On a summer afternoon in July 1977, 18-year-old Audrey Lyn Nerenberg left her family home in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn to buy cigarettes two blocks away and never returned. She carried only a small brown shoulder bag with two dollars, no identification and no prescribed medication. Later that day the family received a phone call from an unknown man claiming to have abducted her and demanding ransom; that call produced no leads.

Audrey was an outpatient at Kingsboro Psychiatric Center being treated for hebephrenic schizophrenia after a diagnosis at 15 and several brief hospitalizations between 1974 and 1977. Investigators have followed leads over the years but no arrests have been made. A friend of her brother, later convicted of an unrelated stabbing in 1982, became a person of interest after refusing a polygraph, though no direct evidence linked him to Audrey. Andre Rand has also been mentioned in investigative speculation, but no concrete tie to Audrey’s disappearance has been found.

Searches of medical facilities have been conducted amid a theory she might have been admitted unidentified, yet nothing has turned up. Does anyone have memories of Audrey, that day in Canarsie, or information that could help bring clarity to her disappearance?