On the night of February 7, 1996, a nurse at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan was watching the television news when a photograph of a missing teenage girl appeared on the screen. The girl was Cheryl Ann Barnes, seventeen years old, last seen a month earlier in Bushnell, Florida. The nurse recognized her immediately. She was treating that very girl at the hospital, a nameless patient the staff had been calling Jane Doe.

The girl had been found in the city, sitting in a snowdrift, wearing a bulletproof vest. She had been unconscious when she arrived, and when she finally came to, she was disoriented and unable to say who she was or how she had gotten to New York. The hospital staff had no name for her until the news report aired. Within days, authorities confirmed that the Jane Doe in the psychiatric ward was the missing Florida teenager, and Cheryl was returned to her family.

But she still could not remember what had happened to her, and for the rest of her life, some of the answers would remain out of reach. Three of the five weeks she was missing had been spent in the hospital, but what she did during the other two was never established. Doctors described her condition as a form of amnesia triggered by psychological trauma. Cheryl had changed.

The girl who had once been messy, carefree, and outgoing had become quieter, neater, and reserved. She remembered how to do certain mathematical equations and could recall some of her favorite hymns, but she could not remember how she had ended up in New York dressed in a bulletproof vest. Her disappearance had begun on the morning of January 3, 1996, when she left home on her way to school and never arrived. When she failed to return that afternoon, her grandparents grew alarmed, noting that it was completely out of character.

Authorities launched a search and soon discovered that Cheryl had withdrawn one hundred dollars from her bank account at an ATM, a detail that led investigators to suspect someone had taken her. Four days after she vanished, she turned up at a church in Pennsylvania and gave the pastor a false name. Weeks passed with no further progress, and authorities asked the public for help through the television program America’s Most Wanted. In early February, investigators gathered their first solid clue.

New York City police had discovered her car, a 1988 Mazda, abandoned in Manhattan, where it had been towed after being parked illegally near the Empire State Building. Days went by before the link was made between the Mazda and the missing teenager. Then the news reports aired, and the nurse recognized her face. In the months that followed, allegations surfaced that Cheryl had been sexually abused by her father, though it was never known whether there was any truth to them.

Her family dismissed the idea that she had run away because of abuse at home. But her uncle, Bill Barnes Sr. , offered a possible explanation for her unusual behavior: just one month before she vanished, Cheryl’s father had married one of her best friends, a girl who was only eighteen at the time. He thought his granddaughter might have been a little embarrassed by it all.

Cheryl herself reportedly did not talk about her disappearance very much and never discussed the abuse allegations. Authorities concluded that she had run away from home, but her family always maintained they believed she had been taken by someone. Her father, struggling under the weight of bad publicity, eventually moved to Chicago with his young wife. Many questions in Cheryl’s case remain unanswered to this day.

Richard Hoagland had seemed to have everything a man could want. Linda Eisler remembered her husband as spontaneous, successful, and fun to be with. The couple married in 1982 and built a good life together: a steady income, a large house in Indiana, two children, and regular trips to exciting, exotic locations. But while Linda felt things had never been better, her husband clearly saw things differently, as his disappearance in 1993 would make plain.

On February 10 of that year, Richard called Linda at work and told her he was so unwell that he needed to go to the emergency room. She told him to wait and she would go with him, but he said he could not. In the hours that followed, Linda phoned around the local hospitals looking for her husband, but he had not been admitted to any of them. When she got home, she found nothing amiss.

His toothbrush, his identification, and his clothes were all still there. He had not even taken a jacket despite the cold weather. Richard had left behind not only his wife but their two young sons, nine-year-old Matthew and six-year-old Douglas. That summer, both boys received birthday cards in the mail, each with fifty dollars inside.

Doug’s card read: “Maybe sometime soon we will get to see each other. I bet I won’t even know. It has been so long. Mind your mother.

Bye, Dad. ” But the cards did not come regularly. Matthew recalled his initial reaction: “Initially, you think, okay, this won’t last long. He’ll be back.

” For decades, the family never saw Richard again. Shortly after he vanished, authorities discovered his car abandoned at Indianapolis International Airport, but no record existed of a Richard Hoagland on any flight, and his passport was still at the family home. With Richard gone, the family was left to struggle. They lost their cars and their house, and Linda’s mother was forced to step in and help financially.

Linda sold what her husband had left behind, including his designer suits. She later described her heartbreak plainly: “He devastated us. He left us with nothing, absolutely nothing. I was very broken.

” She also asked the question that would haunt her for years: “How do you walk away from your own children? How do you turn your back? ”

In 2003, ten years after his family last saw him, Richard Hoagland was declared dead. Linda moved on and eventually remarried.

For twenty-three years, the whereabouts of her former husband remained unknown. It was not until the summer of 2016 that he was finally found, and the discovery came through the most unlikely of sources. A woman named Cynthia Bujnak was working on a genealogy project when she noticed a flurry of activity under the name of her dead brother, Terry Symansky, a fisherman who had died in 1991 during a boating accident. Records stated that Terry had gotten married two years after his death, and that he had a child.

Cynthia tipped off the police, who soon uncovered the real identity of the man posing as Terry Symansky. Richard Hoagland was living in the small town of Zephyrhills, Florida. He had remarried, purchased property and a plane, earned his pilot’s license, and become a father again, all under Terry’s stolen identity. Investigators determined that after fleeing Indiana, Richard had traveled to Florida, where he rented a room from Terry’s father.

