Who are some famous people whose fates are uncertain? (It’s fine if there’s a pretty good idea what happened to them [airplane crash, died in Mexican civil war, etc.] as long as there was never a body or definite final account.) A few off the top of my head:
Amelia Earhart
Ambrose Bierce
Che Guevara
Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid
Flight 19 (the five TBM Avengers lost in the Bermuda Triangle)
Any additions much appreciated.
And of course, probably the single most famous member of the category: Jimmy Hoffa
Judge Cooper
Dan Cooper
Osama bin Laden.
Annie, I believe you’re thinking of Judge Joseph Crater.
Michael Rockefeller
Agatha Christie disappeared for a bit, and Cecil covered the whole affair in a column.
Martin Bormann was never found as memory serves, though most experts think he died in Berlin during the final days of the war (though Ladislas Farago swears to have seen him in South America). Mengele seems to be pretty well accounted for.
Jimmy Hoffa
Madelyn Murray O’Hare and her son
Ritchey James from the Manic Street Preachers (band)
Lord Lucan
Was it Benny Goodman, or one of the other swing band leaders?
I think you mean Glenn Miller (whose plane went done in WWII, possibly on a ‘secret’ mission)
Raoul Wallenberg, although I assume he’s famous mostly because he disappeared; I assume there’s lots of people who endangered themselves trying to help people in the war who aren’t famous because we know what happened to them.
Did somebody already mention D.B. Cooper, also famous pretty much because he disappeared?
Weren’t their remains found? At the least somebody has been convicted in their muder.
Glenn Miller. For years the official story was that his plane was lost in the fog over the English Channel; the Straight Dope ran a column about claims that he died in a French brothel and the potential scandal was hushed up; current belief is that he was a victim of friendly fire, his plane being accidentally downed by an RAF bomber.
Does anyone here know (or care about) Bill Barilko?
Does the Lost Colony of Roanoke count?
Mozart was buried in an unmarked grave, somewhere in Vienna’s St. Mark’s Cemetery.
Did they ever find the remains or plane of Raold Amundsen, after his fatal 1928 crash?
How about that guy . . . what’s his name . . . oh yeah,
Jesus of Nazareth.
Does being Prime Minister count as being famous? The then PM of Australia, Harold Holt, disappeared while swimming at a beach in 1967. He is presumed to have drowned, though he was a good swimmer, and his body has never been found. (Theories that he was taken away by a Chinese submarine have never been confirmed).