Tammy Lynn Belanger

Tammy Lynn Belanger was an eight-year-old third-grader living on River Street in Exeter, New Hampshire, a small town of roughly 13,000 people. On the morning of Tuesday, November 13, 1984, she left home to walk the roughly one-mile route to Lincoln Street Elementary School, a walk she had made since first grade. A neighbor saw her cross Court Street at about 8 a.m., wearing tan corduroy pants, a purple sweater, a tan jacket, and carrying a red backpack with her name on it. She never arrived at school. