Peter D. Kramer
Rockland/Westchester Journal News
May 23, 2024
"June 3, 2011. There was a different energy in the air around Bloomington, Indiana, this time of year. Late at night, the streets, usually bustling with college students, could be eerily silent."
So begins investigative reporter Shawn Cohen's book "College Girl, Missing: The True Story of How a Young Woman Disappeared in Plain Sight" ($17.99 from sourcebooks). The book hits stores May 28, six days before the 13th anniversary of the night Lauren Spierer vanished.
Spierer was the petite 20-year-old blonde coed from Westchester, fresh off her sophomore year at Indiana University, who disappeared on one of the college town’s silent summer streets after a night of drugs and drinking. She staggered off into the pre-dawn hours of June 3, 2011, and was never seen again.
Her disappearance triggered a massive search, and has spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theories, amateur sleuths, psychics, Reddit threads, true-crime podcasts and TV magazine stories.
Where was Lauren? How could she vanish? Who knows the truth? Who isn't talking?
Cohen’s new book, written with the cooperation of Robert and Charlene Spierer and drawing on their private investigators' files, fills in key details of that fateful night. While it doesn't solve the case, it goes a long way to exploring the personalities and motivations of those at the center of the mystery, and the code of silence that has kept the Spierers in anguish for 13 years, not any closer to finding out what happened to their daughter.
Cohen is able to flesh out the story, to fill in the details beyond where Lauren went, from her off-campus apartment to a friend’s dinner party to a “pre-game” drinking bout to friend Jay Rosenbaum’s townhouse, to a local bar, on an odyssey during which she lost her shoes, her phone, her keys and, eventually, her life.
Cohen had unprecedented access
The Spierers granted Cohen access to the files of their private investigator Bo Deitl.
He sifted through that information, and supplemented it with interviews with case insiders. His knock-on-doors approach brings to light new elements of Lauren Spierer's final hours, permitting Cohen to craft a tantalizing single line that stands alone before the book’s preface, eight words to entice followers of the case: "This book contains information never before made public."
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More at link. ~Summer
www.missingkids.org
