Ylenia Maria Sole Carrisi was 23 when she disappeared from New Orleans after arriving around New Year’s Eve 1993. A writer and television personality who sold her belongings to finance travel through Central America, she checked into the LeDale Hotel in the French Quarter and was last seen in the French Quarter area on January 6, 1994. Her family heard from her on New Year’s Day and reported her missing on January 18, 1994.

At the time she was staying with a street musician named Alexander Masakela, roughly twenty years older; he was questioned and was arrested on an unrelated charge later in January but released when no evidence tied him to her disappearance. Most of Ylenia’s personal effects, including her backpack, passport, and journals, remained in her hotel room.

A security guard reported seeing a woman who vaguely matched Ylenia’s description jump into the Mississippi River on the evening of January 6 after saying I belong in water. The Coast Guard searched with no result, and it was never established that the woman was Ylenia. An Italian court declared her presumed dead in January 2013 at her father’s request, but the circumstances of her vanishing remain unresolved.

Does anyone have verifiable information about Ylenia’s last movements in New Orleans or about sightings from early January 1994?