreen because the
call frequency increased during the holiday season and later. Lourien's
aunt also claimed that she got several calls from a
young woman who asked her to speak to her son, Michael.
Laurien's aunt said that the girl sounded a lot like
her and that she called him Mike instead of Michael,
just like she did when they were kids. Unfortunately, despite

(07:46):
all these calls, several years later, Judith would eventually need
to change her phone number, at which point the calls
obviously stops altogether, and for a time there was no
new information. Another couple years later, in nineteen eighty five,
an investigator with an organization called Wings for Children and
called the doctor who ran the same hotline charge to
Judas Bill. This time, the investigator was able to get
a bit more information, but found that he was sort

(08:07):
of evasive in his answers. The man claimed that runaways
and exploitees occasionally visited the home he shared with his wife,
and he even said that one of them may have
been from New Hampshire. It's unclear why he changed his story,
and his evasiveness was strange, but there wasn't much else
that could be really done. This prompted the investigator to
then visit the motels in s Anna and Santa Monica,
California the following year to see if she could turn

(08:28):
up anything new. She would then learn that one of
the motels had allegedly been used as a filming location
by an infamous videographer of miners known only as Doctor Z. Unfortunately,
she was never able to confirm this, and the identity
of man has never been found. That same year, back
in New Hampshire, a former childhood sweetheart of Loreens claimed
that he got a mysterious call from a young woman
who identified herself as Laurie. He wasn't actually home at

(08:51):
the time of the call, but his mother relayed the
information and he was sure it had to be laur
But after that the case just went cold. As with
many of these cases, there have been a number of
alleged sightings over the years, but none of them have
been substantive. So what we know is that Loreen disappeared
one night from her home in a short window between
her friend leaving and her mom coming home. She didn't
take any of her personal belongings that we know of.

(09:12):
She didn't have any money that we know of. All
the light bulbs in her building had been weirdly unscrewed,
and maybe most troubling, her mother received strange phone calls
for years, as well as charges from across the country
linked to things that no parent ever wants to find
out about their child. It was around seven o'clock in
the morning of January twenty first, two thousand and eight

(09:33):
when a security guard at a Taiwan finance building showed
up for work. As he entered the building, there was
a little reason for him to believe that this would
be anything but an average day for him. But it
only took a few steps inside the front door for
him to make a discovery that would turn everything upside down.
Inside one of the elevators was what looked like a
neat pile of clothing on the floor, a highly odd
site for a building that prided itself on order and cleanliness.

(09:54):
The finance building was one of the few truly modern
looking structures in the area. It was an eleven story,
blocky mom that stood kind of awkwardly over the low
rise rooftops of its surroundings. It also housed high income
families and professionals. People kept things tidy and quiet. Nobody
just left clothing the elevator, So perplexed the guard approached
the items. There was one red jacket, a smaller pink one,

(10:16):
and two pairs of shoes, both neatly placed. It was
also winter, and the idea that someone had walked out barefoot,
let alone with a child, was immediately disturbing. Still, accidents happened,
maybe someone moved out in a hurri each in the night,
and maybe they'd come back for them. That seemed like
a reasonable conclusion, but something still ate the security guard.
He then made his way to the security office and
flipped on the monitors that controlled the building's thirteen surveillance feeds,

(10:38):
and within minutes he found what he was looking for,
and what he found only further the confusion. The footage
showed a woman stepping into the elevator with a little
girl in her arms. She looked frantic, like she was
in a rush, but didn't know why. As the elevator
door was closed, she stripped off her red coat and
then knelt to remove her daughter's jacket too. Then came
her shoes, which she placed beside her. Meanwhile, the child

(10:59):
just stood there, quiet and unmoving as her mother then
stared at the elevator panel for the rest to ride.
The woman in the footage also looked agitated and confused,
as she stared so intently at the changing floor numbers
that it was like they were almost speaking to her.
When the elevator reached the eleventh floor, she picked up
the child again and stepped out. A hallway camera then
caught a brief glimpse of her turning left in a
hallway and then entering a stairwell. The guard then checked

