On January 16, 1981, 17-year-old white female Mary Opitz vanished from the parking lot of Edison Mall in Fort Myers, Florida. She had gone shopping with her mother and brother that evening, and after expressing fatigue, she told them she would wait at their car—a burgundy 1979 Chevrolet Camaro. When her mother returned just minutes later, Mary was gone. Her shopping bags and a package of pretzels were found placed on top of the car, but there was no sign of Mary herself.
The area was well-lit, and there were no indications of a struggle.
Initially, law enforcement treated the case as a possible runaway situation, despite her family's insistence that Mary had no reason to leave voluntarily. She had left behind $300 in her bank account, was preparing for her GED exam, and was excited about getting her braces removed in the coming weeks. She also hadn't taken her purse or any extra clothing. Mary lived with her family on College Parkway and had dropped out of high school in tenth grade to focus on her studies. Her mother, Nancy Hoffman, was adamant that Mary had been abducted.
Less than a month later, on February 11, 1981, another young woman—18-year-old white female Mary Elizabeth Hare—disappeared from the same mall parking lot under eerily similar circumstances. Hare had gone to pick up her mother from work, and when her mother arrived, she found Hare's car unlocked and parked, but her daughter was missing. Hare's body was discovered four months later in a remote field near Highway 82 in Lehigh Acres, Florida. She had been stabbed in the back and left fully clothed in a ditch. The decomposition made it impossible to determine whether she had been sexually assaulted.
Both Mary Opitz and Mary Hare attended the same high school, had grown up in New York, and spoke with a regional New York accent. They were known to frequent the same restaurant, and although it's unclear if they knew each other personally, their physical resemblance and shared routines raised suspicions of a connection between the cases. Despite these similarities, authorities have never officially linked the two disappearances.
One theory suggests that both young women may have been victims of Australian-born serial killer Christopher Wilder. Wilder was active in Florida during the early 1980s and was known for luring women from shopping malls under the guise of offering modeling opportunities. He was responsible for multiple abductions, rapes, and murders across several states. Wilder was killed in a shootout with police in 1984, and although he was named a suspect in both cases, no definitive evidence has ever tied him to the disappearance of Mary Opitz or the murder of Mary Hare.
To date, no arrests have been made in connection with the disappearance of 17-year-old white female Mary Opitz. Her case remains open and unsolved, and her family continues to hope for answers more than four decades later.