During his stay, he listened to the older man tell stories about his deceased son, and at some point he discovered the death certificate and stole it. With it, he applied for a birth certificate, obtained a driver’s license, and built an entire new life as Terry Symansky. Authorities also learned that Richard’s new wife had questioned him about his past, but he always came up with a reason or an explanation. When investigators approached him, he initially insisted he was Terry Symansky.

It was only when they produced Terry’s death certificate that he finally confessed. His wife and child were shocked to learn that he was not who he had always claimed to be. Richard told investigators he had disappeared because of family issues with his wife and children. At sixty-three, Richard was arrested on several charges, including identity fraud.

He pleaded not guilty at first, but eventually changed his plea to guilty. He served almost two years in federal prison and returned to Indiana upon his release. In 2018, he was ordered to pay nearly two million dollars in back child support, though Linda and her children did not believe they would ever see a penny of it. His oldest son, Matthew, offered his own theory about what had happened to his father: “I believe he got caught up with the wrong people, got carried away, and over his head in something.

” He added that he still wore a ring of his father’s every day. “But I think I wear it to remind me of a bad example. ”

Craig Williamson was forty-nine years old in 1993, and by every appearance, he had it all. Three years earlier, he had married Christine Reinhardt at the picturesque location of Lake Tahoe.

Theirs had been a whirlwind romance, and the two were said to be deeply in love. Together they dreamed of starting a fish farming business. After the wedding, the couple purchased a farm in Wisconsin, Christine’s home state, and began raising tilapia, which they hoped to sell all across the country. Then, in August of that year, Christine’s life was turned upside down.

Craig had set off on August 28 for Colorado Springs to visit a fishery with whom the couple had recently begun doing business. Christine last heard from him on the evening of August 30, around nine o’clock, when they spoke by phone while he was in a motel. During the call, he asked her to phone again at five-thirty the next morning so he could get an early start. When she did, her calls went unanswered.

Christine contacted the hotel and asked them to check on him; they found his room empty. She reached out to investigators, who told her she would have to wait twenty-four hours before filing a missing person’s report. Later that same day, Craig’s credit cards turned up in El Paso, Texas, more than six hundred miles south of Colorado Springs. Another two weeks passed before the rental car he had been using was located in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border.

Investigators examined the scene but determined there were no signs of foul play. The car appeared to have been simply abandoned. Christine, however, wanted answers, and the police had given her very little to go on. She decided to investigate on her own.

Arriving in Colorado Springs on September 14, just a few weeks after she last heard from her husband, she found his possessions still left behind at the motel. His room, like the rental car, contained no evidence that anything bad had occurred. Still, Christine developed a theory: Craig had been attacked on the day of his disappearance, leaving him injured and disoriented, and as a result, he had wandered off. A potential sighting came to light after the story was broadcast on television stations in both Wisconsin and Colorado.

A few days after the case first aired, a woman named Judy Inman came forward. She claimed that two weeks after Craig was last heard from, she had been on a train traveling from her home state of Montana to Washington when she saw a disheveled man on board who resembled him. The man talked about fish tanks and fish from outside the United States. As a nurse, she was sure he had suffered some kind of head injury.

This sighting brought Christine a measure of relief. She firmly believed Judy Inman had seen Craig, especially since the man had been talking about fish. She also theorized that he had headed for Washington because that was where the couple had first met. Christine left Colorado for Washington to try to find him.

She even took the same Montana-to-Washington train, hoping she might come across the man the witness had seen and determine once and for all whether it was really Craig. By late December, she was still searching. On Boxing Day, she showed Judy Inman photographs of the train stations along the route, and Judy determined that the man had gotten off at Wishram, Washington. Christine then theorized that her husband had mistaken Wishram for Washougal, a town where he had lived during the 1980s.

Craig’s son from a previous relationship traveled to Wishram and put up missing person posters, but no leads came from it. In the years that followed, Christine held onto her belief that Craig had been injured and that she would see him again. Investigators, however, had several different theories. Some suspected he had been killed and that his car had been abandoned in Mexico by the perpetrator.

Others believed Craig had left on purpose, abandoning his old life to start over. They found it odd that his credit cards had been left out the way they were. More interesting was the discovery of beard trimmings in the rental vehicle. Close examination revealed the hair had been cut with scissors, suggesting Craig may have been changing his appearance.

There were other telling details: he was known to have had twenty-five thousand dollars on him at the time of his disappearance, and the vehicle he had been driving contained none of the tanks, fish food, or coolers he would have needed to transport fish. Authorities believed he had fled to escape the responsibilities of running the business. Both he and Christine had invested all their money into the fish farm and had borrowed a further four hundred thousand dollars on top of that. Craig’s case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries in May 1994.

Just over a year later, in July 1995, a man calling himself Ron watched a re-airing of the episode and recognized himself in the images on screen. He realized he was the missing man. At the time of his reappearance, Craig was living in Key West, Florida. He reached out to authorities and explained that he had little recollection of his time in Colorado Springs, except that he had been mugged and attacked.

He believed he had suffered amnesia, a condition made worse by the fact that he had suffered a concussion several months before his disappearance. He said he believed his name was Ron because he had woken up in a hospital where he had been given that name. After he was discharged, he had wandered around the country before settling in Key West, where he began working as a diver. He had no recollection of his wife, his ex-wife, or any of his family members.

He reunited with Christine a few days after he was located, but the couple ultimately divorced, though they remained friends. A trip to Colorado Springs failed to restore any of Craig’s memories. After the split, Craig moved to California, where he had friends, while Christine went to Wyoming to start over.

Despite his claims, some investigators still suspected that the forty-nine-year-old had simply fled to escape his new life.