At about 4:30 a.m. on June 3, 2011, Lauren Spierer walked away from a townhome near 11th Street and College Avenue in Bloomington, Indiana, headed toward her apartment at Smallwood Plaza. She has never been confirmed seen again.
The distance was short, a few blocks through an area busy with student housing, nightlife, and street cameras. The problem is that the public trail ends anyway, and investigators have never been able to replace it with proof.
Lauren was 20, an Indiana University student from New York, petite at about 4 feet 11 and under 100 pounds, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Her family has kept a public site and tip lines active for years.
She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and moved to Bloomington in 2009 to study fashion design at Indiana University. She shared an apartment at Smallwood Plaza near campus with her roommate, Hadar Tamir, another student from New York.
She also had Long QT Syndrome, a heart rhythm disorder that can become dangerous, especially with missed medication or physiological stress. Friends and family referenced the condition early in the search.
In the days before she disappeared, Lauren was finishing her sophomore year and taking a summer class, with plans tied to New York, including an Anthropologie internship reported at the time.
Her parents, Robert and Charlene Spierer, would quickly become the public face of the search, arriving in Bloomington within a day and staying for months as searches expanded and then faded.
Her sister, Rebecca Spierer, also stepped into the public search, appearing in interviews and at community events, and she continues to help manage anniversaries, online campaigns, and statements from the family about the case.
The night, as police and later reporting reconstructed it
The backbone timeline comes from surveillance images, phone records, and witness interviews, with later reporting filling in context and disagreements. Even in the cleanest version, there are gaps that matter.
Late on June 2, Lauren left Smallwood Plaza dressed in black pants and a white top, heading out with her friend David Rohn. They walked to the 5 North Townhomes area, a cluster of student residences near downtown.
Her roommate later recalled that this walk began around 12:30 a.m., when Lauren left the apartment with David. Rohn told police they first met friends at Jay Rosenbaum’s place in the 5 North Townhomes complex.
Around 1:46 a.m., cameras placed Lauren entering Kilroy’s Sports Bar. It is a central location in the case because it is one of the last clearly timestamped appearances.
At about 2:27 a.m., she left the bar with Corey Rossman, a student she had recently met through the broader friend circle. In multiple accounts, witnesses described her as highly intoxicated by then.
Friends later told reporters that Lauren had not spent time with Rossman before that night. She met him for the first time at Rosenbaum’s apartment, where a small group had gathered to drink before heading to the bars.
A key detail from the official timeline is that Lauren left Kilroy’s without her shoes and without her phone. Some reporting ties this to the bar’s sand covered patio and the way she exited.
After leaving the bar, Lauren and Rossman went to Smallwood Plaza, where Lauren lived. Cameras captured movement in and out of the building, and an altercation occurred that left Rossman bruised.
Later reporting named one of the men as student Zach Oakes, who confronted Rossman about how impaired Lauren looked. Accounts say he punched Rossman, knocking him to the ground, and Rossman later told investigators he remembered little after that point.
According to later reporting, the two did not settle into Lauren’s unit. Within minutes, Lauren was back outside, still without shoes, and the pair moved through the area again.
Around 2:51 a.m., surveillance captured Lauren for what is often described as the last released video moment, moving near an alley and an empty lot close to the 5 North area. Later, her keys and purse were reported found along that route.
From there, Lauren ended up at or near a townhome connected to Rossman and his roommate, Michael Beth. Accounts diverge on what happened inside and who walked her where next.
ABC News reporting described an alley video where Lauren was stumbling and, at one point, Rossman carried her over his shoulder. That image has shaped public assumptions about how impaired she was.
In one commonly cited version, Rossman became ill after reaching his place, and Beth then tried to steer Lauren toward safety by moving her to another nearby unit. This is the handoff that later became central in public arguments.
Beth later stated that once they reached his unit, both Lauren and Rossman could barely stand. He said he steered Rossman to bed, urged Lauren to sleep on the couch, and when she refused, phoned Rosenbaum around 3:30 a.m. to ask for help.
The next named residence in the public narrative is the townhome of Jason “Jay” Rosenbaum, two doors down in the same 5 North area. This is where the last reported sighting originates.
Rosenbaum was not a casual acquaintance. He and Lauren had first met years earlier at Camp Towanda, a summer camp in Pennsylvania, and by 2011 he lived two doors from Rossman, with Michael Beth occupying the other adjacent townhome.