(11:21):
the other camera feeds to see where the woman went next,
but that's when his blood slowly began to run cold.
There was no footage of the woman leaving the building
with her daughter, and the only ways out of the
building were well covered by the camera system. There was
also no footage of her coming back down, no footage
of her on any other floor, and nothing of her leaving.
All that was left were the abandoned jackets and shoes
in the elevator. When officers from the local police department

(11:42):
arrived at the scene, the security guard wasted no time
to ushering them to the footage he had already qued
up the clip from January twentieth. Just before nine pm,
the elevator's interior camera brought it a clear view of
the woman in the video, later identified as a thirty
seven year old named Leo. She once again appeared in
the frame, carrying her four year old daughter in her arms,
and her expression was impossible not to notice. She seemed

(12:03):
tense and focused, and there was a hurriedness to her steps,
as if she were running late for something, She didn't
pause to check her surrounding. She just moved straight to
the elevator, like she knew exactly where she was going.
The elevator door slid shut, and then the behavior grew
stranger as she removed the jackets and shoes and set
them on the floor. When she was done, Leo wore
only a white tank top and black vest, and she
was barefoot, despite the winter cold. There was also no

(12:25):
one else in the elevator with the mother and daughter,
and no indication of why she was behaving this way.
The child was again silent and passive, either unbothered or
too young to understand what was happening. Then, moments later,
the pair got off on the eleventh floor, turned down
the hallway, and entered the stairwell. Officers watched the footage
again and again. It was deeply unsettling, not because of
what they saw, but because of what they didn't, And

(12:45):
just like the security guard, police found no trace of
Leo or the child with her anywhere else in the building.
It was like they disappeared into thin air. Within hours,
officers were coming every floor and questioning residents. The building's
architecture also made the situation even more maddening. It had
a single monitored entrance and exit, and the elevator doors
were locked down with key cart access between nine p

(13:05):
m and seven a m, a cutoff Leo had barely made.
Every floor also had its own hallway cameras, and every
stairwell had defined access. There were also no back doors
or easy escape routes. This wasn't the type of place
you could just slip out unnoticed, and yet there was
no trace of Leo and her daughter. Officers then started
their search at the top of the eleventh floor, the
last place the two were seen. All of the four

(13:27):
possible units on the floor, only two were occupied, one
by a Buddhist temple and another by a human resources agency.
Police also questioned residents on other floors, but no one
had seen or heard anything. There were no signs of
any disturbance, No one heard unfamiliar sounds the night before,
and there was nothing to indicate that a woman and
her child had wandered through in the middle of the night.
The stairwell also led upwards the roof and downwards to

(13:48):
the other ten floors. Officers were going to sweep every level,
checking utility closets, maintenance shaft, emergency stairwells, anywhere person could
potentially hide, fit or fall. They looked in ventilation ducks
and the door spaces, above ceiling panels and under floorboards.
They then expanded their search their surrounding blocks, hoping against
hope that Leo had some owgotten out of the building undetected,

(14:09):
but there was no indication of that happening. Her motorcycle
was also found to still be parked outside, exactly where
she left it and untouched. The only confirmed sighting was
from a teenage girl at the front of the building
who saw Leo and the lobby and approached the elevator
just before nine pm. Neither the girl nor Leo exchanged
any words during the brief encounter. There was also no
overnight security guard on duty there, so next after tracking

(14:31):
down Leo's identity, please questioned her friends and family members,
and what stood up most of them was that no
one could come up with the reason why Leo would
have been at the Finance building at all. She didn't
have friends or family who lived in the building, not
even a passing acquaintance that anyone knew of. By the
end of just that first date, the case had slipped
from strange to surreal, and with nowhere else to turn,
please started looking to Leo herself. To those who knew her,

(14:54):
Leo wasn't the kind of person who would just vanished.
She was a mother of four and a woman whose
life revolved around her children. She came from modest beginnings
in a rural part of the country, and she had
been beautiful in her youth, so much so that she
tracted many admirers. But her mother arranged a marriage for
her instead, pairing her with a well off local man
who owned land and had enough money to provide a
stable life, at least on paper anyway. After marrying, Leo

(15:15):
settled into a three story home and took on the
quiet life as a stay at home mother, as the
couple had three children rather quickly. The man Leo was
arranged to be married to, however, wasn't some wealthy prince
chrumming that saved her from a life of poverty. He
was instead allegedly violent and prompt abouts of heavy drinking
and domestic rage. Her husband apparently made life at home
of minefield, and eventually Leo had enough and divorced him.

