On September 20, 2007, Tanya Ryder finished a shift at a supermarket in Maple Valley, Washington, exhausted from juggling multiple jobs with barely any sleep. Minutes from home, fatigue overcame her. Her car drifted off the road and plunged into a ravine roughly twenty feet deep. When she regained consciousness, she was hanging upside down, held in place by her seat belt and wedged against the steering wheel.

Several ribs were broken. Her left leg had gone numb. When Tanya did not come home, her husband Tom called the police. The operator essentially refused to file a missing person’s report.

Tanya was an adult and, by the operator’s reasoning, not considered at risk. Tom was effectively told his wife was a grown woman free to go wherever she pleased. He knew this was not like her. She would not vanish without a word.

He called the station again and again, repeating the entire story to each new operator until one finally agreed to file the report. Meanwhile, Tanya hung in total darkness. Her only comfort was the faint glow of her phone screen, which displayed Tom’s name every time she tried to reach him, only for the pain and her pinned position to force her to give up. She screamed his name until the battery died.

As the days passed, she drifted in and out of consciousness. At her most delirious, she hallucinated dialing 911 and hearing an operator laugh before the line went dead. The fantasy was not far removed from the dismissiveness her husband had actually faced. Even after authorities accepted that Tanya was in danger, their first move was to investigate Tom.

He agreed to a search of the home and a polygraph test, understanding that clearing himself would speed up the search. Once ruled out, investigators reviewed supermarket surveillance footage showing Tanya driving away, her last confirmed sighting. Her bank accounts showed no activity, ruling out the possibility she had walked away from her life. Finally, they traced her cell phone signal to a tower along Highway 169 in Renton, a suburb of Seattle.

Once they searched the correct stretch of road, it took twenty minutes to find her. Eight days after she had disappeared. Rescuers spotted her car wedged among the trees, cut through the roof, and airlifted her to the hospital. She had survived eight days without food or water.

Her injuries included multiple broken ribs, a shattered collarbone, a dislocated shoulder, kidney damage from crushed muscle tissue, and a badly mangled leg that came close to amputation. By her own account, she had given up hope and made peace with dying. When she woke in the hospital, Tom was beside her. She later published a memoir sharing her story in the hope that no other family would be told that a missing loved one had the right to disappear.

She survived because her husband refused to accept no for an answer and because rescuers searched the right stretch of highway in time. Teruo Nakamura was born in 1919, a member of the Amis, an indigenous tribe from Formosa, now Taiwan, then under Japanese rule. He enlisted in the Takasago Volunteer Unit of the Japanese Imperial Army in November 1943 and was stationed on Morotai Island in the Dutch East Indies. On September 15, 1944, American and Australian forces assaulted the island.

The Japanese fought fiercely but were overwhelmed. Most surviving soldiers surrendered, were captured, or died of hunger and illness. A small number retreated into the dense jungle to make a final stand. Nakamura was among them.

Two months after the assault, having lost radio contact, the Japanese army declared him dead. He was not dead. He was cut off from the outside world. For the first twelve years, Nakamura survived with a small group of fellow stragglers, living on bananas and fish.

None of them knew the war had ended in September 1945. Leaflets announcing Japan’s surrender had been dropped over the island that same year, but Nakamura and his comrades dismissed them as enemy propaganda. The aircraft they spotted overhead, which they assumed were part of an ongoing war, were actually Indonesian Air Force planes conducting routine practice flights. In 1956, after what was reportedly an attempt on his life, Nakamura left his comrades and struck out alone.

He built a hut in an open field, cultivated sweet potatoes, foraged bananas, fished, and built a makeshift abacus to occupy his mind. To avoid detection, he cooked only at night. He tracked time by observing the phases of the moon, tying a knot in a rope to mark each month and year. By his own later account, what kept him going was the hope of reuniting with the family he had left behind.

He eventually befriended an elderly local man who brought him provisions and small luxuries like tea and coffee. That arrangement lasted for years until the old man died, but not before asking his son on his deathbed to continue looking after Nakamura. Accounts differ on what happened next. Some say the old man’s son alerted authorities; others claim a pilot spotted the hut from the air.

In November 1974, the Indonesian government received a tip about a former Japanese soldier possibly still hiding on the island and launched a search. Searchers waved a Japanese flag and played the national anthem. On December 18, 1974, Nakamura, now 55, emerged from the jungle. He was unkempt and exhausted but in remarkably sound physical condition.

He was flown to Jakarta, given a clean bill of health, and returned to Taiwan, where his family had long since accepted his death. His parents had both died without ever learning he had survived. His son, an infant when Nakamura enlisted, was now an adult with four children. His wife had remarried.

The Japanese government refused to pay his full back pay, arguing that because Taiwan was no longer under Japanese rule, he was not technically a Japanese citizen. The decision sparked public outrage, especially since Hiroo Onoda, another Japanese holdout discovered in the Philippines months earlier, had received his full entitlements. Onoda was a Japanese national and an officer; Nakamura was a private and ethnically Taiwanese. After nearly thirty years of unbroken service, Nakamura received a final payout equivalent to roughly $227.

Following sustained backlash, the Taiwanese government made a separate donation worth about what Onoda had received. Nakamura bought a home near his former wife and visited frequently. He died on June 15, 1979, after a long illness. In July 1977, a six-month-old baby boy was reported missing in Honolulu, Hawaii.

His mother, Charlotte, struggling with severe untreated mental illness, had been caught trespassing. She gave police a false name, lied about her son’s name and date of birth, and invented an entirely different identity for the child. She was admitted to a psychiatric ward, and the baby was placed in an orphanage less than thirty miles from where they had lived. When Charlotte was released, she never came back for her son.