Indianapolis Monthly reported that around 4:15 a.m. there were phone calls placed to David Rohn, tied to the idea that Lauren did not have her own phone and used someone else’s. The calls were not answered.
Investigators later said Lauren used Rosenbaum’s phone to call Rohn and another friend in those minutes. Neither call was answered, and nobody retrieved a voicemail that might narrow the final timeline further.
The final point on the map is around 4:30 a.m., when Rosenbaum’s account has Lauren leaving the townhome and walking toward 11th Street and College Avenue, turning south toward Smallwood Plaza.
Her family’s site describes her last known clothing as black pants and a white tank top with a white top, and multiple reports emphasize she was barefoot.
Police summaries and later timelines usually describe that outfit as black leggings and a white shirt, with friends emphasising that she still had no shoes when she stepped away from the intersection at 11th Street and College Avenue.
After that, there is no publicly confirmed camera image of Lauren reaching her building, entering it, or continuing down College Avenue. The search, from day one, has been about explaining that missing stretch.
The boyfriend, the phone, and the moment people realized she was gone
Lauren’s long distance boyfriend was Jesse Wolff, also an IU student. Police publicly called him a person of interest early on in the sense that they were trying to talk to everyone connected to her last hours.
Wolff and Lauren had first met years earlier at Camp Towanda in Pennsylvania, the same summer camp where she met Rosenbaum. By 2011 they had been a couple for about two years, maintaining their relationship while at Indiana.
On the night she disappeared, Wolff was at his own Bloomington apartment watching sports with friends rather than at the bars. He told police he had not seen Lauren at all that evening.
The most consistently reported trigger for the missing person report is simple, her phone stopped behaving like Lauren’s phone. Jesse tried to reach her, and a bar employee ultimately replied that her phone was left at Kilroy’s.
By early afternoon on June 3, Wolff had received a reply from a Kilroy’s employee explaining that Lauren’s phone and shoes were there. He and Hadar Tamir then met up and began checking likely places before contacting police.
That detail matters because it anchors the phone’s location while Lauren herself remained unlocated. It also helps explain why friends moved quickly toward keys, roommates, and physical searches rather than waiting.
Indiana Daily Student reporting described Bloomington Police confirming they had Lauren’s cellphone within days, with the phone located between a friend’s apartment and Smallwood. That sits alongside the bar employee reply detail in later retellings.
By the afternoon of June 3, friends reported Lauren missing to the Bloomington Police Department. By June 4, her parents were in Indiana, walking blocks, reading sidewalks, and pushing the search outward.
The first wave search, fast, public, then grinding
The early search became unusually visible, unusually quickly. Social media accounts like @NewsOnLaurenS spread images, updates, and calls for tips across the country within days.
Volunteer ground searches ran repeatedly, with the schedule tightening and then shrinking as days passed without a break. IU staff, students, and community leaders appeared at searches and vigils.
Police used divers, dogs, checkpoints, and repeated canvassing of the same few blocks where the last confirmed sighting sat on the timeline. In June 2011, the department also publicly referenced ten persons of interest.
Bloomington Police have repeatedly described the four men from Lauren’s final hours as people with continuing investigative interest, but none has been charged. Reports say they declined police polygraphs on legal advice, instead taking privately arranged tests and providing DNA samples.
Within the first week, officers and volunteers also focused on Lake Monroe, sending divers to search near the Fourwinds Resort and Marina on June 8 after an anonymous, specific tip suggested that area. They reported finding nothing linked to Lauren.
On June 15, Bloomington Police released grainy surveillance images of a white pickup truck passing twice through the last seen area. The driver later came forward, and investigators publicly cleared both him and the vehicle.
Rewards escalated. WRTV reported Colts owner Jim Irsay offering $10,000 early, followed by Lauren’s parents offering $100,000, and later public reporting put the reward as high as $250,000.
Kilroy’s also became part of the official record beyond the timeline. In September 2011, Indiana State Excise Police cited the bar for allowing a minor to loiter and furnishing alcohol to a minor, tied to their investigation.
What investigators did after the headlines cooled
When street searches failed, law enforcement moved to slower, heavier work, interviews, record collection, and targeted searches based on tips. The Indiana Daily Student later reported thousands of overtime hours devoted to the case.
The landfill search became one of the most cited examples of scale. WRTV reported more than 4,000 tons of trash searched at Sycamore Ridge Landfill in August 2011, without evidence recovered.
In the years after, false alarms kept arriving in waves, remains later determined not to be hers, and tips that made headlines before dissolving. WRTV’s running timeline captures those moments year by year.
