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- [00:00]
Narrator/Advertiser
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- [00:32]
Sarah Reid
It's April 1980 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Manchester is a mill city stitched together by the Merrimack River. The red brick factories stretch long and low against a gray sky. It's the kind of place where the river air clings to your clothes, and the buildings seem to hum with the memories of machines that haven't run in years, brick and mortar and river air, old mill blocks carved into apartments, windows that rattle in the wind. On the west side of town, just a few blocks from the river, the buildings sit close together, like they're huddling against the cold. The building at 289 Merrimack street is one of them, a modest three story New England style multifamily home with white clapboard siding. And inside it's quiet. Not silent, just muffled pipes ticking, a refrigerator humming. The building seems to be waiting. Around 1:15am Headlights sweep across the building as a car eases into a parking space. Judith Raun and her boyfriend step out and head toward the front door of the building. The stairwell is dark. Not dim, completely dark. They climb the stairs anyway, feeling their way up toward the third floor. Investigators would later discover that all of the light bulbs in the stairwell had been unscrewed, and before they even step foot inside the apartment, she can feel it. Something is off. The front door opens easily, too easily. Inside, the air feels wrong, shifted. The back door is wide open, and in the bedroom there's a girl asleep in her daughter's bed, a friend who had been over earlier that night. But her daughter is not there. No sound from the kitchen or the bathroom. No jacket grabbed in a rush, no note on the table. Just an open space where her daughter should be. Her name is Laureen Ron. She's 14 years old, and whatever happened here happened fast. I'm Sarah Reid, and this is sequestered season four. The year is 1980. We're in South Central New Hampshire, and this is the disappearance of Loreen Ron. Do you know any 14 year olds, or do you at least remember being 14, because I do 14. Is that funny in between age where you're not a little kid anymore, but. But you're also not free. You're old enough to want the whole world and yet you're still living under someone else's rules. Laureen Rahn lived with her mom, Judith Rohn, in Manchester, N.H. she went to Parkside Junior High. She got good grades, but she was the kind of kid who can look totally fine at school and still have a whole private world going on underneath. She loved singing and dancing. She dreamed of becoming an actress. For Laureen, it was that kind of dream that isn't just about success. It was about being noticed, being seen. The night she disappeared wasn't supposed to be a night where anything bad happened. It was the first Saturday of her spring break. Judith, her mom was out of town for the day, watching her boyfriend compete in a tennis tournament one town over. Laureen usually went with them, but this time she asked to stay home and Judith said yes. So it's that kind of night. A normal Saturday night. A teenager at home with a little more freedom than usual. And it's not long before a couple of friends stop by. There's drinking beer and wine. The kind of risky, ordinary decisions teens have been making forever. And I want to sit in that for a second because it matters. This case isn't born out of a dramatic final scene. It starts in the small stuff. An apartment, a spring night. Kids passing time like they're adults, assuming tomorrow is guaranteed. Back then, there was no digital trail, no texts or location pings. Instead, Laureen's last hours live in a handful of memories and a handful of details. And those details are about to become everything. Because inside that apartment was nearly everything investigators would ever know and almost nothing they could prove.
- [05:33]
Police Official
On April 26, 1980, 14 year old Lorene Rohn was hanging out in her Merrimack street neighborhood. She and a female friend went back to her apartment where they fell asleep. When Lorene's mother came home that night, the friend was asleep, but Lorene was gone.
