In 1953, twenty-four-year-old Donald Gordon Buckley walked away from his life in Sydney, Australia. He was a married laborer with three children, including a baby daughter, and he was reportedly having trouble with his wife. After deserting his family, Donald made several child support payments, likely under a court order, but they soon stopped, and he dropped off the map for decades. Nothing more was thought of the case until 2023, when Donald’s granddaughter went to the police wanting to know what had happened to him.
New South Wales police began appealing for information, describing the missing father of three as a thin man, five foot seven, with brown hair and brown eyes. A police spokesperson said investigators believed one of three things had occurred: Donald had taken his own life, changed his identity to avoid paying child support, or met with foul play. The spokesperson noted that while police typically did not investigate cases a hundred years old or older, only seventy years had passed, so there was still time to resolve this one. Donald’s granddaughter, Donna Truscott, had decided to approach the police after her gravely ill father asked her to find out what happened to Donald.
Donna’s father died shortly afterward; he had been four years old when his father left. Before going to the police, Donna had done her own investigating. While scouring court archives, she discovered her grandmother’s divorce petition, which revealed that Donald was frequently violent. She also found that her great-grandfather, Donald’s own father, had taken his life in 1953, the same year Donald vanished.
In the latter half of 2023, investigators finally traced Donald, discovering that he had changed his identity several times over the years. He had died on January 16, 1980, at the age of forty-nine, decades before his granddaughter began searching for him. Though she never met him, she was surprised to learn he had lived a full life after walking out on his family. The discovery also confirmed a tip her father had received years earlier: after placing an ad in a Sydney newspaper looking for Donald, he had been told that Donald had been buried under a different name in the town of Mory.
Donald’s death certificate showed he had used numerous names over the years, including Arthur Johnson, Arthur Harold Alfred Johnson, Donald Gordon Johnson, and Arthur Gordon Buckley. Donna noticed something else that caught her attention: her grandfather would have been fifty at the time of his death, not forty-nine. She also wondered who had placed a plaque at the cemetery that read “In Loving Memory of Our Father” and listed the names of his children, including her father. The most bizarre twist came when Donna received a phone call from Queensland police.
She had previously uploaded her DNA to GEDmatch in search of family members and was shocked to learn there had been a match to a dead woman discovered in a Brisbane unit complex. The woman had been buried in a locked area behind a wall for thirteen years and was identified as thirty-eight-year-old Tanya Lee Glover, a distant cousin Donna had never met. The skeletal remains had been tightly wrapped and were discovered by cleaners in December 2022. Tanya’s case remains unsolved.
In 1985, when twenty-six-year-old Jody Roberts vanished, a reporter with Tacoma’s News Tribune, those around her suspected foul play. She would not simply leave her cat unattended, nor would she fail to turn up for work. The truth would prove stranger than anyone imagined. Jody had joined the newspaper in 1980 at age twenty-two, building a reputation as a diligent, hard-nosed investigator.
Five years later, at the time of her disappearance, she was liked and respected by her colleagues, but something had shifted within her. She was downtrodden, sometimes irritable, almost erratic, and failing to care for herself. Her landline was often disconnected. Nobody seemed to know she was struggling, failing to make payments on her house and grappling with severe depression.
She was even getting therapy to help with basic tasks like paying bills and remembering to shower. The week of May 13th, Jody requested vacation time, planning to head to Eastern Washington with a friend who was a photo editor at another newspaper. The request was made too late, and her editor refused. Jody continued coming to work until Friday, May 17th, the last day any of her colleagues ever saw her.
That weekend she was in high spirits, partying on Saturday night with friends until around 3:30 a. m. , at which point she said goodbye and headed home. Her last known activity was Monday, May 20th, when she failed to show up for work and instead withdrew all her money from her savings account.
The following day, a coworker went to Jody’s house and found her car gone, the door locked, and the windows shut. After a missing person report was filed, detectives received permission from her parents to break in. Inside, the house was in total disarray, with clothes and papers scattered about, cat feces on the floor instead of the litter box, and a strong unpleasant odor. Jody’s friend, the photo editor she’d planned to trip with, later said the house was tossed but no messier than normal, as she had never been an overly neat person.
He was more concerned that her cat was wandering outside yowling, as it was an indoor animal. Jody’s mother took in the cat, insisting her daughter would never leave it to fend for itself without food and water. Though family and friends worried something sinister had happened, many of Jody’s colleagues theorized she had left voluntarily, some even sharing these beliefs with investigators. Five days after she disappeared, Jody appeared at the security office of a shopping center in Aurora, Colorado.
She explained she didn’t know her name or where she was. She was wearing a University of Denver sweatshirt, carrying keys to a Toyota with an M initial keyring, and a copy of a book. The security guard tried her key in the Toyotas in the parking lot without success and called the police, who searched her bag but found no identification. She was taken to a mental health clinic where professionals could not help her recall her identity.
For months she remained there as experts tried to coax her memories. She was diagnosed with psychogenic amnesia, generally triggered by a threat of death or a life-threatening situation. On June 12th, investigators in Tacoma discovered Jody’s vehicle near the County City Building downtown, a spot rented by the newspaper for its reporters. The car was untidy inside, but there were no signs of a struggle, no blood, no indications of violence.
