Full Name: Lauren Elizabeth Spierer

Alternative Name: Lauren E. Spierer

Case Status: Missing

Record ID#: 0317

*The names “Jane Doe”  and “John Doe” are English names used when the person’s true name is not known. If used above, the name refers to a person of unknown identity.

Date of Birth*: January 17, 1991
Birthplace: Scarsdale, New York, USA
Age at the Time: 20
Age Group: 20s
Biological Sex: Female
Hair: Long blonde hair, straight to slightly wavy
Eyes: Blue
Skin Complexion: Fair or Light
Shoe Size: ~ 6 US (reportedly a small size)
Ethnicity: Caucasian or White
Nationality: United States
Languages Spoken: English

*If the date says January 1, this is often just a placeholder for an unknown specific date. It usually means “sometime that year”.

Physical Build: Petite or Short, Slim or Thin

Height:

Weight

Distinguishing Marks:

• Birthmark, Medical Condition, Pierced Ears, Scar

Medical Condition: She had a known heart condition (Long QT Syndrome) and was reportedly taking medication. She was heavily inebriated and allegedly under the influence of drugs (Cocaine and Klonopin). She had also sustained a head injury earlier in the evening which may have further impacted her thinking or reasoning skills. She had a large bruise under her eye from whatever had occurred with the injury, but could not recall how it had happened.
Physical Abnormality:
Dental Condition:
Scars & Other Marks: She had a small horizontal scar on the center of her forehead. She also had an oblong vertical skin-toned birthmark about a foot in length on the center of her back.
Piercings: Multiple Piercings, Ear, Navel. She had three earring holes in each ear and a cartilage piercing in the upper part of her left ear. She also had her belly button pierced.
Tattoos:

Other Descriptors: Unknown

Clothing

• Shirt:​ White short-sleeved off the shoulder sheer shirt that was cropped at the bottom.
• Shirt:​ White long-sleeved buttoned-up shirt that she was wearing with the sleeves rolled up.
• Pants:​ Long black leggings
• Shoes:​ Barefoot at time of disappearance (lost earlier in the night)

Possessions:

• Diamond Stud Bar Belly Ring
• Large Silver Ring with Turquoise Stone (made by David Yurman)
• Small Gold Band Pinky Ring With Small Red Stone
• Round Silver “O” shaped Ring
• Thin Gold Bracelet With Red “Evil Eye” Ruby Surrounded By Diamonds
• Possibly a Blue Half Moon Necklace
• Her shoes and cell phone were allegedly left at Kilroy’s Sports Bar.
• Her keys and purse were allegedly found in the alley behind her apartment.

Date of the Disappearance*: June 3, 2011

Description: On the morning of June 3, 2011, a 20-year-old college student named Lauren Spierer walked away from a friend’s apartment in Bloomington, Indiana, and was never seen again.

Lauren Elizabeth Spierer was born on January 17, 1991, to Charlene and Robert Spierer. She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, an affluent town in lower Westchester County, graduated from Edgemont High School in 2009, and enrolled at Indiana University, where she was studying textiles merchandising. By the accounts of those who knew her, she was warm and sociable. A neighbor named Martin Rivlin described her simply as “always pleasant, very pleasant… a lovely girl” (Daily Voice). Spierer was active in the Jewish community at IU and had spent the previous spring break planting trees in Israel on behalf of the Jewish National Fund. She was, by most accounts, a young woman fully engaged in college life and optimistic about her future.

The night she disappeared she had been enjoying the evening with a cluster of close friends, most of whom she had known for years. She met her boyfriend, Jesse Wolff, and her friend, Jason ‘Jay’ Rosenbaum, years earlier at Camp Towanda, a summer camp in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. She had met Corey Rossman and his roommate Michael Beth more recently, over Memorial Day Weekend at a speedway. Notably, Rosenbaum, Rossman, and Beth were all fellow students in the Apparel Merchandising program with Lauren, meaning her closest acquaintances on the night she disappeared were people she saw not just socially but academically as well.

