Lauren Spierer was born on January 17, 1991, to Charlene and Robert Spierers. The girl grew up in Scarsdale, New York, a wealthy city in Westchester County. Lauren graduated from Edgemont High School in 2009 and then continued her education at Indiana University. She chose to study textiles, clothing and merchandising. Spierer was an active member of the Jewish community at her university. During the spring break, she traveled to Israel, where she planted trees under the Jewish National Fund program.
Spierer had met her boyfriend Jesse Wolff and friend Jay Rosenbaum many years earlier at a summer camp in the mountain town of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. It was also there that she met several other prospective Indiana University students with whom she spent time often during her student life.
On Friday, June 3, 2011, the night she disappeared, Spierer was partying with friends in Bloomington and drinking alcohol. According to witnesses, the 20-year-old was severely intoxicated. The local police used surveillance videos and witness testimony to create a timeline of the student that evening. The last hours before the disappearance were as follows:
00:30 - According to witnesses, Spierer has left her apartment with her friend David Rohn. The couple went to Jay Rosenbaum's apartment and met Corey Rossman, Rosenbaum's neighbor, there.
01:46 - According to monitoring, Lauren showed up at Kilroy's Sports Bar.
02:27 - cameras have caught the 20-year-old walking out of the bar with Rossman. The woman had left her cell phone and shoes inside (took off her shoes as she stepped out onto the sand-covered patio). The two friends headed towards the Spierer apartment complex.
02:30 - it is seen on video surveillance that Lauren has entered the apartment in Smallwood Plaza where her residence was located. Zach Oakes, who was walking down the street, noticed that the 20-year-old was very intoxicated. He stopped and asked her if she was okay.
2:48 AM - After leaving the apartment, Spierer walked the alley that ran between College Avenue and Morton Street. Security cameras mounted on nearby buildings have registered a woman exiting the alley at 2:51 am and walking towards an empty lot. The keys and the missing person's purse were found next to this path through an alley. Spierer showed up at Rossman's apartment shortly thereafter. Michael Beth, Corey's roommate, was already there. Rossman drank a lot of alcohol that night and stumbled a lot. He also vomited on the carpet as he made his way up the stairs. Beth claimed he walked his friend to bed. He then tried to convince Spierer to stay overnight for his own safety. According to the man, Lauren wanted to go back to her own apartment.
3:30 AM - Michael Beth said he called his neighbor Jay Rosenbaum and asked him to look after Lauren. Spierer tried to persuade Betha to drink alcohol with her in her apartment. Finally, the student went to Rosenbaum, who noticed a bruise under her eye. It probably arose during the fall that occurred earlier that evening. The woman, however, did not remember where the bruise had come from. It was later determined that two calls had been made on Rosenbaum's phone shortly before she left. The man claimed that Spierer called twice - once to Rohn and then to another friend. No calls were answered, and no voicemail was left.
04:30 - According to Rosenbaum, Lauren left his apartment at this time. The man last saw Spierer at the intersection of 11th Street and College Avenue. The woman headed south toward College Avenue. She was barefoot at the time, wearing black leggings and a white shirt. From that moment on, no one saw her again, and she did not appear in the surveillance footage.
A few hours later, Wolff sent his girlfriend a message. To his surprise, he received a reply from a bar worker. Jesse then reported Lauren to the police.
In August 2011, police conducted a nine-day search of the Sycamore Ridge garbage site in Pimento for clues regarding the disappearance. This was where Bloomington rubbish is taken away after it stops at the transfer station. Participating in the search were the Bloomington Police Department, Indiana University Police Department and the FBI. Two years after the disappearance, the investigators received about 3,000 pieces of information that were allegedly related to the student's disappearance.
In April 2015, Bloomington Police announced they were investigating a possible link between Spierer's disappearance and the murder of another Indiana University student, Hannah Wilson. The woman went missing on April 24, 2015, after visiting the same bar that Spierer had visited on the night of her disappearance.
The last time Wilson was seen was getting in front of a bar into a taxi, which then left. Hannah's body was found the next morning in Brown County. A man who lives there, Daniel Messel, was arrested for murder after his cell phone was found near the body. In July 2015, Bo Dietl, a private investigator employed by the Lauren family, concluded that the two cases were not related and that any similarities between them were coincidental.
On January 28, 2016, the FBI and other police agencies investigated a property in Martinsville, approximately 32 miles north of Bloomington. The property was linked to Justin Wagers who lived there with his mother and stepfather. The man was suspected of exposing himself several times in a public place in the presence of women. Dogs trained to find corpses participated in the search. Excavations were also carried out around the barn, which had been checked by dogs earlier, but nothing was found. Investigators also towed away and searched Wagers' white truck, also to no avail.
There were many theories about what happened to the missing woman that night. Spierer's parents stated that they believe their daughter is dead. Based on reports of her level of intoxication, they also felt that Lauren might have been under the influence of drugs while at the bar. "We felt like someone might throw something in her drink at Kilroy's," said Robert Spierer.
The family expressed suspicions about the men Lauren was with that evening, as well as her boyfriend. Everyone refused to undergo a polygraph test, and they also hired lawyers shortly after the woman's disappearance. Although the parents have not made any specific accusations, they believe that their daughter's friends know more than they told the police. The men in turn responded to these allegations that they had taken part in a private lie detector test as well as an FBI polygraph. The hiring of lawyers, on the other hand, was due to the fact that they do not trust the Bloomington Police.
Lauren's friends and her boyfriend told police that the night before Spierer disappeared, she not only drank alcohol but also took drugs. Wolff's mother claimed that her son's girlfriend was asked to leave the holiday camp where she met Jesse and Rosenbaum due to drug use. "This poor little girl is not with us today because of drug abuse," said the woman. On September 2, 2010, nine months before her disappearance, Spierer was arrested on suspicion of drug intoxication in a public place and the use of illegal substances. After Lauren disappeared, the police found a small amount of cocaine in her room.
Rosenbaum told investigators that Spierer was drinking alcohol, snorting cocaine and crushing Klonopin tablets that night. Her rare heart disease - long QT syndrome - further increased the risk of health and life threatened by drug use. Police addressed rumors that Lauren had overdosed and that those who spent the night with her would hide her body to avoid criminal charges. Detective Bo Dietl doubted it would have come to this, however. He also referred to the frequent drug abuse by students on the Indiana University campus. "Every kid buys weed, cocaine, alcohol, pills," he said. “I mean, it's everywhere. So it really can't be the motive. "
The police admitted that they had not ruled out other possibilities, such as kidnapping by a stranger. Spierer's parents previously stated that they did not believe her disappearance was the result of an accidental abduction.
In 2017, Brown District Attorney Ted Adams said he believed Daniel Messel could be linked to Lauren's disappearance. In 2016, Messel was convicted of killing another UI student, Hannah Wilson, who had been beaten a year earlier. Messel's cell phone was found at her feet. The man was never charged in connection with the Spierer case, however.
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