Back in Colorado, Jody decided to leave the clinic and was discharged on September 10th. With help from local authorities, she established a new identity as Jane Dee and gained a new social security number, choosing the birthday of January 1st, 1963, though she was actually born in 1958. Over the next few years, Jody earned a degree in Russian literature while waiting tables. She moved to Alaska in 1989, and the following year she met a fisherman named Dan Williams.
They married and had two sets of twin daughters, the first in 1993 and the second in 1995. Jody also became skilled with computers, helping people sell items on eBay, which was in its infancy at the time. Though those around her knew she had memory issues, she never discussed them. In 1997, Tacoma investigators relabeled her case a homicide and began re-interviewing those who knew her.
One friend told them Jody had admitted to blackout episodes, though she didn’t touch drugs. She had spoken about characters in books who made fresh starts for themselves, but never mentioned a desire to do it herself. Eventually, her old newspaper published a front-page story about her case, catching the attention of a woman who’d worked with Jody in Alaska. The woman told the media that the moment she saw the photo she knew it was Jody, but frustratingly, the tips sat unused for weeks until a new detective finally took over the investigation.
Investigators located Jane Dee living in Sitka, Alaska, and called her. She said she didn’t know the name Jody Roberts and described her earliest memory as wandering around the shopping center in Aurora. She said she wanted to know her history, so the police gave it to her and pointed her to the News Tribune’s website. After reading the article, she contacted investigators, keen to meet her parents, who had been grieving since 1985.
Her mother recalled that her personality was the same, so happy and content, and her husband echoed similar sentiments. Though the media attention was overwhelming at first, it eventually died down. Many psychological experts believe she had been suffering from a fugue state at the time of her disappearance. Over the following years, Jody considered publishing a book but abandoned the deal.
She divorced her husband, moved to Oregon, and eventually sold the house she bought there. By 2017, her father had died and her mother was in poor health, so Jody moved in to care for her with one of her daughters. Family members referred to her as a hermit, concluding they would likely never know what happened to her when she vanished. Brenda Heist was a forty-three-year-old mother of two when she disappeared from Pennsylvania in 2002.
A bookkeeper for a car dealership, she carried out some chores around the house the morning of February 8th before dropping her eight-year-old daughter and twelve-year-old son off at school. Though she had left her dinner out to defrost, Brenda never came home that night, and she vanished from her children’s lives for over a decade. At the time, Brenda was in the middle of divorce proceedings, but the relationship with her soon-to-be ex-husband was described as amicable. However, in the days before she vanished, Brenda learned she had been denied housing support going forward.
She had also taken a few days off work to look at housing complexes and figure out her next move. In the years following her disappearance, police investigated, examined the family home, spoke with her young children, and at one point suspected her husband Lee was responsible, theorizing he had taken her life. The suspicion was fueled when they discovered Brenda’s life insurance policy was worth $100,000, which Lee eventually collected after she was declared dead in 2010, eight years after she went missing. He was shunned by neighbors and the local community after being investigated.
On February 12th, four days after Lee filed a missing person’s report, Brenda’s car was discovered in a parking lot near a bus station in a neighboring county. There the trail ended, and in the following months investigators found little more to go on. Years later, a Cold Case unit re-examined the case but found nothing new. For eleven years, Brenda’s children grieved.
Then in April 2013, her family was contacted by authorities after the now fifty-four-year-old went to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office in Florida and turned herself in, as there were outstanding warrants against her. While there, she acknowledged being a missing person and said she was tired of running. According to Brenda, her life after disappearing had been less than glamorous. She spent time living in a trailer with a man, doing odd jobs like cleaning homes and babysitting in exchange for cash.
She made well below minimum wage and likely not enough to pay taxes. Between 2011 and 2013 she resided in a homeless shelter, scavenging food from restaurant bins and begging, and at one point she slept outdoors under bridges. During that time she used a fake name, and there were warrants out for her arrest under that name, mostly for petty crime. Brenda stated that on February 8th, 2002, after dropping her children off at school, she went to the park to think things over and decompress, feeling very stressed by her home situation.
While sitting crying on a bench, two women and a man approached to check on her and asked her to join them on a hitchhiking trip to Florida. In a spur-of-the-moment decision, Brenda agreed, wanting to run from the stress of everything happening back home. She dropped her car off near the bus station and left with the clothes on her back. Though Brenda was safe and well, her family appeared less than interested in bridging the gap.
Her ex-husband would likely have to return the $100,000 from her life insurance policy, while her daughter Morgan tweeted that she hoped her mother rots in Hell. Brenda spent time in jail after coming clean, on charges including probation violation, forgery, and giving a false name to law enforcement. In the following months, one individual came forward claiming the mother of two hadn’t been homeless the entire eleven years she was missing. Speaking with CNN, Sandra Forester claimed Brenda cleaned her home in Florida under the name Lovey Smith and eventually moved in with her about six months after starting the cleaning job.
Sandra said the more they spoke, the more Brenda opened up about her situation, claiming she had a bad relationship with her boyfriend, describing an abusive situation and saying he was maybe an alcoholic. Brenda also told Sandra she didn’t have any children and was a widow. Sandra lived with Brenda for around ten to eleven months and said she looked nothing like the woman in her most recent photograph, having deteriorated significantly.
Brenda’s daughter Morgan told CBS News that her mother had been her best friend, adding that she hoped one day to forgive her mother, not for Brenda’s sake but for her own.