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To understand the events of June 2-3, it helps to understand how compact the area was. Jay Rosenbaum lived at 5 North Townhomes, and Corey Rossman and Michael Beth lived just two doors away. Lauren’s apartment was at Smallwood Plaza at 455 N College Ave, roughly two blocks south along College Avenue. Kilroy’s Sports Bar sat about one block east of her apartment at 319 North Walnut Street. The entire drama of that night played out within a few blocks along North College Avenue between 8th and 11th Streets, a small enough area that the walk from the bar back to Lauren’s front door took only about three minutes.

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The evening of June 2 into the early morning of June 3 began ordinarily enough. Lauren spent Thursday evening watching the 2011 NBA Playoffs and drinking wine with friends. Around 12:30 a.m., she left her apartment with a friend named David Rohn and headed to a party at Jay Rosenbaum’s apartment, where she met up with Rossman (and possibly Beth?).

The times seem a bit odd here but it doesn’t seem like Lauren and Rossman were at Rosenbaum’s for very long at this time. They spent some time there with their friends, drinking and partying but then they left and headed to Rossman’s apartment, where they met Michael Beth. A while later, Lauren and Rossman headed out again to the nearby Kilroy’s Sports Bar, arriving there around 1:46 a.m. (it was only about 2 hours since she had left home at this point).

On the way, Lauren was observed stumbling and requiring Rossman’s assistance to walk, but once at the bar, Rossman bought Laruen several more drinks. It would later be discovered that Lauren got in using a false ID, a fact the bar was cited for (Link). By this point, Lauren had removed her shoes to walk on the bar’s sand-covered patio and was now barefoot. Surveillance cameras confirmed Spierer entered Kilroy’s at and was seen exiting with Rossman at 2:27 a.m., leaving behind both her shoes and her cell phone. By the early morning hours, witnesses later confirmed that the group had been consuming not only alcohol but drugs as well.

After leaving Kilroy’s, the pair initially headed toward Lauren’s apartment complex, where they encountered other students outside the elevator on Lauren’s floor at around 2:30 a.m. Rossman got into a physical altercation with one of those students (Zach Oakes), who took issue with him for failing to assist the visibly intoxicated Lauren into her apartment. Rossman ended up knocked to the ground with a split lip and later claimed that the blow left him confused about the events that followed, though investigators noted that the alcohol and drugs he had consumed that night complicated any effort to assess that claim.

Rather than proceeding to Lauren’s apartment, which was mere steps away, the two turned around. At 2:48 a.m., Lauren and Rossman appeared on a security camera heading into an alley behind her apartment complex. They exited the alley at 2:51 a.m., and Spierer’s keys and purse were found along that route by another student sometime before 3:00 a.m.. The pair then walked north toward Rossman’s apartment, with Rossman at some point carrying Lauren because she could no longer walk steadily on her own.

Rossman vomited on the stairs as they entered his apartment building and was clearly unsteady himself.. Beth said he escorted Rossman to bed and tried to persuade Spierer to sleep over for her own safety. She refused, wanting to go home, and continued trying to convince Beth to drink with her.

At approximately 3:30 a.m., Beth brought Lauren to Rosenbaum’s apartment rather than escorting her back to her own, then left. Rosenbaum also grew concerned when he saw Lauren’s condition and attempted to contact several of her friends to arrange a ride, but was unable to reach anyone. At the time, he said Lauren was still trying to convince him to drink with her (relevant because it is possible she wandered somewhere else looking for her friends or someone to hand out with later when she disappeared).

Rosenbaum told police that Spierer had a large bruise under her eye that she allegedly sustained in a fall earlier that evening, and that she could not remember how she got it. At some point during her time at his apartment, Lauren used Rosenbaum’s phone to call two people: David Rohn and one other friend. Neither answered, and she left no messages.

At approximately 4:30 a.m., Rosenbaum allowed Lauren to leave his residence on her own and briefly observed her walking in the direction of her apartment. He was the last known person to see Lauren alive.Why he did not walk the two blocks with her, or offer her shoes to wear, has never been satisfactorily explained. A security camera located along Lauren’s return route did not capture any images of her walking home.

Lauren was last seen at the intersection of West 11th Avenue and North College Avenue. She was barefoot, without her phone or purse, bruised, and severely intoxicated. She never arrived at her apartment.

