Without a Trace

On Memorial Day weekend 1996, 19-year-old Cal Poly freshman Kristin Smart left a party and never made it back to her dorm. The last person seen with her had a black eye, three different stories, and a reputation that should have raised red flags long before that night. This is where it all began — the disappearance that would haunt a family, baffle investigators, and remain one of California’s most heartbreaking cold cases for over two decades. Without A Trace begins its three-part series on the Kristin Smart case.

Thirty years of tips, suspects, and dead ends. In the final episode of the Springfield Three series, we lay out every major theory investigators have pursued — from a targeted abduction to a convicted killer who said he knew where the bodies were but refused to talk. No arrests. No answers. Just an unsolved case that someone out there could still break open today.

The cars were still in the driveway. The purses were still inside. And the porch light had been shattered and swept clean. In Part 2 of the Springfield Three series, we dig into what investigators found inside that house, the persons of interest who emerged over the years, and why three decades of serious law enforcement effort has never produced a single arrest.

It was supposed to be the best night of their lives. On graduation night 1992, three women walked into a house in Springfield, Missouri — and were never seen again. No evidence. No suspects. No closure. This is where it all began.

On February 9, 2004, college student Maura Murray crashed her car on a quiet New Hampshire road — and then simply vanished. No phone calls, no sightings, no answers. Over 20 years later, her disappearance remains one of the most debated unsolved mysteries in America. What really happened that night on Route 112?

On the night of March 31st, 2006, twenty-seven year old medical student Brian Shaffer walked into a bar in Columbus, Ohio with two friends. Security cameras recorded him walking in. They never recorded him walking out. The bar had one entrance. One exit. Cameras on every door. Brian Shaffer has never been found.

In February 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers made camp on a mountain called Dead Mountain. They were never seen alive again. Their tent was cut open from the inside. Their bodies were found scattered in the snow — some barefoot, some glowing with radiation, some crushed from the inside out. No explanation has ever been proven. This is the Dyatlov Pass Incident.

In 1971, a man calling himself D.B. Cooper hijacked a plane, collected $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted into the Pacific Northwest. He was never found. Over 50 years later, the FBI’s only unsolved skyjacking remains exactly that — unsolved.