10 Devastating Missing Child Cases That Remain Unsolved

Imagine turning away from your child for two seconds to take something from a shelf, and when you look back, they are gone. Or picture going inside your house for a minute to get a cold drink from the fridge, and when you go back outside, your toddler is missing from where you left him on the fenced-in lawn.

For too many people, this is no longer a frightening hypothetical scenario. They were going about their day, caring for their children, and either looked away for a moment or went into the house briefly when the unthinkable happened.

These real-life scenarios result in thousands of missing child cases that are nowhere near being solved and so many heartbroken parents who still cling to the last bit of hope that they might one day see their child again. However, there is sometimes more to these tragic cases than initially meets the eye.

This list details just ten of the most devastating cases that remain unsolved in 2024.

Related: 10 Missing Persons Cases Solved by YouTube Divers

10 Jeremiah Huger

On June 25, 1985, four-year-old Jeremiah Huger played with friends in a playground directly behind his grandmother’s apartment in the Bronx. His mother stood at one of the apartment windows, watching her child run around before heading to the shops with a relative. Jeremiah’s grandmother was his legal guardian, so it was assumed she would keep an eye on him in the playground. When his grandmother called Jeremiah to come inside but received no answer, she assumed he had gone to the shops with his mother.

However, the little boy’s mother returned without him a short while later, upon which she and the grandmother walked to the playground to find Jeremiah. When they asked around, the other children told them a man had called Jeremiah by his name. When Jeremiah walked towards him, the man grabbed him and walked off. Neither Jeremiah nor the man was ever seen again.

If Jeremiah is still alive today, he would be 43 years old. His mother believed at the time that an ex-boyfriend took Jeremiah, while police believed the boy may have been sold by the person who took him. Unfortunately, the case is cold, and police are no closer to discovering what happened to Jeremiah.^[1]

9 Diane Prevost

Two-year-old Diane Prevost played in the sand in Grundy Lake Provincial Park in Ontario, staying far away from the lake’s edge, while her father fished on the dock on September 17, 1966. Diane’s siblings had no problem with the water, unlike Diane, who was terrified of it. They continued splashing around in the lake.

After a while, Diane asked her father if she could go to the family’s trailer at the campsite, around 500 feet (152 meters) from the lake. Her father said he would take her but asked her to wait a few minutes so he could reel in his fishing line. When he turned back to her, Diane was gone. Her father and the rest of the family immediately began searching for her. When they could not find her after an hour of searching, the family called the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police). Authorities searched the lake, the park, and the surrounding area for over a month to no avail.

It’s been nearly 58 years since, and Diane has never been found. In 2018, a woman named Mary Belanger made local headlines when she claimed she was Diane Prevost and that she was kidnapped to replace a child who had died. DNA tests ultimately proved Belanger’s claims were not true.^[2]

8 Lucy Rebecca Meadows

On July 25, 1996, Yong Meadows helped her daughter, Lucy, climb out of the back seat of their car on the driver’s side in the Rivergate Mall parking lot in Tennessee. Yong walked to the passenger side to get a few parcels out of the car. When she turned around, her child had disappeared. Shocked, Yong alerted mall security, who immediately started searching for Lucy. They found no trace of her in the parking lot, the mall, or the surrounding area. Later, witnesses came forward, stating they saw a brown minivan in the parking lot at the time of Lucy’s disappearance. This information amounted to nothing, and the police were stumped.

Things took a horrifying turn when it was eventually discovered that Yong often left Lucy’s eleven-year-old brother at home alone and that Lucy was once found wandering the streets around the neighborhood where she stayed, alone and crying. Yong and her husband, Tom, divorced a month after Lucy disappeared. Tom was very vocal at the time about Yong’s friend, Tammy Dy, whom he believed was involved in Lucy’s disappearance.

Yong also stopped cooperating with the police and changed her story several times. First, she told the police that Lucy was out of sight for seconds. Then, she stated she was busy with the parcels for around ten minutes before looking for Lucy. Yong failed two polygraph tests and then refused to make any further statements.

Fast forward to 2004, and a witness comes out of the woodwork. The witness stated he saw Lucy at her parent’s house on the night before she disappeared, and she “looked dead.” The witness also said that the adults who were present, including Lucy’s mother, were shouting Lucy’s name and screaming for someone to bring them a Bible.