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Her boyfriend Jesse Wolff, who had been texting with her the previous evening but had not gone out with the group, became aware something was wrong when he sent a message to her phone and received a reply from a Kilroy’s employee who told him that a girl had left her phone at the bar hours earlier. He called police quickly and reported her missing, and Lauren’s parents arrived from New York on June 4 to help with the investigation.

• On June 6, a ground search commenced with hundreds of volunteers
• Divers searched Lake Monroe on June 8.
• The family offered a $100,000 reward for information on June 9.
• Her disappearance was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” on June 11.
• The public became involved through the help of news stories on mainstream media, social media (e.g., @NewsonLaurenS) and a website designed by Lauren’s parents.

By August, police were searching through more than 4,000 tons of trash at the Sycamore Ridge Landfill, turning up nothing. State police searched wooded areas southwest of Martinsville. The investigation used drones, K-9 units, and dive teams, but not a single piece of physical evidence connected to Lauren’s whereabouts was ever recovered.

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Rosenbaum later told investigators that Spierer had consumed alcohol, snorted cocaine, and crushed up Klonopin tablets that evening. She was a tiny person (4’11” and ~ 90lbs) with little to absorb the stimulants. Her rare heart condition, long QT syndrome, added to the danger from both alcohol and drug use. Long QT syndrome is a disorder affecting the heart’s electrical system, and it makes a person particularly susceptible to dangerous and potentially fatal arrhythmias when stimulants or certain other substances are involved. Police addressed the possibility that Spierer may have overdosed and that those with her may have hidden her body to avoid criminal charges.

Nine months before her disappearance, Spierer had been arrested on charges of public intoxication and illegal consumption. After she disappeared, police found a small amount of cocaine in her room.

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Frustrated by what they perceived as stonewalling and an insufficiently aggressive criminal investigation, Lauren’s parents pursued a civil case. In June 2013, the Spierer family filed a civil lawsuit against Rossman, Rosenbaum, and Beth, arguing they were negligent on the night of her disappearance.

The suits accused the defendants of negligence, alleging they supplied Spierer with alcohol after she was already visibly intoxicated, then failed to ensure she returned safely to her apartment. As part of the suit, the family subpoenaed private cell phone and academic records spanning 134 days before and after the night Spierer disappeared, a move the defendants’ lawyers labeled a fishing expedition. The lawsuit had also opened the possibility that statements the men gave to police shortly after the disappearance, which had not been revealed to the Spierers or the public, would come to light during civil proceedings.

In December 2013, the federal judge dismissed the suit against Michael Beth. The suits against Corey Rossman and Jason Rosenbaum continued but were ultimately dismissed in October 2014. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling in 2015. The court determined that the plaintiffs had failed to present sufficient evidence that the defendants were at fault for Lauren’s disappearance.

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In April 2015, Bloomington Police announced they were investigating a possible link between Spierer’s disappearance and the murder of IU student Hannah Wilson, who also went missing after visiting Kilroy’s. A local man named Daniel Messel was arrested for Wilson’s murder after his cell phone was found near the body. In July 2015, investigators concluded that the two cases were unrelated.

In January 2016, the FBI investigated a property on Old Morgantown Road in Martinsville, approximately 20 miles north of Bloomington. That investigation centered on properties belonging to the family of a man named Justin Wager. Police dogs reportedly identified something of interest, but the physical search produced nothing conclusive. Investigators announced that any findings from that search would remain private unless charges were filed, which they have not been. Wager maintained that police had been sent to his property based on a false tip and that he and his family had no connection to Lauren’s disappearance.

Also in 2016, a private investigator working for the Spierer family interviewed a man named Corey Hamersley, who was incarcerated at the time on unrelated charges. A tip had reached Lauren’s parents suggesting that Hamersley had told a fellow inmate that Lauren overdosed on Ecstasy while in the presence of three men, who panicked and disposed of her body. During the interview, Hamersley denied the conversation ever took place and denied any involvement in her disappearance.

In 2021, a TikTok video surfaced making allegations about Lauren that connected her disappearance to an online gambling operation. A short time later, Lauren’s family announced publicly that they had reported a TikTok video to police for further investigation, though they did not specify which video it was.

By 2021, police reported that they had received more than 36,000 tips since Lauren disappeared. Of those, 1,100 were described as actionable.

