In the small town of West Point, Virginia, the evening of May 20, 1957, marked the last time 16-year-old Elsie Mae Roane was ever seen. A local police officer spotted the female teenager standing near the intersection of Main Street and Seventh Street around 11:00 p.m., holding two suitcases. Elsie, a sophomore at West Point High School, was known as an above-average student.
At the time of her disappearance, she lived on Fifth Street with her adoptive father, Harry Roane; her adoptive mother had passed away from breast cancer two years prior. The circumstances of her disappearance are clouded by a delayed reporting, as her father worked the night shift and didn't realize she was missing for three days. This delay meant that by the time an alert was issued to police across Virginia, any potential trail had grown cold.
Elsie's home life was reportedly troubled. Before she vanished, she had written to relatives in North Carolina, expressing her difficulties at home and asking if she could live with them. They had encouraged her to try and mend her relationship with her father. Friends and acquaintances questioned at the time could offer no clues as to her whereabouts. There were rumors that Elsie may have been pregnant at the time she went missing. A male friend of Elsie's told police he had spoken with her on the night she disappeared and she had mentioned plans to spend the night at a female friend's house, but she never arrived. The last bus out of town had already departed more than an hour before she was last seen, and there were no taxis in West Point at that time, deepening the mystery of how she might have left.
Over the decades, the case has remained unsolved, but not forgotten by the community or investigators. In 2012, the West Point Police Department took a fresh look at the case, conducting numerous interviews which led them to identify a male person of interest who was around the same age as Elsie. One individual of interest was a classmate named Lloyd Hodges, with whom Elsie was reportedly in a relationship. When questioned in his seventies, Hodges initially claimed not to remember Elsie, though he later acknowledged knowing her but denied any romantic involvement. The detective who interviewed him believed he knew more than he revealed, but Hodges passed away in 2023 without providing any further information. The police officer who last saw Elsie, Billy Haigler, also drew scrutiny as he did not stop to question why a young girl was out so late on a school night with luggage. He quit the police force three months after her disappearance and died in 1969. Investigators have expressed that while a prosecution is unlikely due to the passage of time, their primary goal is to discover what happened to Elsie and provide closure.Last Seen: May 20, 1957
