"People who know nada about aviation history still know who Amelia Earhart is. People who know squat about American labor unions still know who Jimmy Hoffa is. People know them - the pioneering flier and the Teamsters union president - because both of them vanished dramatically. Both were famous in life, and now enduringly so in the mystery of their disappearing."
"Now we have the vanishing of Nancy Guthrie, the octogenarian mother of a TV news personality, evidently carried off from her Arizona home into ... a void. No trace, no proof of life, and all the while, the nation is informed of every twist of what mostly is not happening. It turns out there are several kinds of "disappeared": There are people who choose to disappear."
Disappearances produce a unique mystery because they leave no definitive 'after' or finale, unlike deaths that show visible before-and-after. Famous unresolved vanishings such as Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa remain culturally prominent for their enduring lack of closure. The recent disappearance of Nancy Guthrie exemplifies a vanishing with no trace and intense national attention focused on absence. Disappearances fall into categories: those who choose to vanish and those who are taken. The American frontier tradition enabled reinvention, but modern technology now makes deliberate erasure of identity much harder. People who fake deaths often get caught, as shown by a Newport Beach doctor later apprehended.
Read at Los Angeles Times
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