A 9-year-old girl disappeared near Dayton while walking her dog to a neighborhood park near her home 25 years ago.
A successful Ohio State University medical student vanished from a campus-area bar in April 2006 and didn’t show up two days later to board a plane for a spring break trip with his girlfriend.
A 4-year-old boy, carrying a red toy fire truck, went missing without a trace after playing with friends in a small northeast Ohio town nearly 100 years ago.
These are just some of Ohio’s missing persons cases that remain unsolved. They represent children, siblings, parents, and other loved ones whose fates remain a mystery.
All have been labeled “cold cases” because police have no new leads to investigate or the cases have been open for a year or longer.
A Dispatch investigation found that as of Oct. 31 there are at least 689 Ohioans who remain missing and unaccounted for more than one year after they first disappeared.
Those 689 cases were found through a Dispatch analysis of missing persons data from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office , which lists missing Ohioans using information pulled from the FBI’s National Crime Information Center.