(15:37):
This was an act that in a conservative community like hers,
was met with raised eyebrows and a lot of gossip.
The divorce wasn't common there, and it was an act
that was looked down upon and harshly judged, but Leo
couldn't take any more of her husband's outrageous and violent tendencies.
Time passed afterward as the couple started their new lives apart,
but her husband remained in the picture, hoping to earn
Leo back. He swore he was a changed man, that

(15:57):
he never drank again, and that he'd be a better husband,
and so she gave him another chance. The couple remarried
and had another daughter soon after, but it quickly became
apparent that nothing had changed with Leo's husband. By two
thousand and eight, she was, for all intents and purposes,
at a single parent, raising four children by herself, while
her husband drifted in and out of drinking benches. He
was rarely home and often at at bars. The household

(16:18):
income was unreliable to because it was drinking, and the
debts were starting to stack up. The weight of all
of this was starting to show too, and friends and
family noticed that Leo seemed off. In the days before
her disappearance, not just like she was tired and stressed,
but more like unstable, like something inside her head had
become unmoored. She wasn't sleeping well, and her moods shifted unpredictably.
The night she vanished, she and her husband had another

(16:39):
one of their loud arguments of hers out of controlled
drinking habits. Afterwards, she told her eldest daughter and her
mother that she was going to visit a friend for
a few days. She didn't say who she was going
to visit, just that she need to go. She didn't
take her idea while at her cell phone, She just
grabbed her youngest daughter and left. In the absence of evidence,
speculation flooded in. With no son of Leo or her
daughter anywhere in the building or outside of it, the

(17:01):
police were left trying to build a narrative out of fragments.
One of the earliest theories suggests that perhaps Leo, mentally
fragile and overwhelmed, had taken her daughter to the rooftop
with the intention of ending things. Police quickly determined that
this line of thought was hard to support, though the
rooftop was thoroughly searched, and if Leo had jumped with
her daughter. Someone would have found them on the ground,
but there was also no way off the roof that
didn't lead straight back through the cameras. Another theory floated

(17:24):
the idea that she had a breakdown and tried to
discard her identity, hence leaving her id phone and wall behind. This, however,
raised another question. If she did want to disappear, why
bring her youngest daughter. This is where the whispers of
a secret lover start to grow louder. Maybe Leo had
been seeing someone in the building. After all, she did
tell her eldest daughter and mother she was off to
stay with an unspecified friend for a few days. Maybe

(17:46):
that friend lived in the finance building. But that theory
didn't end up holding much water either. The building's longtime
security guard had never seen Leo before, and there was
no one in the building who admitted knowing her. Friends
of Leo also pushed back on the secret lover theory.
Since her hus was always either at work or at bars,
she was stuck at home with the children, Leo rarely
had time to even leave the house, let alone begin
and maintain some kind of secret affair. The most chilling theory, perhaps, though,

(18:10):
was the simplest that something happened to Leo inside that building,
something no one saw or heard, and something no one
has found any trace of to this day. Could she
have encountered someone in that stairwoid that took her and
her daughter, But again, there's nothing on the security footage
to support this. By twenty thirteen, the story becomes something
of a local legend. That year, local police decided to

(18:30):
revisit the case in earnest. Maybe they'd miss something in
the initial searches of the building in two thousand and eight,
or maybe new eyes or newer technology could uncover something
the original investigation didn't. The Finance building was once again
searched from top to bottom. Officers re examined the unoccupied
units on the eleventh floor and questioned the residents again,
some of whom had moved in long after the disappearance,
but nothing changed. In the end, the reinvestigation turned up

(18:54):
no fresh evidence, no new leads, and no potential suspects.
If anyone in the building knew something, they weren't taught,
if there was a secret path or a flaw on
the surveillance coverage, it evaded not just one thorough search,
but two five years apart. Almost two decades have passed
since Leo and her daughter stepped into that elever and vanished,
and all that remains is a handful of unsettling images

(19:15):
burned into the memories of those who have watched the footage.
In a building filled with security cameras, surrounded by people,
and designed to be secure, a mother and her child
simply disappeared.