Mystery Of The Missing Scientist

Dr. Timothy Cunningham left his office Feb. 12—and disappeared. Seven weeks later his desperate family and police are still searching for clues to what happened

- Sandra Sobieraj Westfall

Harvard-educated epidemiologist Dr. Timothy Cunningham had a gift for distilling complex science into layman’s terms. “His work—his reports, his research—was immaculate,” says a colleague at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. And the unmarried 35-year-old put the same attentive care into the tidy yellow home he shared with the dog he doted on, Mr. “Bo” Bojangles. So after Cunningham left work on the morning of Feb. 12, saying he was going home sick, everything was in its rightful place: his car in the garage and his keys, wallet and phone safely locked inside the house with Bo. All that was missing, his parents and police discovered two days later, was Cunningham, who had vanished without a trace. “There’s a lot that I cannot simply explain,” says Atlanta police major Michael O’Connor. “This is an extremely unusual set of circumstances.”