Justice Pending, Episode 48: Lauren Spierer

November 20, 2025·23 min·1 clip

Twenty-year-old Lauren Spierer vanished from a well-lit college street in Bloomington with friends, cameras, and just two and a half blocks to walk.

The episode covers the disappearance of Lauren Spierer, who went missing in Bloomington, Indiana, on June 2, 2011. Lauren was a 20-year-old Indiana University student from Scarsdale, New York, studying textiles merchandising. She was barely five feet tall, weighed approximately 90 pounds, and had blonde hair and blue eyes. The evening began with friends watching a basketball game at her apartment in the Smallwood Plaza Complex. After texting her boyfriend Jesse Wolf that she was going to bed around 12:30 a.m., Lauren instead went to a party two blocks away at her friend Jason Rosenbaum's townhouse. At the party, she met Corey Rossman and Michael Beth. Witnesses suggested that drugs including Klonopin and cocaine may have been involved in addition to alcohol. Around 1:30 a.m., Lauren and Rossman went to Kilroy's Sports Bar, where they stayed for less than half an hour. Notably, Lauren left the bar barefoot and without her phone. Surveillance footage later showed Rossman carrying Lauren over his shoulder as they returned to his apartment around 2:30 a.m. In the hallway of Lauren's apartment building, the group encountered friends of Jesse Wolf, and one of them punched Rossman in the face. Rossman has since claimed the punch erased his memory of the evening. At Jason's place, Rossman's roommate said Corey went to bed sick. According to Jason, Lauren refused his offer to sleep on his couch and left around 4:30 a.m. heading south on College Avenue. After that point, no surveillance footage captured her. By the afternoon of June 3rd, Jesse Wolf reported her missing after not hearing from her. Police and hundreds of volunteers searched lakes, wooded areas, and dumpsters throughout Bloomington. All four men she was with that night hired lawyers quickly and were named persons of interest, though none have been charged. Private polygraphs arranged through their attorneys produced results that were never made public. Lauren's parents flew in from New York and stayed in Indiana for weeks, joining searches and speaking with media. The hosts discuss three main theories: deliberate foul play by the men she was with, accidental overdose potentially triggered by her known heart condition, and stranger abduction. A man later convicted of killing another Indiana student, Hannah Wilson, in 2015 was investigated but police found no connection to Lauren's case. In 2025, journalist Sean Cohen published the book 'College Girl Missing,' which includes new interviews and witness testimony. Lauren's family continues to post on social media every June 3rd and believes someone still knows the truth.

As heard by us

A careful, unsettling case study that keeps its focus on the facts and the unease.

Lauren Spear's disappearance is handled with restraint, beginning on a summer night in Bloomington and moving through the people investigators looked at first.

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Why you'd press play

A missing-person case where the timeline is sharp and the answers stay slippery.

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