Ten years have passed since the disappearance of Indiana University Second-Year Lauren Spierer on June 3, 2021.
Spierer, who was 20 years old, disappeared during a night out in Bloomington in 2011 without a trace before morning.
Heavily intoxicated and presumed to be under the influence of drugs, details of the case have been corroborated and contested by authorities, friends, and Spierer’s own family.
In the past decade, nobody has been named a suspect, and her parents are still not ready to accept the possibility that she may have died that very night.
What Occurred 10 Years Ago?
Spierer was observed drinking at Kilroy’s Sports Bar with friends based on security camera footage and eyewitness accounts.
Her boyfriend Jesse Wolff was not with her and reported her missing the following day.
The two had been exchanging text messages before he called it a night, and Spierer was said to be very intoxicated.
Spierer, who had a complicated history with drugs, had been arrested for public intoxication about nine months before her disappearance.
Police found a small amount of cocaine in her room after the fact.
At around 2:30 am, she departed from the bar with her friend Corey Rossman, leaving her shoes and phone behind.
Rossman escorted her to her apartment complex. A passerby, Zach Oakes, noticed Spierer was inebriated and asked if she was okay.
Rossman got into a confrontation with four male students in the hallway of the building’s fifth floor.
At approximately 3 am, Spierer was captured on security footage heading toward an alley behind the building, in the direction of an empty lot. Her purse and keys were later found on that route.
She and Rossman reached Rossman’s apartment, where his roommate Michael Beth put a very drunk Rossman to bed and tried to persuade Spierer to sleep.
When questioned, he claimed Spierer wanted to return to her apartment.
Thirty minutes later, Beth called Jay Rosenbaum (a member of Spierer’s inner IU circle who she met at the same camp and Wolff had first interacted) and asked him to take care of Spierer.
While they waited, she tried to convince Beth to drink with her back at her place. Beth alleges that Spierer made two calls that went unanswered, and she left no messages.
Lauren Spierer was last seen walking barefoot in black leggings and a white t-shirt. She had planned to walk back to her apartment but vanished on the way.
Several hours later, Wolff sent Spierer a text and received a reply from an employee from the bar she had left her phone at. He proceeded to report her missing that morning.
How Was The Case Managed?
After reviewing hours of all available security footage and thoroughly questioning Rossman, Beth, and Rosenbaum, the Bloomington police department turned to the public.
In August, they conducted a nine-day search of the Sycamore Ridge Landfill in Pimento for any clues that may tie into the case, but they yielded no results.
Four years later, investigators hoped to connect the case to the murder of another Indiana University student, Hannah Wilson.
Wilson also disappeared after visiting Kilroy’s bar and was last seen getting in a taxi until her body was discovered in Brown County.
Bloomington local Daniel Messel was arrested after his phone was discovered near her body.
Private investigators state that although the crimes were similar, the circumstances were coincidental, and Messel had no link to Spierer’s disappearance at the time.
A second promising lead emerged in 2016 when Bloomington PD officers and federal agents searched Justin Wagers’ Martinsville property with the assistance of cadaver dogs.
Anthropologists were hired to sift through sections for the dogs to sniff; however, this too proved to be a dead end.
As of 2021, no suspects have been named, and nobody has been directly blamed for the disappearance.
10 Years On, Hope Is Not Lost
Spierer’s mother, Charlene, told ABC News in 2020: “I really just would like to hear, ‘This is where you can find your daughter’ […] it’s the not knowing what happened to her, where she might be… it’s unbearable.”
In a report released last year, the total number of missing person cases in the United States was fewer than in 2019, with the number being 543,018, the lowest since 1990.
209,375 females under the age of 21 were reported missing, with the number of reports of those over 21 being nearly 60,000.
The Bloomington police have repeatedly emphasized that this is still an active case and has kept a phone line open for anyone willing to report suspicious activity related to the disappearance.
Police have stated that they’ve received over 36,000 tips since 2011, and 1100 of those were considered to be worth investigating.
Bloomington PD has executed a minimum of 10 search warrants and received 800 tips in the past four years alone, 100 of which were followed up.
Spierer’s parents have ensured her name stays in the news, and a Twitter account has been spreading the word since 2011.
The account @NewsonLaurenS had been kept anonymous until now. The woman behind the account, Kristin Goetterman, has spent the last ten years raising awareness and gathering information about the case. She said in regards to the account: “At its greatest, it grew to 25,000. Today, 10 years later, it’s a little over 19,000,”
The Twitter account has steadily been grabbing attention across the country, “We got folks like Kim Kardashian and Ryan Seacrest and the major news outlets to retweet that information, and that was critical to the story. It spread like wildfire because of the interest of Lauren.” Goetterman said.
With the recent news that influencer Gabby Petito had disappeared and later that her body had been found making headlines across the globe, interest in disappearances such as Spierer’s has increased tenfold.
Interest in true crime cases online has rekindled an interest in Lauren Spierer’s unsolved case.
