College Girl, Missing: The True Story of How a Young Woman Disappeared in Plain Sight

14 years ago, Lauren Spierer, an over-served 20 year-old student at Indiana University who had been indulging in recreational drugs, walked out of her friend’s apartment building at 4 in the morning and disappeared, never to be seen again. She was barefoot, having left her shoes and cell phone at a bar. Her purse and keys would later be found in the alley she and a male friend traversed on their way to his apartment. Video cameras caught sightings of her on that last night. But Lauren herself was gone.

Shawn Cohen, an investigative reporter from New York, never planned on immersing himself into Lauren’s story beyond reporting on it after the she disappeared.  One of many reporters from news outlets that included People magazine, CNN, and USA Today, who arrived at this bucolic college town in Bloomington, Indiana, he segued from just reporting to becoming entrenched in trying to solve the question of what happened to Lauren Spierer. The result is “College Girl, Missing: The True Story of How a Young Woman Disappeared in Plain Sight.” (Sourcebooks 2024).

He made connections with her family who lived in Scarsdale, New York, immersed himself in all the available records, spoked to the retired New York Police Department detectives turned private investigators that the Spierer family hired to find answers, and returned to Bloomington numerous times.

But there were obstacles. By the time Lauren was reported missing, 14 hours had gone by before the police, who at first didn’t treat her disappearance as a missing person’s case, were called. The men she was with that night, long time friends of hers, all immediately lawyered up and wouldn’t talk, and the information gathered by the Bloomington Police Department hasn’t been released as the case is still considered open.

“The family isn’t giving up trying to find out what happened,” Cohen said in a phone interview earlier this week.  Neither is he.

“It’s something I think about all the time,” he says.

It was thought that maybe she had been abducted by a stranger, supposedly a white truck had been seen in the vicinity that was later connected with the murder of another IU student. But that connection proved false and the truck in question was sighted well beyond when Lauren disappeared.

Having attended Indiana University, I know the path that Lauren would have followed that last night. And though I was a student at IU before Lauren, I often visited the campus around the time of her disappearance and still remember the numerous posters showing her photo and asking, pleading really, for anyone with information to call. A pretty girl, with blonde hair and sweet smile, it’s hard to understand how friends who were with her that night decided to hire lawyers rather than talk to the reporters and police in hopes that the information they could provide would help the investigation.

Cohen, too, is waiting for the call or text that will break the case open. Since the book was published he gets frequent tips but nothing that has ever solved Lauren’s disappearance. But he, like her family, is determined to never give up.

He has retraced Lauren’s steps and finally was able to get into the apartment where her friend, instead of walking Spierer home, says he watched her through the window as she walked barefoot reaching the intersection of 11th Street and College Avenue.

“I stood at the window to see if he could have seen her the way that he said he did,” says Cohen.

Both Cohen and I each have two children, and we discuss how awful this would be for any parent but Cohen, who has made an emotional connection with the Spierers, has watched them go through hell. In other words, it’s become personal.

When I ask him why he thinks Lauren’s long time friends wouldn’t be more helpful, he says, “self-preservation.”

But maybe there’s someone out there who is willing to go beyond protecting themselves and doing what is right.

“I want to keep this in the forefront, to keep the focus on Lauren and on the people who were involved,”  Cohen says. “I’m always hoping that someone will break, that their conscious will bother them enough, so they come forward or maybe somebody who knows something will leak it. I  want more and more people to learn about this, to talk about this until maybe someone opens up and tells what they know.”

This article originally appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.