Being only twelve years old at the time, the witness did not think much of it until he was older and realized what he had seen. The witness was never named but is said to be a family member. He also passed a polygraph test. There is yet to be movement in an attempt to start a grand jury investigation. In the meantime, Lucy remains missing, and there is no progress in proving that her mother was involved in her disappearance.^[3]

7 Lisa Irwin

Lisa Renée Irwin was just over ten months old when she was taken from her Missouri home on either October 3 or 4, 2011. Lisa’s father, Jeremy, arrived home from work at 4 a.m. on October 4 and found his front door wide open. From outside, he could see that most of the lights in the house were on. He also noticed a broken window.

When Jeremy went to Lisa’s room, he found an empty crib. His fiancé and Lisa’s mother, Deborah Bradley, was asleep in their room. When he woke her up and asked about the baby, she claimed that she had checked on Lisa at 10:30 the night before, and everything was fine then. They both started searching the house and then called the police. An ensuing investigation revealed two witnesses saw a man walking down the street holding a baby in the middle of the night. However, this was the first dead end in the case.

Deborah admitted that she had been drinking that night and that she could only recall seeing her child around 6:30 p.m. on October 3 before she took her first drink. Investigators initially believed someone kidnapped Lisa. But then, cadaver dogs picked up a hit in Deborah’s bedroom near her bed on October 19. Police turned on Deborah, accusing her of having something to do with her daughter’s disappearance.

Deborah then said she did not look for her daughter immediately because she was scared of what she might discover. This strange statement motivated the police to find evidence of Deborah’s guilt, but they never did. At one point, Jeremy told the police that three cell phones were missing from the house. One of the phones showed that a 50-second call was made around midnight on the night Lisa disappeared. Both Jeremy and Deborah denied making any phone calls at that time.

Investigators found that the call was made to a Kansas City resident named Megan Wright. Megan denied answering that call, but the investigators discovered that Megan once dated a transient who eventually became a person of interest in Lisa’s case. Unfortunately, the police have yet to find this person. They now believe that if they can confirm who made the call, they will find out what happened to Lisa.

In 2012, Deborah and Jeremy informed the police that their debit card had been used on a dodgy website that offered false birth certificates. The couple’s attorney confirmed this, and it has been proven that this website exists. The case is still open, and Lisa’s parents remain hopeful that they will see their daughter again one day.^[4]

6 Tamra Keepness

Tania Murrell was six years old when she disappeared while walking home from school in Edmonton in January 1983. In July 1985, eight-year-old Nicole Morin vanished from a condominium building in Toronto. Four-year-old Michael Dunahee was last seen on a Victoria playground in March 1991.

More than 50,000 children are reported missing in Canada every year. Fortunately, most of them are found unscathed. Sadly, this is not true for Tania, Nicole, or Michael. And it is not the case for five-year-old Tamra Keepness.

Tamra was a bubbly child who loved playing Nintendo games and climbing a tree just a block away from her house in Regina. Tamra, her five siblings, and their parents, Lorena and Dean, were at home on July 5, 2004. The couple started arguing around 8:30 p.m., and Dean left the house. He ran into his friend Russell, who often babysat the six kids. The two men went to a local 7-Eleven to buy milk, and after taking it back to Dean’s house, they went to a bar.

Lorena, who was still home then, eventually put her children to bed. Tamra shared a room upstairs with her two brothers and was there when Lorena left to visit a friend. Lorena and her friend set off to buy alcohol but stopped at Lorena’s home first. Lorena told her 10-year-old daughter Summer that she would be at her friend’s house for a while but would call and give her the friend’s phone number in case she needed her. Afterward, Lorena claimed she called Summer at midnight to give her the number.

In the early hours of July 6, Raine Keepness (Lorena’s second oldest child) felt Tamra get up from the bed they shared. By 9 a.m., when Lorena’s mother, Lois, arrived at the house, Tamra was missing. Lorena and her mother searched everywhere, and when they could not find Tamra, a family member called the police around midday.

Despite receiving 2,000 tips, the police never found Tamra. Two weeks after the little girl’s disappearance, Dean was arrested for attacking and assaulting Russell the night his daughter vanished. It is alleged that Dean retaliated with violence after Russell threw a joint at him and that the fight had nothing to do with Tamra’s disappearance.

