Hyun Jong "Cindy" Song

Case background and investigation

Hyun Jong Song, known to friends as Cindy, was a South Korean-born student at Pennsylvania State University, majoring in integrative arts and active in campus life through the Korean Undergraduate Student Association, the Red Cross, and an advertising club. In the fall of 2001 she was 21 years old and living in an apartment on Blue Course Drive in State College, Pennsylvania. By all accounts she was a bright, sociable young woman looking ahead to graduation. Her disappearance on the morning after Halloween would become one of Penn State's most enduring mysteries, unsolved for more than two decades.

On the night of October 31, 2001, Cindy dressed in a bunny costume and went out with friends to Player's Night Club on West College Avenue, where they danced and celebrated the holiday. Afterward the group reportedly went to a friend's home to play video games for a few hours. Around 4 a.m. on November 1, her roommate, Stacy Paik, dropped Cindy off at their apartment. That was the last time anyone reported seeing her. When friends later checked the apartment, they found evidence she had made it safely inside: her false eyelashes had been removed and set down, and her backpack and phone were there. Yet Cindy herself was gone, and her bunny costume, purse, identification, and credit cards were missing. There were no signs of a struggle.

The absence of a struggle and the presence of some belongings but not others left investigators from the Ferguson Township Police Department with more questions than answers. There was no activity on her bank cards and no calls from her phone after she was dropped off. In December 2001, a tip emerged that a woman matching Cindy's description had been seen being forced into a vehicle in Philadelphia's Chinatown, roughly two hundred miles away; police developed a composite sketch of a possible suspect, but the lead was ultimately not confirmed. The case went cold, with no crime scene, no witnesses to an abduction, and no physical evidence pointing to a clear perpetrator.

Years later the investigation took a dramatic turn when an informant connected the case to Hugo Selenski, a Pennsylvania man later convicted of murder in unrelated killings. According to accounts, Selenski's associate Paul Weakley brought forward a claim that Selenski was involved in Cindy's abduction, and Selenski himself reportedly said that he and another man, Michael Kerkowski, had mistaken her for a prostitute, held her captive, and later buried her body. When multiple bodies were unearthed on Selenski's property in 2003, however, Cindy's remains were not among them, and investigators were never able to substantiate the claims. Selenski is serving a life sentence for other crimes. With no body, no crime scene, and no confirmed suspect, Cindy Song's disappearance remains open and unsolved, still haunting her family, friends, and the Penn State community more than twenty years later.