Episode 173: The Disappearance of Laureen Rahn
Photo of Laureen with an age progressed photo of what she would look like at the age of 55.
Laureen Rahn was born on April 3rd, 1966, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Her parents divorced when she was still a baby, and she was raised mostly by her mom Judith Rahn, maiden name Swanson. Judith and Laureen moved down to Miami, Florida for several years when Laureen was 4-years-old until she was around 10-years-old, when they moved back to Manchester, New Hampshire. Judith was one of eleven children, and Laureen had no shortage of adoring aunts and uncles. By 1980, Judith and Laureen were living in a third-floor apartment, unit 6, on Merrimack Street. Laureen attended Parkside Junior High School and was described as being a good student with an A average and was an overall happy, outgoing girl. She loved to sing and dance and one day hoped to become an actress.
While Laureen had a great relationship with her mom, it seemed like she was falling in with the wrong crowd. She began to be described as “troubled” and was spending more of her free time being alone out on the streets of Manchester, which had some rough areas. She had also started to get into the habit of drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana. Her aunt, Diane Pinault, described her as "an angel who hung around with the wrong people for a while."
On April 26th, 1980, now 14-year-old Laureen had asked to stay home alone at their apartment while Judith was spending the evening at a tennis match out of town up in Northern New Hampshire to support her boyfriend, who was a professional tennis player competing in the match. Laureen usually went to the tennis matches with her mom, but it was her spring break off from school and she had asked if she could skip out on the match this time. Several of her aunts and uncles and other family members had stopped by the apartment to check on Laureen throughout the day, and Laureen had also been out and about in the neighborhood and at a local convenience store, the Rosebud Superette, on her block. That evening, she invited over two friends, a male, reported to be anywhere from 15 to 21-years-old and a female, 14-years-old like Laureen, to come over. The three drank a six pack of beer as well as a bottle of wine.
Around 12:30 a.m., now on April 27th, Laureen was sitting with her male friend in the living room when they heard voices, thought it was Judith and her boyfriend returning, and the male friend left out the back door. Less than an hour later at around 1:15 a.m., Judith and her boyfriend got back to the apartment. She and her boyfriend had to walk through completely dark hallways, as it was found later that all of the light bulbs in the hallway lights had been unscrewed. When Judith arrived at her apartment door, she found it unlocked. Immediately checking on Laureen, she went into her bedroom and saw her asleep in bed. She came back out and her boyfriend told her that the back door was open. Judith went back into Laureen’s room to wake her up and ask her what had happened, only to realize the girl in the bed was Laureen’s friend. Judith realized that Laureen had left behind her purse, wallet, and brand new sneakers and began to frantically call anyone who might have an idea of where she went. Judith and her boyfriend then ran outside to search for her and reported her missing at 3:45 a.m.
Initially a bus driver thought he recognized Laureen as a passenger the night of her disappearance, but this was later questioned when he was shown a more recent photo of her weeks later. As time passed and Laureen didn’t return, police began to take her case more seriously as opposed to thinking she had just ran away.
A little over five months after Laureen’s disappearance, on November 1st, 1980, Judith was reviewing her phone bill when she saw that she had been charged for three phone calls placed in California on October 1st. She thought this was odd as she didn’t have any relatives or friends there nor had she ever been. Two of the calls had been placed from a motel in Santa Monica, California, and the third from a motel in Santa Ana. Disturbingly, the call at the motel in Santa Ana was to a sex hotline specifically for teenagers that connected them to a doctor to answer questions. Judith felt that these calls were placed by Laureen.
At first, the doctor running the hotline denied knowing any information, but in 1985, Karole Jensen, an investigator from the organization Wings for Children, called the physician and he said that multiple young women and runaways visited him and his wife at their home, and one of these girls could have been Laureen. He mentioned meeting several girls from the East Coast and said there was one girl from New Hampshire who was accompanied by an older woman.
There have been no further leads in the investigation. There have been several alleged sightings of Laureen but none that have been confirmed. In 1981, a friend of one of Laureen’s aunts said she thought she saw Laureen at a bus terminal in Boston. In 1988, a witness in Anchorage, Alaska said that he saw a sex worker matching Laureen’s description. Other leads have been explored, including connections to other disappearances in the state of girls around Laureen’s age and even potential connections to serial killer Terry Rasmussen.
Judith moved to Florida during the years after Laureen's disappearance and remarried. She believes that her daughter placed the three California phone calls in October of 1980. In the years following Laureen’s disappearance, Judith got multiple calls, all at 3:45 a.m., from someone who never spoke on the other end and called more frequently as Christmas approached. These calls continued until she changed her number. She has been contacted about multiple Jane Does, many that had been found out west, but none panned out to be Laureen. Judith said she thinks of her “Every single day. I have her picture right in front of me all the time."
At the time of her disappearance, Laureen was 14-years-old, was 5’4” and weighed 90lbs. She has brown hair and blue eyes with a prominent scar on her upper leg from falling onto broken glass when she was little. She has light brown birth marks under both eyes. She was last seen wearing a white V-neck sweater, a blue plaid blouse, jeans, brown shoes, a heart-shaped gold ring and a silver and blue necklace. Foul play is suspected in her disappearance.
Anyone with any information on the whereabouts of Laureen Rahn is asked to please call the Manchester Police Department at (603) 668-8711, the New Hampshire State Police Cold Case Unit at (603) 223-3648, or send a tip to their email at ColdCaseUnit@dos.nh.gov.
Image sources:
api.missingchildren.org - “Laureen Rahn”