Sharon Sue Smith, 25, was last seen on August 25, 1980, in Bangor, Maine after finishing an evening shift at the Paramount Lounge on Harlow Street. She was renting a room on the hotel’s ground floor; police later found the room door open and her purse left inside. She never contacted family again and her Social Security number has not been used since her disappearance.

Smith was a mother of two and had been planning to move to Florida with her parents and five siblings. Over the years suspicion focused on a sometime boyfriend, Franklin George Gilks, after people reported he had claimed to have killed Smith during an argument. An anonymous caller later warned Smith’s daughter to leave the case alone and said Gilks had killed her mother. An anonymous letter identified a property on New Boston Road in Hermon, where Gilks grew up, and a cadaver dog alerted to human remains in the area, but an excavation of the front yard produced nothing.

Gilks died in 2008; Smith’s children’s father is also deceased and her oldest child died as a teenager. Her daughter continues to seek answers. Did anyone in the Bangor or Hermon area remember Sharon or see anything on or after August 25, 1980?