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When someone disappears, they often leave a trail behind that investigators can begin to follow; a potential crime scene, a last confirmed sighting, a person they were supposed to meet or a place where they were headed. These clues will hopefully lead investigators to their missing person.
However, in the case of Laureen Rahn, a 14-year-old who vanished in New Hampshire in April 1980, there didn’t seem to be a single clue or explanation left behind. Despite the passage of 46 long years, it seems that investigators are no closer to knowing where Laureen could have gone or who may have been responsible for her disappearance today than they were on the night she vanished. To this day, no one can say for certain what happened to Laureen Rahn.
What began as an ordinary night at the start of Laureen’s spring break would eventually become one of New Hampshire’s most baffling missing person cases. In the months & years that followed, strange events left Laureen’s family wondering if she was truly gone, if she was somehow still trying to reach them or if someone was playing a cruel prank on them.
Laureen Rahn was born on April 3, 1966 in Manchester, New Hampshire. After her parents divorced when she was only an infant, she had little to no interaction with her father & she was raised by her mom, Judith Rahn. When Laureen was four, Judith relocated them to Miami, Florida, but six years later when Laureen was ten, they came back to Manchester to be closer to family.
Judith came from a large family as one of 11 siblings & since many of them lived locally, they spent a lot of time with Laureen’s teenage cousins & aunts.
In 1980, Judith & Laureen were living in a two bedroom, third-floor apartment at 289 Merrimack Street. She was an eighth grade student at Parkside Junior High where she was said to have very good grades. She was an outgoing girl who loved to sing & dance & hoped to one day work as an actress in Hollywood.
Although most online reports indicate that Laureen & her mom were essentially best friends who got along very well, according to two of Laureen’s personal friends, Michelle & Lori, who were guests on an episode of the podcast, Speculating Wildly About Crime, this was absolutely not true.
According to Lori, Laureen often complained that her mom was gone a lot, leaving her home alone, sometimes without food or money, not coming back until the middle of the night after being out with various men. Because of this, Laureen often spent her free time at one of her various aunt’s houses.
According to Laureen’s aunt Diane Pinault, her niece was an angel who hung around the wrong people for a while. Although she hadn’t gotten into any serious trouble, Laureen had begun to drink alcohol, smoke marijuana & she talked about running away.
Michelle & Lori each indicated that she preferred the warmer weather of Florida & would sometimes say that she hoped her dad would come get her & take her back there, believing he lived there. Unbeknownst to Laureen, her dad was actually living in Manchester only three miles away from where she & her mom were living at the time.
Although media reports describe the man Judith was dating at the time of her daughter’s disappearance as a professional tennis player, according to Michelle & Lori, he was actually a squash player or a racquetball player.
He had a match scheduled in northern New Hampshire on Saturday, April 26, 1980 & despite the fact that Judith & Laureen often went to see him play together, this time, Laureen asked if she could stay home since her spring break had just started.
Throughout that Saturday, while Judith had been out of town, some friends had seen Laureen around town as well as at a small local convenience store that afternoon where a lot of local teens hung out. She was restocking wine coolers, possibly in exchange for alcohol. Several family members also stopped by her apartment during the day to check in on her.
When Judith & her boyfriend came home at about 1:15 am, now on Sunday, April 27, 1980, they immediately noticed how dark it was in the hallways of all three floors of the apartment building. It was later determined that all of the bulbs had been unscrewed, but it’s unclear if this had any direct correlation to Laureen’s disappearance.
As they approached the apartment door, Judith was surprised to find it unlocked since Laureen was normally good about making sure that it was locked. After they came inside, Judith’s boyfriend eventually realized that the back door of the apartment was standing ajar. Feeling concerned, Judith went to her daughter’s bedroom to check on her & see what was going on.
She was relieved to see a figure asleep in the darkened room, but quickly realized that it wasn’t Laureen. Instead, it was her daughter’s friend, who, according to some sources, was named Kristen. This was when Judith realized that Laureen wasn’t in the apartment.
Since Kristen had been drinking that night, her recollections were very hazy, but she was able to tell Judith that she, Laureen & a male friend had hung out & shared a six-pack of beer as well as a bottle of wine. Some sources indicate that there could have also been a fourth person there, an 18-year-old boy. The male that was definitely there was said to be as old as 21-years-old while Kristen’s age was never mentioned.
Although the exact amount of alcohol that Laureen consumed was never clarified, having just turned 14 a few weeks earlier & at 5’4” & only 90#, one would assume that had she consumed a significant amount, she would have been very intoxicated that night.
