Nicholas Peter Zizzamia was 22 and a senior accounting major at Villanova when he left his parents’ home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on May 12, 1979. He said he was driving to campus to pick up graduation tickets, left in his father’s 1976 Pontiac Bonneville wearing a tan sweater, blue jeans and white sneakers, and phoned later to say he would be home by 8:00 p.m. He never returned and did not attend graduation.

The Pontiac was found parked and locked behind his father’s barbershop on Grove Street in Cherry Hill on May 15; an inspection turned up nothing suspicious. Friends later said Nicholas had talked about wanting to vanish, prompting speculation he might have left voluntarily or taken his own life, but there was no activity on his driver’s license, Social Security number or credit cards after he disappeared. A week after he vanished, an unidentified man matching Nicholas’s description was found dead by suicide in a Richmond, Indiana motel room; authorities have considered whether that John Doe could be Nicholas, but burial records and the grave marker for the unidentified man are missing, preventing confirmation.

Nicholas was an only child; his parents died without learning what happened and a paternal aunt continues to hope for answers. If anyone has information about Nicholas’s last movements or the unidentified man found in Richmond in May 1979, please share what is known.