Notable disappearances captivate and unsettle us

People who know nada about aviation history still know who Amelia Earhart is.

- PATT MORRISON

A SIGN OF SOLIDARITY from neighbors at Nancy Guthrie's home in Catalina Foothills, Ariz.

CAITLIN O'HARA Associated Press

People who know squat about American labor unions still know who Jimmy Hoffa is.

People know them—the pioneering flier and the Teamsters union president-because both of them vanished dramatically.

Both were famous in life, and now enduringly so in the mystery of their disappearing.

Death itself holds tragedy but rarely mystery. We can tell that some animating spirit has left a body; we can see the corporeal before and after.

Yet with a disappearance, there is no "after," no finale. And that unsettles and engrosses us.

Now we have the vanishing of Nancy Guthrie, the octogenarian mother of a TV news personality, evidently carried off from her Arizona home into ... a void. No trace, no proof of life, and all the while, the nation is informed of every twist of what mostly is not happening.

It turns out there are several kinds of "disappeared":

There are people who choose to disappear. It's practically a founding American tradition. Our continental spread allowed people to "light out for the territory," in Mark Twain's phrase, to shed one identity and assume another-a cowboy, maybe, or a con man.

The American West was a magician's box: go in as one person, emerge as another. This is much harder to do now that tech can foil any vanisher's plans, from renting cars to getting cash. And those who fake their own deaths usually get caught. More than 20 years back, a Newport Beach doctor dodging nearly $2.5 million in insurance fraud charges bought himself a fake Russian death certificate. He got nabbed after almost 14 years on the lam, some of them spent teaching scuba in Egypt.