Elizabeth Connie Converse was 50 when she quietly packed her Volkswagen Beetle in the summer of 1974 and drove away from her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Before leaving she mailed letters to friends and family saying she intended to start a new life; the letters contained a tone of finality and reflected a period of deep depression, professional disappointment, and heavy drinking. Her brother Philip later suggested she may have driven into a body of water and taken her own life, and a friend remembered her defending another person’s right to suicide.

The family respected a written wish to be left alone and did not immediately contact police; about a decade later they hired a private investigator but found no answers. There was an unpursued sighting of an Elizabeth Converse listed in a Kansas or Oklahoma phone book years afterward.

Connie’s whereabouts after she left Ann Arbor remain unknown.