- [05:53]
Sarah Reid
Here's what we can say for sure based on the official summary in this case, Judith Ron tells police she had gone out for the evening with her boyfriend and Lorene had asked to stay home. In Manchester. Judith and her boyfriend return around 1:15am and when they arrive, she notices two things immediately. The front door is unsecured and the back door of the apartment is wide open. There are no signs of forced entry. Inside the apartment, Judith finds one of Lorene's friends asleep in Lauren's bed. But Lorene is not there. The friend explains that earlier in the night she and Laureen had been drinking. She says Lorene had gone to bed, but later got up, grabbed a pillow and blanket, and moved to the couch in the living room. And according to the timeline investigators would later build, that is the last confirmed moment anyone can place Loreen Ron inside that apartment. At 3:45am on April 27, 1980, the Manchester Police Department responded to 289 Merrimack street on a report of a missing 14 year old girl. And from that moment on, the timeline stops. The room stays, the couch stays. Loreen does not. When investigators step into this case, they're working with a scene that's unsettling for all of the things it doesn't have. Not because the apartment is chaotic, it's not. Not because something is smashed or overturned, nothing was, but because it's too normal. There are no clear clues in the room, no obvious sign of a struggle, no blood or broken furniture or ripped clothing, no signs of forced entry. Nothing that says this is the moment everything went wrong. And when a person goes missing like that, when the scene refuses to explain itself, the first question isn't even who did this? The first question is, what kind of missing is this? Meaning is this a kid who walked out on her own? A kid who planned something? A kid who thought she'd be gone for an hour and came back to a locked door? Or is this a kid who never had a choice in the matter because Laureen was 14 and 14 is old enough to think you're capable of more than you are, and young enough to be incredibly vulnerable in the wrong moment to the wrong person and possibly make the wrong decision. She was small, around 90 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes. And if she walked out of that building on her own into the dark, what was she expecting to happen next? Was she meeting another friend on a quick walk? Did she have a ride, A plan? Or was it nothing more than a teenager's version of I just need some air?
- [09:05]
Investigator/Expert
It was basically a missing juvenile at the time, and she just never appeared. And there's never been any real solid leads to where to go to actually identify where she is right now.
- [09:24]
Sarah Reid
In those early hours, police tried to build a timeline from the people closest to the last moments we can account for. Reaching backward through a night that already felt slippery. Two friends had seen Lorene not long before she disappeared. They could place her in the apartment. They could describe the mood, the drinking, the ordinary drifting of time that night but they couldn't explain the one thing that mattered. Where she went, why she left, who she might have been meeting, or what might have happened after she moved from her bed to the couch. There was no answer, no direction, just absence. And in cases like this, absence isn't just a void. It becomes the shape that investigators are forced to work around early on. Details like clothing matter because there's sometimes all you have. Laureen was reported missing wearing a white V neck sweater over a blue plaid blouse and blue jeans with brown shoes. She was wearing a heart shaped gold ring and a silver and blue necklace. The point is, this isn't a kid who packed a bag and planned for a long trip. This is someone dressed for a normal Saturday night with friends and then disappeared into thin air. The early morning hours turned into days and the case shifted from missing teenager to something investigators feared was much darker. Then, months later, Judith found something on her phone bill that would haunt this case case for years. When we come back, the trail jumps from New Hampshire to California.
- [11:21]
Narrator/Advertiser
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- [11:55]
Sarah Reid
It's early November. Months have passed since Laureen disappeared and Judith is doing something painfully ordinary, going line by line through her phone bill. That's when she sees them. Three collect call charges, all dated October 1st. If you remember the 80s, a collect call is what you make from a payphone when you don't have enough change. You dial, you ask the operator to place it collect. And the person who answers has to decide in real time to accept the charges or hang up. These are the charges Judith is staring at on her bill that day. Collect calls weren't all that unusual to see on your bill back then. But what's strange here is the pattern. All three calls were placed from California and all on the same day. It isn't a wrong number, it isn't a glitch she can explain away. And California? Judith doesn't have ties there. Neither did Lorene. There was no reason for her home phone in Manchester to be connected to California at all. And that's when the thought, what if Laureen Made those calls. Police start pulling on the thread because it's the first thing in months that feels like movement. Something that isn't just a rumor or a feeling or a guess. It's a record, a trace. They work the lead with authorities in California, and what they learn only makes things stranger. Two of the calls were traced back to a motel payphone in Santa Monica, which were placed to another motel in Santa Ana. The third call went to a teen sexual assistance hotline, which was run by a California physician. And I know what you might be thinking. How do charges show up on Judith's phone bill if none of those calls were actually placed to her home? Back then, a lot of long distance calls ran through an operator, and there were ways to route billing that barely exists anymore, including collect calls, operator assisted billing, and even billing a call to a third party's phone number. Which is likely what happened in this case. What matters is that the phone company's records tied all