According to the male who had been over that night, they heard voices in the apartment building’s hallway at about 12:30 am. Thinking it could be Judith coming home sooner than they expected, he quickly left through the back door of the apartment that led down to the building’s back alley. He later told investigators that he heard Laureen lock the door behind him.
Five years later, in 1985, this man died by suicide. He was never considered a suspect in Laureen’s disappearance.
A neighbor later confirmed his story, saying that he heard voices approaching the Rahn apartment that night followed by someone leaving down the back stairs before things got quiet again.
After this male left, Kristen said that she & Laureen went to sleep in her bed, but at some point, Laureen left with her blanket & pillow to sleep on the couch.
Judith called around to nearby family members to see if Laureen was with them, they also drove around looking for her. Finding no sign of her, she contacted the police at 3:45 am to report her daughter missing.
According to Michelle & Lori, Judith never saw her boyfriend again after that night.
Not only did responding officers find no sign of a struggle in the apartment, but they also noted that Laureen had left all of her personal items behind. A now retired Manchester detective, Tony Fowler, thought that maybe Laureen had left the apartment to meet someone with the intention of coming back.
Her purse, money & clothing was there as well as her brand new shoes that were sitting in the living room. She’d begged her mom for them & had only just gotten them weeks earlier for her birthday.
According to reports, Laureen was last seen wearing a white v-neck sweater, a blue plaid blouse, jeans & brown shoes as well as a heart-shaped gold ring & a silver & blue necklace. She has a prominent scar on her upper leg from a time she’d fallen onto broken glass as well as light brown birthmarks under each eye.
When Laureen’s friends Lori & Michelle were interviewed on Speculating Wildly About Crime, it was their perception that Judith wasn’t very involved in the aftermath of her daughter’s disappearance. They speculated that she didn’t want her partying lifestyle to be exposed. She allegedly turned down independent sleuths who were interested in solving Laureen’s case, she seemed disinterested when working with law enforcement as well as private investigators & she turned down a call with Unsolved Mysteries.
During the initial stages of the investigation, officers spoke with a man who worked for a local bus company who indicated that he may have sold a ticket to a girl that resembled Laureen. When the bus driver was questioned & shown an older photo of her, he said that he dropped her off at Park Square in Boston, an hour southeast of Manchester.
However, when they came back a few weeks later with a more updated photo, the same bus driver couldn’t say for sure that it had been Laureen who he dropped off in Boston.
In October 1980, six months after she vanished, Judith found three strange charges to her home phone bill from October 1. Back in the 1980s, collect calls could be made to a location & charged to an account, if a person had one, which Judith did.
Each call came from a motel in Santa Monica, California, a place she had no connection to. Two of them were made from the motel pay phone to another motel an hour’s drive southeast in Santa Ana while the third was to a hotline for teens who had questions about sex.
When investigators contacted the doctor who ran the hotline, he denied knowing anything about that specific call. When an investigator with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children followed up with this doctor five years later in 1985, he now admitted that a number of runaway girls occasionally visited his wife at their home & one of them may have been from New Hampshire.
Since Laureen always dreamed of working in Hollywood as an actress, Judith wondered if her daughter had gone to California & stayed at the motel where the phone calls had come from. When this same investigator traveled to the motel in 1986, she learned that it may have been used as a filming location for a child porn director known as Dr. Z. Unable to link Dr. Z to the teen hotline or Laureen, nothing came from the lead.
Beginning in 1981, up until Judith changed her phone number years later, she continued to receive phone calls that would normally come through at 3:45 am with the frequency ramping up around Christmastime. Although the caller never spoke, Judith thought it could be her daughter on the other end, unsure why she never said anything.
Judith wasn’t the only person receiving strange phone calls as Laureen’s aunt Janet Roy had also gotten several calls from a young woman who asked to speak with Mike. Janet’s son Michael was Laureen’s favorite cousin & she was the only one in the family who referred to him as Mike. By the time Michael would come to the phone, the caller had already hung up. Although the caller didn’t sound like her niece, Janet thought that for whatever reason, Laureen may have been disguising her voice.
Laureen’s friend had also gotten a phone call, but since he wasn’t there at the time, his mom took a message, telling him that someone by the name of either Laurie or Laureen had called.
Detective Lucas Hobbs, who is currently assigned to cold cases, indicated that there is nothing in the official police files for Laureen’s case about any of these phone calls, including the three from the motel in Santa Monica that had been charged to Judith.
