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She was a 20-year-old student at Indiana University at the time.
Despite extensive media attention, Spierer is presumed deceased, and her case remains unsolved.
Lauren Elizabeth Spierer was born on January 17, 1991, in Scarsdale, New York.
Her father worked as an accountant.
She attended Edgemont High School and graduated in 2009.
After high school, she went to Indiana University (IU) to study textile merchandising.
At IU, Lauren was active in the Jewish community and she participated in their gatherings.
She had a close circle of friends from Camp Towanda in Pennsylvania, where she met her boyfriend Jesse Wolff and friend Jay Rosenbaum.
They all later attended IU together.
Disappearance
On the night she went missing, June 3, 2011, Lauren was out drinking with friends.
Her boyfriend said that he didn't join Lauren and her friends that night, but they texted each other before he went to sleep.
Witnesses said Lauren was heavily drunk that night.
Bloomington police created a timeline of Lauren's activities that night by reviewing video footage and statements from witnesses to find out where she was before she disappeared.
Friday, June 3, 2011
12:30 a.m. – Witnesses say Lauren left her apartment with her friend David Rohn.
They went to Jay Rosenbaum's apartment, where she met Corey Rossman, a neighbor of Rosenbaum's.
1:46 a.m. – Lauren was seen going into Kilroy's Sports Bar.
2:27 a.m. – Lauren left the bar with Rossman.
She left her phone and shoes at the bar after walking out onto the sand-covered patio.
Rossman walked her back to her apartment complex.
2:30 a.m. – Lauren was seen entering the Smallwood Plaza apartments where she lived.
Zach Oakes, a passerby, noticed she seemed very drunk and asked if she was okay.
2:48 a.m. – Lauren left the apartments and went into an alley between College Avenue and Morton Street.
Security cameras from nearby apartments show her leaving the alley at 2:51 a.m. and heading towards an empty lot.
Her keys and purse were found along this path in the alley.
Shortly after this, Lauren and Rossman arrived at Rossman's apartment.
Michael Beth, Rossman's roommate, was there.
Rossman was extremely drunk, and even vomited on the carpet as he went upstairs.
Beth tried to convince Lauren to stay over for her safety, but she insisted on going back to her own apartment.
3:30 a.m. – Lauren eventually went to Rosenbaum's apartment, where he noticed a bruise under her eye, possibly from a fall earlier that night.
Lauren said she didn't remember how she got the bruise.
Shortly before leaving, two calls were made from Rosenbaum's phone.
He said Lauren made both calls, one to Rohn and another to a friend, but neither answered and no messages were left.
4:30 a.m. – Rosenbaum said Lauren left his apartment.
This was the last time anyone saw Lauren.
Rosenbaum said he last saw her at the intersection of 11th Street and College Avenue, walking south on College.
She was barefoot, wearing black leggings, and a white shirt.
Later that morning, her boyfriend Wolff texted Lauren but got a reply from someone at the bar where she was last seen.
When no one found Lauren, her boyfriend then reported her missing.
Investigation
The police searched the area where Lauren went missing, inorder to find clues about her disappearance.
The Bloomington Police Department, Indiana University Police Department, and the FBI all joined in the search.
However the search yeilded no clues.
By May 24, 2013, investigators had received 3,060 tips about Lauren's disappearance, with 100 of them coming in during the first part of 2013.
In April 2015, Bloomington Police started looking into a possible connection between Lauren's disappearance and the murder of another IU student, Hannah Wilson.
Wilson vanished on April 24, 2015, after being at Kilroy's, the same bar Spierer visited the night she went missing.
Wilson was last seen getting into a taxi outside the bar.
Her body was found the next morning in Brown County.
Daniel Messel, a local man, was arrested for Wilson's murder when his cell phone was found near her body.
However, by July 2015, investigators found that there was no connection between the two cases.
Any similarities between them were just a coincidence.
On January 28, 2016, the FBI and other police agencies investigated a property.
They were following up on new leads and tips related to Lauren Spierer's disappearance.
The property belonged to Justin Wagers, who lived there with his mother and stepfather.
Wagers was suspected of exposing himself to multiple women in the local area.
During the search, cadaver dogs detected possible evidence at the property.
Anthropologists dug and inspected soil from a barn where the dogs had signaled, but they did not discover anything significant.
Lauren's parents think she has passed away.
They feel someone might have put something in her drink at Kilroy's bar.
"We felt somebody could have slipped something into her drink at Kilroy's," said Robert Spierer.
The family was also suspicious of the men who were with Lauren that night, including her boyfriend Wolff.
They refused to take police polygraph tests and hired lawyers shortly after she went missing.
While not making specific accusations, her parents believe these individuals may know more than they've disclosed to the police so far.
The men responded by explaining that they underwent private polygraph tests, including one conducted by the FBI.
According to them, they decided to hire lawyers because they didn't trust the Bloomington police.
Theories
Several theories have been suggested about what happened to Lauren that night:
- Accidental Overdose
Lauren's friends and her boyfriend told the police that she had used drugs along with alcohol on the evening she vanished.
They said this was why she was very drunk that night.
On September 2, 2010, nine months before she disappeared, Lauren was arrested for public intoxication and underage drinking.
After her disappearance, police discovered a "small amount of cocaine" in her room.
Rosenbaum told investigators that on that evening, Lauren had consumed alcohol, snorted cocaine, and crushed Klonopin tablets.
Her rare heart condition, long QT syndrome, made drug use very risky.
There were rumors suggesting that Lauren might have overdosed and that those with her might have hidden her body to avoid legal trouble.
Bo Dietl, a private investigator hired by the Lauren's family, questioned whether a fatal drug overdose would be a sufficient reason to cover up her death, considering the widespread drug use on the IU campus.
Random Kidnapping
The police have said that they are still considering other possibilities, including the idea that Lauren may have been abducted by someone she didn't know.
However, Lauren's parents have expressed their belief that her disappearance was not a random abduction.
Daniel Messel
In 2017, Brown County prosecutor Ted Adams suggested that a man named Daniel Messel, might be linked to Lauren's disappearance.
Previously, in 2016, Messel was convicted of murdering another IU student, Hannah Wilson, who had been reported missing just one day before her body was found in a remote field.
She was fatally beaten and Messel's cell phone was found near her body.
Despite these connections, Messel never faced charges in relation to Lauren's case.
Authorities believe the cases are not linked, but they agree that they share very striking similarities.
Aftermath of Disappearance
Spierer's parents sued Rossman, Rosenbaum, and Beth, alleging they were careless in their actions before she disappeared.
The lawsuits claimed that these individuals gave alcohol to Spierer when she was already clearly drunk.
They also alleged that they failed to ensure she got back home safely, which the family believes contributed to her disappearance.
The family expressed hope that the lawsuits would prompt the defendants to reveal more information about what happened the night Lauren went missing.
In 2013, federal judge Tanya Walton Pratt dismissed the lawsuit against Beth, ruling that he did not have a legal responsibility to care for Lauren.
In 2014, Pratt also dismissed the lawsuit against the other two men.
Lauren's parents appealed the ruling, but the dismissal was upheld by a federal appeals court in 2015
The unsolved disappearance of Lauren Spierer casts a long shadow.
Despite a massive search and countless leads, what happened to her remains a mystery.
Her disappearance still deeply affects her family, friends, and everyone in the Bloomington community.
Though years have passed, hope for answers hasn't faded.
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