of those calls to Judith's line. Not as a theory, not as a rumor, but as an official billing record. And this is where the case splits right down the middle. Because on one side you have Manchester, New Hampshire, a 14 year old girl gone from a third floor apartment, her life still sitting there like she could walk back in at any moment. And on the other side, you have California motel payphones and a teen hotline. The kind of places teenagers don't usually end up by accident. Investigators managed to track down the physician who was connected to the hotline. At first, he tells them he knows nothing about the call. And for a while, the lead seems to go nowhere. Time passes the way it does in missing person cases. Not cleanly, not in chapters. Weeks become months, months become years. But that California detail doesn't go away. It just sits there, unresolved. Then the case gets pulled back off the shelf, because in 1985, that same physician changes his story. He reportedly tells an investigator that runaway girls sometimes visited his wife at their home and that one of them may have been from New Hampshire. A promising lead that led them nowhere. Authorities also looked into another dark possibility tied to California, including whether one of the locations connected to the calls had any connection to a child pornographer known as Dr. Z. But investigators were never able to connect that person to the hotline or the motels. And they were never able to prove that Lorene was ever in California at all. Here is where that trail stalls. No confirmations, no names, no way to prove who was on the other end of that line. So you're left with the same brutal question, just in different form. If those calls were her, how did she get there? And if they weren't, who placed them and why? At the center of it all is the part that never changes. Lorene Ron is still missing, and no one has ever been able to explain how a 14 year old just disappears from a third floor apartment and leaves almost nothing behind.
- [16:44]
Police Official
Police say what's unusual is there was no sign of forced entry and she took nothing with her. How and why she vanished and where she is now remains a mystery.
- [16:54]
Investigator/Expert
She walked away, and we don't know if she went out to a different location. There was rumors she went out to California. There was rumors that she, you know, could be here in the city of Manchester. It's been all over the place.
- [17:13]
Sarah Reid
When a person disappears without a trace, the theories can multiply quickly. Not because the truth is complicated, but because the silence is so. I want to do this the disciplined way and separate what's documented from what's speculated. We have theory one, and that is that Laureen left voluntarily. In other words, she was a runaway. This theory shows up early for a reason. Lorene was 14. There were no obvious signs of a struggle inside the apartment, and some reports describe her as going through a troubled phase. People who knew her said she talked about running away before. But here's what complicates that theory. She didn't take the things you'd expect someone to take if they were leaving on purpose, even if it was just for one night. No money, no clothing, no personal items. And I know that doesn't disprove runaway, but it does make it harder to explain. She was taken either by someone she knew or someone who knew the building. This theory grows out of one brutal detail. Lorene disappears from her home while someone else is asleep in her bed. If she was abducted, it suggests timing, opportunity, a person who either knew the apartment's rhythm or was close enough to take a risk. In that setting. There was the unlocked front door, the open back door, and the unscrewed light bulbs in the stairwell. It's the kind of disappearance that makes you wonder if someone was waiting for the moment to be right. But there's a hard limit here. There's no confirmed witness who sees Loreen leave and no confirmed physical evidence that proves an abduction. So the case stays balanced on that razor edge. She either walked out or. Or she was taken out. Theory 3, the California thread and the fear that comes with it. Months after Lorene vanished, her mother found charges on the phone bill for calls connected to California. That's documented. Investigators traced where those calls came from and where they went, including the teen hotline. The leap happens after that, because once California enters the story, people begin to imagine the worst case version of how a missing 14 year old ends up that far away. You'll see it described as trafficking, exploitation, a ring, a pipeline. Here's what we can say. Carefully, though, investigators followed all of the leads connected to those calls. They spoke to the physician. They looked into the possible connection to the child pornographer known as Dr. Z. But they could not confirm that Lorene was ever there, and they could not conclusively connect those calls to her disappearance. So this theory remains what it always has, a deeply disturbing possibility built around a lead that refuses to become proof. Theory four, a known offender in the region. Over the years, people have speculated about whether a serial offender active in New England at the time could have been involved, including names that surface because of proximity and later crimes. But this is where we have to be careful, because proximity is not evidence and rumor is not a lead. Unless law enforcement has publicly named a person as a suspect in Lorene's case, we have to treat this as speculation, not a conclusion. And then there are the sightings. Over the years, there have been unconfirmed sightings, including claims in places like Boston and. And even as far away as Alaska. They're haunting because they offer hope, but unconfirmed means exactly that. There's no documentation strong enough to turn them into fact. So when you step back, the case still comes down to a small number of possibilities. Did Laureen leave that apartment on her own, expecting to come right back? Was she intercepted in the hallway, on the stairs outside of the building? Or did the answers travel farther than anyone could imagine without leaving a trail? Anyone can prove that last part. The not knowing, is what makes this case endure.