One year after Laureen disappeared, a close friend of her aunt Jobeth Swanson claimed to have seen her at a bus terminal in Boston in 1981, but this sighting has never been confirmed. Seven years later in 1988, another witness reported seeing a sex worker in Anchorage, Alaska who matched her description based on a photo they saw of Laureen after she went missing. Because eight years had gone by at this point, this tip was never taken seriously.
Investigators believe that in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 27, 1980, Laureen willingly left her apartment with someone she knew or that she left to meet someone with the intention of coming back.
Although she is still classified as a missing person, they assume that she’s likely deceased, believing that after she willingly left, she was met with foul play.
Laureen had not been the only young girl to vanish in New Hampshire. One month earlier, a 15-year-old girl named Rachael Garden disappeared on March 20, 1980. She was last seen walking home from Rowe’s Corner Market on Pond Street in Newton, 45 minutes southeast of Manchester. She’d gone to the store to pick up a pack of cigarettes & gum, paying with a $5 bill sometime between 9-9:30 pm. From here, she planned to spend the night at a friend’s house.
Despite extensive searches, Rachael has never been found. Although investigators initially treated her case as a runaway, over time, they came to believe that foul play was involved.
She was last seen speaking with three male acquaintances who were involved in criminal activity. One of these men later served a prison term for assault & rape & another allegedly confessed to killing Rachael, while it’s unknown if they were actually involved in her disappearance.
No connection was ever made between Rachael & Laureen, but they were both very petite in size, of similar age & some felt that they resembled one another.
Only six weeks after Laureen vanished, a 25-year-old woman also disappeared without a trace. Denise Denault was a divorced mother of two young sons who lived only two blocks away from Merrimack Street where Laureen lived. Although she was 11 years older, Denise & Laureen resembled one another.
She was out having drinks at the Merrimack Club in downtown Manchester & was last seen leaving at 1:30 am on Sunday, June 8, 1980, saying she was going to a party.
Denise lived a few doors down from suspected serial killer Terry Peder Rasmussen. At the time both Laureen & Denise vanished, he was living in the area under the name Bob Evans, one of his many false identities.
Rasmussen pleaded guilty to murdering his wife in California in 2003 & he died seven years later in 2010. Authorities believe that he was responsible for at least six more murders across the United States between 1978 & 2002.
Although there is no direct evidentiary connection tying Rasmussen to Laureen or Denise, he was absolutely suspected of their disappearances due to timing as well as proximity.
Laureen Rahn is frozen in time as a 14-year-old girl who would be 60-years-old in 2026. For those who never had the opportunity to know her, she’s only remembered as the stories written or spoken online as well as a black-and-white photo from her missing persons case.
46 years have passed since she vanished from her Manchester, New Hampshire apartment on Merrimack Street in April 1980. Despite the passage of time, there is still no definitive answer for what happened to her. There was no obvious crime scene, no confirmed sightings that could have explained where she went, no suspects & no confession.
Senior Assistant Attorney General R. Christopher Knowles, chief of the Cold Case Unit, insists that they remain committed to bringing Laureen home. There have been advancements in forensic technologies that didn’t exist in 1980 that are being utilized. Since relationships & loyalties change & people pass away, they also hold out hope that someone who may have been staying quiet about what they know about her disappearance will decide to come forward.
Anyone with information about Laureen’s disappearance is encouraged to contact The Cold Case Unit tip line at (603) 271-2663.
References:
- The Doe Network: Laureen Ann Rahn
- Buzz Sprout: Speculating Wildly About Crime: 74. Laureen Rahn – Revisited
- Apple Podcasts: Speculating Wildly About Crime: 17: Crossover with This Story is Nuts Featuring Missy
- Apple Podcasts: Speculating Wildly About Crime: 93: Laureen Rahn Revisited – Exclusive interview with Lori B
- Nhpr: NH Cold Case Unit appeals to public for information in Laureen Rahn disappearance
- New Hampshire Department of Justice: Rachel Garden
- The Charley Project: Laureen Ann Rahn
- The Charley Project: Rachael Elizabeth Garden
- The Charley Project: Denise Ann Daneault
- Manchester Ink Link: 40 years after disappearance, family holds out hope for Laureen: ‘In my heart I want to believe she’s alive’
- New England Cold Cases: Denise Daneault
- Wikipedia: Terry Peder Rasmussen
- Wikipedia: Disappearance of Laureen Rahn
- Reddit: While her mother was out of town, a 14-year-old girl invited friends over for a night of drinking & then disappeared from her apartment. What happened to Laureen Rahn?
- Solve the Case: Laureen Rahn
- Medium: The strange disappearance of Laureen Rahn