The baby, whose real name was Markx Panama Barnes, was adopted and grew up under a different name, completely unaware of how his life had begun. His half-sister Jennifer, eight years older, had been living in New Mexico with her own father when her mother and baby brother vanished within the same year. In 2001, she flew to Hawaii and pleaded with police to reopen the case. At her request, a forensic sketch artist created an age-progressed illustration of what her brother might look like as a grown man.

Ten years later, that sketch ended up in the hands of the very man it was created to find. Steven, now an adult, came across the illustration by coincidence and was stunned by the resemblance. Friends and family agreed it was uncanny. Steven refused to believe it at first.

It was his wife who pushed him to seek answers. He contacted the Honolulu Police Department, and after eight months of waiting, a DNA test confirmed his suspicion. His real name was Markx Panama Barnes. He had solved one of the longest-running missing person’s cases in American history as the missing person himself.

He reconnected with Jennifer and with his biological father, Mark, who was thrilled to meet the son he had lost decades earlier. Charlotte’s fate remains unknown to this day. Michelle Whitaker was born on August 16, 1969, into a family of seven. By all accounts, she was a happy, energetic child.

Things changed around age fifteen when her family relocated to Gastonia, North Carolina. Her teenage years turned turbulent, marked by conflict with her mother and a craving for approval that never felt satisfied. She married a Navy recruiter against her mother’s wishes shortly after high school; the marriage did not last. The family moved again, to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

As Michelle approached thirty, she was working part-time as a waitress and barely scraping by. One evening, a man named David offered her a ride home. He brutally assaulted her, leaving her face badly battered and bruised. He was arrested a year later and sentenced to eight years in prison.

The trauma sent Michelle into a downward spiral. She drifted between her parents’ home and friends’ houses, sometimes sleeping in her car, and eventually spent time behind bars following a drunk driving incident. After serving her time, Michelle vowed to turn her life around. On August 5, 2002, a heated argument with her mother, Laura, ended with Michelle storming out.

When Laura realized her daughter had not come back, she grew anxious. A man Michelle had been staying with had not seen her in days either. Because Michelle was an adult with a pattern of drifting, police initially had limited options. An official missing person’s report was filed on August 21, 2002.

Investigators found no activity in her bank accounts and no solid leads. They identified Doug Gilmore as the last person known to have seen her. He had spent the evening with her at a pool hall, then taken her on a motorcycle ride. He fully cooperated, passed a polygraph, and said he dropped her off at a truck stop the next morning at her request.

From there, the trail went cold. In August 2005, an anonymous letter arrived at the police station claiming to know the location of Michelle’s body, describing a spot near tall pine trees at the edge of a pond, roughly twenty-five miles from the truck stop. Police searched for two full days and found nothing. The letter was a hoax.

Months later, a man named Jonathan Vic was arrested for the murder of Dana Satterfield, a local salon owner. He had been a regular at the diner where Michelle once worked and was already a suspect in the disappearance of his own former fiancée, Heather Scarborough, who had also been a waitress. Despite the parallels, investigators never found evidence tying him to either disappearance. He was convicted of Satterfield’s murder in November 2006 and sentenced to life plus sixty years.

In August 2008, after six years of silence, a woman contacted police claiming Michelle Whitaker was alive and living in Oregon. She had recognized Michelle from an episode of Forensic Files and photos on the memorial web page Laura had built. Oregon State Police visited the address, and Michelle confirmed her identity without hesitation. A fingerprint test verified it.

Michelle explained that she had grown exhausted with her chaotic life and convinced herself that disappearing would lift a burden off her family. Her original plan had been to reach Myrtle Beach, but she ended up traveling through Las Vegas and California before settling in Oregon. She expressed deep remorse over the toll her disappearance had taken. She has since worked to rebuild her relationship with her mother.

Michelle McMullen, 27, was a resident of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who had relocated to Louisiana to finish her degree at Grambling State University. Balancing full-time school with raising her six-year-old son, Jallen, on her own proved a serious financial struggle. She sent Jallen to live with her parents in Harrisburg while she stayed in Louisiana. On September 28, 2008, she arrived back in Pennsylvania but dropped Jallen off at a friend’s place instead of going to her parents’ house.

Her parents did not learn she was in town until the next day. That evening, after saying good night to her son, she set off on the drive back to Louisiana. She never made the call she promised. Her car was later found abandoned in Hagerstown, Maryland, with her wallet, cell phone, and other belongings still inside.

On October 9, 2008, police announced Michelle was actually wanted on theft charges. She had stolen nearly $2,400 from a Presbyterian church where she had worked as a secretary. In December, a tip came in. A woman matching her description had been spotted working at a hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, claiming she was fleeing an abusive relationship.

When confronted, she denied knowing the person who recognized her and insisted her name was Monique Watson. By the time police arrived, she was gone. In February 2010, a rerun of a true crime documentary series aired Michelle’s story. A viewer recognized the woman in the segment as her own hairdresser.

Michelle had made her way to California, where she had told a salon owner she was a survivor of Hurricane Katrina. The salon owner had taken her in and taught her how to style hair. After being caught, Michelle claimed the $2,400 she had taken from the church were extra paychecks used to fund her education. She was charged with theft, forgery, and fraud.

By her own account, the fear of being caught had tormented her more than any prison sentence. She was sentenced to probation and a $6,000 fine. Her return had less to do with being found by loving searchers and more to do with finally running out of places to hide.