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The Bloomington Police Department has maintained that the case remains very active and that each tip received is investigated to the fullest.

In 2024, journalist Shawn Cohen published a book titled “College Girl Missing: The True Story of How a Young Woman Disappeared in Plain Sight,” with the expressed hope that renewed attention could generate new leads. Cohen noted that even in 2011, a code of silence surrounded many of the key people in the case, and the book questioned whether Bloomington police were sufficiently aggressive in their early interviews with the young men who had been with Lauren that night.

On June 3, 2025, fourteen years after her daughter vanished, Charlene Spierer posted a message that captured everything still unresolved about the case. She wrote that the not knowing what happened, the not knowing where Lauren’s remains are, and the absence of any closure is devastating, exhausting, and endless. She addressed whoever is responsible directly, writing that they will never stop searching and will never forget.

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• 12:30 A.M.
  Lauren and her friend David Rohn leave her apartment and head to Rosenbaum’s.

• 1:46 A.M.
  Spierer and Rossman arrive at Kilroy’s Sports Bar

• 2:27 A.M.
  Spierer and Rossman head back towards her apartment, leaving behind her shoes and phone.

• 2:30 A.M.
  Rossman gets into an altercation near Lauren’s apartment and they head back towards his place.

• 2:48 A.M.
  Rossman & Spierer head into the alley between College Avenue & Morton Street

• 2:51 A.M.
  They exit the alley and head towards Rossman’s Apartment. They arrive shortly afterward and Beth begins trying to find someone to get Spierer.

• 3:30 A.M.
  Beth takes spierer to Rosenbaum’s apartment.

• 4:30 A.M.
  Spierer leaves her apartment, heading for the intersection of 11th Street and College Ave
  

Multiple Victims?: No

Rumored or Actual Sightings:

*If the date says January 1, this is often just a placeholder for an unknown specific date. It usually means “sometime that year”.

Date the Body was Recovered:

Description: Unknown

Time of Death:

Cause of Death:

Recovered Remains (if partial):

Suspected Homicide?: No

Multiple Victims?: No

DNA Tested (No Match):

*If the date says January 1, this is often just a placeholder for an unknown specific date. It usually means “sometime that year”.

Description:

License Plate:

Description: The five men most closely associated with Lauren’s final hours were David Rohn, Jason Rosenbaum, Corey Rossman, Michael Beth, and Jesse Wolff. None has ever been named as a formal suspect. Both Rossman and Beth submitted DNA as part of the investigation, and Rosenbaum participated in a polygraph test.

• Jesse Wolff ➡️ Boyfriend and the one who reported her missing. By all accounts, he was not present that night.
• David Rohn ➡️ Friend who walked with Lauren from her apartment to Rosenbaum’s party at the beginning of the night.
• Jason (‘Jay’) Rosenbaum ➡️ Friend & classmate of Lauren’s. He was hosting a party that night which Lauren attended earlier in the evening. Beth later stated he took Lauren back to Rosenbaum’s house late that evening. Rosenbaum said Lauren left his apartment on her own at around 4:30 am before disappearing.
• Corey Rossman ➡️ Friend & classmate of Lauren’s. He also attended Rosenbaum’s party. Later went to Kilroy’s Sports Bar with Lauren before returning with her to his apartment.
• Michael Beth ➡️ Friend & classmate of Lauren’s; Rossman’s roommate. He also attended Rosenbaum’s party but seemingly went home early. He was at home when Rossman came by with Lauren after they went to the bar and escorted Lauren back to Rosenbaum’s.

Lawyers for the men stated that their clients cooperated fully with police and the private investigators hired by the Spierer family, and that all of them passed private polygraphs. Since they did not trust the Bloomington police, they retained lawyers and declined police-administered polygraphs.

According to a private investigator hired by the family, after Jesse Wolff reported Lauren missing, Wolff said, “She’s dead. I know she’s dead.” The investigator found it notable that Wolff used past tense language so early in the process. Multiple news reports said Wolff helped look for Spierer in the initial days after her disappearance but then quickly left town. Wolff’s defenders have argued that such a statement reflects shock and grief rather than foreknowledge.

Lauren’s mother said she truly did not believe it was a random abduction and that someone Lauren knew was responsible for the events of that evening.