Two days later, Tamra’s siblings were removed from their home by child protection services. Lorena never regained full custody of any of her kids. She had three more children after Tamra disappeared, but they were also taken away by child welfare. Lorena died in 2023 without ever knowing what happened to Tamra. And there are no new leads in the case.^[5]

5 Adji Desir

January 10, 2009, was just another Saturday for Marie Neida as she headed to work. She left her six-year-old son Adji at his grandmother’s house in Immokalee, Florida, and set off for the retirement home where she worked as a nursing assistant. At a quarter past five that afternoon, Adji’s grandmother watched her grandchild go out the door to play outside with other children. Not even 30 minutes later, he was gone.

The grandmother and other family members searched for Adji for two hours before calling the police. Considering that Adji had a mental disability, which rendered him almost non-verbal, the police took his disappearance very seriously. They first suspected a family member had taken Adji to Haiti, where his father and other family members lived. No proof was ever found to support this theory, and none of the boy’s family members were ever charged with anything.

It is now believed that Adji either wandered away and got lost or that a stranger abducted him. Given his disability, Adji would not have been able to ask for help. He was afraid of strangers and would often hide when he felt scared. According to investigators, and considering that he disappeared from a tight-knit (and gated) community, somebody must have seen something.

In 2023, police received a tip from someone claiming to have seen Adji in Texas. This did not amount to anything, and as of this writing, Adji remains missing.^[6]

4 Nyleen Kay Marshall

June 25, 1983, was a beautiful day, and four-year-old Nyleen Kay Marshall and her family made the most of the great weather by attending a picnic at a Helena National Forest campground in Montana.

At around 4 p.m., Nyleen was playing and catching frogs with other children along a creek bank. Afterward, a few of the children told Nyleen’s parents that they saw her talking to a man in a purple jogging suit. They also said the man asked whether Nyleen wanted to play a game called “Follow the Shadow.”

The children had walked ahead while Nyleen talked to this unknown man, and when they turned around, the little girl was gone. Her family called the police immediately when they could not find her. The officers called in reinforcements, and everyone searched the entire area, including abandoned mine shafts, to no avail.

More than two years later, on November 27, 1985, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children got a call from a man claiming he had taken Nyleen. Two months after that, the Child Find of America organization received a typed letter from presumably the same man. He again claimed to have abducted Nyleen and that he was not going to return her to her parents. In the same letter, the man mentioned committing disturbing acts with the child.

He also mentioned traveling to several locations and taking Nyleen with him. These claims matched several sightings of Nyleen that were reported to the police. Within the next six months, the organization received two more letters and two phone calls. The FBI traced the calls to phone booths in Madison and Edgerton in Wisconsin. As soon as the calls were traced, they stopped.

Nyleen remains missing, and authorities still do not know the identity of the man who sent the letters and made the phone calls. Nyleen’s disappearance was featured in the original Unsolved Mysteries series in 1990. After the episode ended, a viewer contacted the broadcaster, stating he believed one of his students was Nyleen. Police followed up on this tip, and while they did not find Nyleen, they found another missing child named Monica Bonilla.

In 1991, Richard James Wilson confessed to killing Nyleen. However, Wilson suffered from mental illness, and there was no evidence linking him to the case. In 1995, Nyleen’s mother, Nancy, was murdered in Mexico. Her body was found in a hotel room. While authorities do not believe her death was linked to her daughter’s disappearance, this case also remains unsolved.^[7]

3 Lubos Bednar

On August 27, 1988, five-year-old Lubos Bednar and his older brother played in the sandpit near their residential building in Puchov, Slovakia. At around noon, the boys’ mother called them to come inside for lunch. She saw both of them as she called to them. Only her older son, Stanislav, came in and told his mother Lubos had “gone behind the building.” The boys’ father immediately went outside, but Lubos was nowhere to be found. He searched around the building and then asked several neighbors to help him look for his son.

When they found no trace of Lubos, his father reported him missing. The police wasted no time in launching a search operation. They searched throughout Puchov and scoured old tombs, cellars, and elevator shafts in their efforts to find Lubos. One witness claimed they saw Lubos enter a car, while another said they saw him alone on a train. None of these claims helped the investigation.

