Disappeared (2009-2022)

I happened to remember this old Discovery true-crime show about missing person cases which I used to watch a lot. I found it online complete except for most of the first season and that was all she wrote for a week or 10 days. I didn’t get to all of it, but I sampled all the seasons and saw a couple of them complete. The initial run lasted six seasons, starting in 2009. Then there was a break and three more seasons, then another break and season 10 ran just last year. It turns out I hadn’t seen all the old episodes by a long shot. The comforting voice of Christopher Crutchfield Walker provides the voiceover in all seasons except 7 (nonetheless a pretty good season). The show is built out of interviews with various principals—not always all of them—accompanied by reenactments, which can be confusing or distracting but also helpful. It’s fair to say the shows are often padded out to fit a one-hour TV time slot. Compare the much more highly efficient Forensic Files, which can practically pack in three intriguing cases in the time Disappeared spends on one. But in many ways I appreciate the slower pace of Disappeared, which offers time to let the complexities settle in. They are essentially different shows despite all the police procedure: Forensic Files explicitly knows whereas Disappeared explicitly does not know. In general, I think the early seasons are better. The cases seem to be chosen more for their inherent interest, while the later seasons, especially 10, are focused more on urgent public service in the mold of America’s Most Wanted and To Catch a Predator, offering a platform to help solve cases. Since Gabby Petito there have been increasing cries for the media to focus on BIPOC missing person cases rather than solely on young white women, which is fair and reasonable. We hear more about gross police incompetence in these later seasons, and in turn police don’t always cooperate with interviews, which is unheard of in the early years. It’s easy to come away with a sense of outrage and urgency in the later seasons and it’s not out of place for these cases.

I found a Wikipedia article that traces ongoing results of the cases, another reason I favor the older episodes. Those cases simply have a better chance of being resolved by now. I ran into plenty of “still missing” notices there, but sometimes there are developments and sometimes they are as surprising as any twists and turns captured in the show. To be clear, these resolutions can also be something like learning how a stage magician’s tricks work. At first, curiosity is satisfied but then it starts to feel stupid that you ever wanted to know. For what it’s worth, my interest in these cases is apparently more about the mystery of them, how strange they can seem, rather than the horrors and sadness of human brutality and trafficking. Many of these vanished are victims of various crimes, or suicides, or even people trying to start over—and many times it’s fairly obvious what has happened to them. Once in a while they are found alive. Often their bodies are never found, or haven’t been yet. Among other things I am amazed how hard it can be to find a body—sometimes the follow-up casually mentions it was finally found in an area that was supposedly searched carefully. Once or twice the body has clearly been moved there later. The ones who likely died from exposure are often lost in unimaginably vast and harsh terrains. It’s actually disconcerting how many missing person cases there seem to be. The show is also useful that way, reminding us of it. What happens to these people? I feel for the families and those left behind, of course—their grief is often the hardest part to watch. See enough of these episodes and they start to fit patterns. Near the end of many someone is often seen saying, “Well, someone knows what happened here and I just wish they would come forward with what they know.” Check the Wikipedia page—sometimes they did.