- [21:55]
Police Official
The missing persons website says foul play is suspected, but investigators aren't so sure and are still treating this as a missing person's case. This week, the Attorney General's newly formed Cold Case unit began looking at Lorene's file.
- [22:09]
Sarah Reid
We're in the process now of reviewing the case involving Lorene Rohn to evaluate whether it should be included on the cold case website, whether the circumstances would lead us to believe that foul play was involved and that it should be a case listed with our unit. This is the part of the episode where we pull back and look at it through the 1980s lens, because when you hear this story now, your brain immediately reaches for modern tools. Where's the last ping? Who texted? Who what do the cameras show in the hallway? Did anyone's doorbell catch her leaving? In 1980, none of that existed. If Laureen walked out of that apartment building, there was no digital breadcrumb behind her, no phone in her pocket, no location history, no automated timestamp that says this is where to start. And that matters in a case like this, because this disappearance lives in a narrow space. It's not a highway. It's not a bus station. It's a small building, a hallway, a stairwell, a door that didn't catch. The other thing the decade changes is how quickly a story becomes a label. In the early hours of a missing teen case, especially back then, it was easy for the first narrative to be she ran away not because anyone didn't care, but because that was the closest explanation people had when there wasn't visible violence and there weren't obvious clues. And once a case gets labeled, the whole investigation can be shaped by that first assumption. Leads get sorted differently, the urgency shifts, and people decide what kind of story they're hearing. So the 80s lens for Laureen is both simple and brutal. A girl can disappear in the smallest possible window from the most ordinary possible place, and the decade offers almost nothing to capture the moment it happened. No cameras, no data, just human memory. And memory is fragile. Lorene Ron has never been found. No one has been charged, and no answer has ever arrived that could claim close this story with certainty. What investigators have, even all these years later, are the pieces that still matter. Her case is still listed as endangered, missing. There are records. There is evidence on file, and there are identifiers available that can help, including dental information and DNA. And that matters because time does not erase a person. It just changes the way the truth surfaces. Sometimes cases like this get solved because someone finally says the thing they've been holding back for decades. Sometimes it's a memory that never felt important until it's placed next to the right detail. Sometimes it's one small admission, one name, one story about that building that night, that hallway, that door. So if you know something about Loreen Ron, if you remember something that you've never told anyone, you can still speak now. You can contact the Manchester Police Department at 603-668-8711. And if you're listening from far away, here's what you can do. Say her name correctly, remember that she was 14, and resist the urge to turn her into a legend or a cautionary tale. Laureen was a real kid, a daughter, a friend, a teenager with plans, with a voice and a future. She didn't get to live. Whatever happened to her, she deserves to be searched for like she mattered. Because she did. In 1981, another case begins, this time in Oklahoma. Two girls disappear in the same night, and the closer you look, the harder it becomes to say what actually happened. Sequestered is created by Sarah Reed and Andrea Clyde. Hosted and produced by Sarah. Written and researched together.