Brianna Maitland

Brianna Maitland, 17, clocked out of work at a northern Vermont restaurant at 11:20 p.m. on March 19, 2004.

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Hours later, a state trooper found her car, a 1985 Oldsmobile, about mile down the road. It was backed partway into an abandoned house. Two of her paychecks were found inside. But the teenager was gone and hasn't been heard from since.

Leigh Abel, 78, disappeared five days before Christmas in 2001. He was last seen fishing in New Smyrna Beach, Fla. His car later turned up in Boca Raton, 250 miles south.

Leigh Abel

Tionda Bradley, 10, and little sister Diamond, 3, left home in Chicago on July 6, 2001, and were never seen again. The girls left a note for their mother explaining that they were going to a neighborhood store and then to a school playground.

Tionda & Diamond Bradley

Arrilla Webb-Vaul was 23 when she went missing in 1979. She dropped off her husband at a shopping center in Shreveport, La., then pulled over with a flat tire a few minutes later. A man in a white pickup truck came to her aid, and she was never seen again. Her car tire had been slashed.

Arrilla Webb-Vaul

Hubert Valdez, 28, was last seen walking out of Gilbert's Lounge in Van Horn, Tex., at closing time on April 29, 2003. His car was found later that same day elsewhere in the southwest Texas town.

Hubert Valdez

Allen Regusters, then 48, left home on March 17, 2003, to pick up his paycheck at the U.S. Postal Service office in Washington, D.C. He, too, was never seen again.

Allen Regusters

America's missing come in all ages, genders, economic statuses and skin tones.

"I guess you think it's never going to happen to your family," Bruce Maitland, 44, father of the missing Vermont teenager, told the Crime Library. "But then it does."

How often it happens and to whom are complicated questions.

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