David Porter, 23, a White man, vanished from Honolulu, Hawaii in the first days of November 1976, slipping out of ordinary life so abruptly that the date most often attached to his “death” is really the day worry finally turned official. On November 12, 1976, after his family had gone several days without seeing or hearing from him, he was reported missing.
Friends knew him by the nickname “Boogie,” and the pieces that surfaced later would paint him as someone drawn to the ocean and the beach—until, suddenly, he was simply gone. 
The last confirmed sighting placed him at his mother’s home during the late afternoon of November 3, 1976. He left behind his dog—an omission that stood out as wrong to those who knew his routines, as if whatever pulled him away did not allow time for the small, careful details of leaving. By the next morning, his white 1965 Volkswagen Beetle was seen at his mother’s home around 8:00 a.m., but later that same morning the car disappeared, adding a new urgency to the search: now it wasn’t only a missing person, but a moving mystery. 
Weeks later the Beetle reappeared in a place that felt more like an answer than a clue: abandoned near Kaumoku Street at Mariners Ridge. Neighbors said it had been left there sometime between November 7 and November 11. The car had been wiped clean of fingerprints, as though someone had taken time—calm, deliberate time—to erase the most basic traces of who had last touched it. Inside the trunk were Porter’s swim fins, the kind of personal item that suggested a life still in motion, abruptly interrupted. There was no sign of him at the scene, and no clear trail leading away from it. 
In the background, grief already sat heavy on the family: Porter’s father had died of cancer just weeks before the disappearance, but his brother later indicated Porter did not seem unusually depressed and did not appear suicidal. He also had not touched his bank account after vanishing, deepening the sense that this was not a planned departure but something forced or fatal. Publicly available case summaries describe the disappearance as suspicious and unresolved; they do not identify any named suspect, and they do not report arrests, charges, trials, or convictions connected to his disappearance. 