In August 2012, Bloomington police encountered Indianapolis resident Robert Redington on an upper level of a downtown parking garage overlooking Kilroy’s. He carried two loaded handguns, with a shotgun and ammunition stored in his vehicle nearby.
Redington told officers he was in town because of Lauren’s disappearance and spoke about seeing spirits and dark entities. Courts later described him as having a personality disorder, and his 51 guns stayed in police custody until an appeals court ordered their return in 2019.
Another name appeared in 2016, when an inmate at Indiana State Prison told investigators that former IU student Corey Hamersley had mentioned Lauren while they watched a news segment. Hamersley, jailed for a drug fueled shooting rampage, allegedly said he knew the men responsible.
According to that inmate, Hamersley said Lauren overdosed on ecstasy at a gathering and that frightened friends disposed of her body in the Ohio River. Investigators treated the story as uncorroborated, and Hamersley later denied knowing anything about her disappearance.
Coverage of that lead often mentions that Hamersley and Lauren both moved in Bloomington’s heavy party scene. Police have said they found a small amount of cocaine in her apartment during early searches, a detail her parents have publicly addressed.
In 2015, investigators also examined whether convicted killer Daniel Messel could be tied to Lauren’s case. Messel murdered IU student Hannah Wilson after she left Kilroy’s, but police have never announced any evidence connecting him to Lauren’s disappearance.
That same year, inmate David Hayden wrote a series of letters to courts claiming Messel had involved him in moving Lauren’s body during a camping trip in Brown County. A judge dismissed his letters as unreliable and ordered him to stop sending them.
In January 2016, the case produced another major public action, an FBI connected search at a Martinsville property tied in media coverage to Justin Wagers. Public timelines state the search did not yield Lauren’s remains.
Media later identified the man connected to that Martinsville search as Justin Wagers, previously arrested for exposing himself to women and girls. Agents removed a white pickup with a blue camper shell and used cadaver dogs and anthropologists to examine nearby ground.
Investigators also searched a rural property linked to Wagers’ father on Old Morgantown Road, again using dogs and careful excavation. Authorities have never announced finding evidence tying Wagers to Lauren, and he later served prison time on the indecent exposure cases.
The civil lawsuit, and what it did and did not change
In 2013, Lauren’s parents filed a civil lawsuit against men connected to her final hours, arguing negligence related to decisions made while she was visibly intoxicated. The lawsuit became a parallel fight for information.
The lawsuit, filed in 2012, argued that Rossman, Rosenbaum, and Beth furnished alcohol and possibly drugs when Lauren was already clearly impaired and then failed to make sure she returned safely to Smallwood, conduct her parents believe contributed to her death.
The case went through dismissals and appeals. In 2015, the Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the defendants, and the case did not produce a courtroom finding of what happened to Lauren.
In dismissing the claims, Judge Tanya Walton Pratt wrote that many different scenarios could explain what happened after Lauren left 5 North and that, without concrete evidence, a jury could not reliably link any specific theory to the defendants’ actions.
The legal outcome did not resolve the factual questions people cared about most, whether Lauren left the townhome alone, whether someone else joined her, and where the trail actually breaks.
The questions that keep returning
One reason this case holds attention is how narrow the final window is on paper. A short walk, a familiar neighborhood, and a clear last point, followed by absence.
Another reason is that much of what happened indoors relies on a small number of accounts, and later reporting has described inconsistencies across interviews. That has kept public debate fixed on the same names.
There are also persistent rumors that never fully solidified into public proof, including a reported scream near the last seen area and talk of other people present inside the townhome complex. These details appear in longform reporting as unresolved.
What changed in 2024 and 2025
In 2024, a new book, College Girl, Missing by journalist Shawn Cohen, brought fresh attention and presented additional witness context and phone record discussion, while also emphasizing that the core mystery remains.
In 2025, local coverage around the 14 year mark again restated the same fixed point, last seen around 4:30 a.m., leaving the townhome area and walking toward College Avenue, with her clothing description repeated.
Lauren’s family continues to publish updates and keep official tip channels visible. Their site still lists her last seen clothing, her height and weight, and the Bloomington Police and IU Police contact routes.
Anyone with information can contact the Bloomington Police Department at 812-339-4477. You can also reach the Indiana University Police Department at 812-855-4111 for reports related to her disappearance.
Her family’s official site findlauren.com lists these contacts and invites tips and support.
The family’s official Facebook page with updates and community information is Official Lauren Spierer Updates from Her Family.