Then, in 2003, investigators heard about a young man named Happy Sindane, who claimed he had been kept as a slave in South Africa. He told the investigators that he remembered living with his own family as a child before being kidnapped. This gave the police hope that they may have finally found Lubos Bednar. Unfortunately, Happy Sindane was exposed as a liar. He was found dead ten years later outside of Johannesburg.

As for the real Lubos, he is still missing, and the case remains cold.^[8]

2 Inga Gehricke

On May 2, 2015, five-year-old Inga Gehricke’s family hosted a barbeque for friends in Wilhelmshof, Germany. At around 6 p.m., the little girl went into the woods with other children to help gather twigs for the barbeque and campfire. Minutes later, the kids returned without Inga. One of the children said they saw her gathering twigs but had no idea where she had gone. The children also did not see anyone else in the woods.

The police were called, and four days of intense searching ensued. Ponds were dragged and emptied, and dogs were brought in to help find Inga. On May 7, the case was turned into a criminal investigation, and the search was called off. While the case made the news nationwide, the police had no suspects, no leads, and no signs of Inga’s whereabouts. The last picture taken of Inga on that day was now being circulated on the Internet and shown on TV as investigators tried to solve the mystery of her disappearance.

Inga’s case was closed in 2019 because of a lack of leads. In 2020, police thought they had finally found a vital lead when they discovered one Christian Brueckner owned property around 90 minutes away from the campsite and had been in a minor fender bender the day before Inga disappeared. The accident happened an hour from the forest, proving he was in the area.

It is also believed that when Inga disappeared, Brueckner was working on renovating a derelict factory near the campsite. Christian Brueckner is the main suspect in the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann. Unfortunately, despite many signs pointing to him, German prosecutors have ruled out the possibility that Brueckner had anything to do with Inga’s disappearance.

Brueckner is also a convicted rapist, and it was announced in June 2024 that police had discovered an email account linking him with ‘the killing’ of Madeleine. However, there have been no further breakthroughs in Inga’s case, even after another five-day search earlier in 2024.^[9]

1 William Tyrrell

On September 11, 2014, three-year-old William Tyrrell traveled with his foster parents and five-year-old sister to visit his foster grandmother in Kendall, Australia. The next morning, after breakfast, William and his sister started a game of hide-and-seek, staying within the front and back yards of the foster grandmother’s house. Both William’s foster mother and grandmother watched the two children as they played.

His foster mother went inside to make tea but became worried when she did not hear anything from the yard for about five minutes. She had heard William trying to roar like a tiger while running towards the side of the house, but then there was only silence. Half an hour later, after William’s foster father returned home, his foster mother phoned emergency services to report William missing. The police arrived at the house nine minutes later.

William’s foster mother told police that the little boy had been wearing a Spider-Man suit when he inexplicably vanished. Hundreds of police officers, emergency service members, firefighters, and community members searched for William for several days. There were motorcycles and helicopters, and the police left no house unturned in their search. After nine days, there was no sign of William and no leads.

The police investigation included finding the drivers of two cars parked on the nearest cul-de-sac the morning William disappeared. The police also cleared William’s foster family of involvement in the child’s disappearance. They believed for seven years that William was abducted by a stranger to be sold into a pedophile ring. Additionally, repairman Bill Spedding was named as a person of interest, but it was soon revealed that investigators had wrongly targeted him.

In 2015, the police identified a pedophile ring near the Kendall area and pursued all possible leads related to this discovery. By September 2016, there was still no progress on the case, and the New South Wales Government offered a $1 million reward for any information that would lead to William’s return.

By 2018, investigators again launched a search for William in the forest and woods near his foster grandmother’s home. They also said they had identified more than 700 persons of interest and found more than 4000 pieces of evidence. Still, none of this led to a breakthrough. In 2019, an inquest started into William’s disappearance, and his foster parents were again questioned. By 2021, the inquest findings had still not been released. In November of that year, three more locations were searched in the Kendall area without success.

In April 2022, Tyrrell’s foster mother was charged with giving false information about William’s disappearance but was found not guilty in November of that year. The last real movement on William’s case came in June 2023 when police recommended that the foster mother be charged with interfering with a corpse.

Even though police now believe that William died accidentally and his foster mother covered it up by disposing of his body, they have yet to find concrete proof. In the meantime, both William’s foster parents have been convicted and handed 12-month-old good-behavior bonds for assaulting and intimidating another child. They are expected to appeal this ruling next year. (February and April 2025 respectively).^[10]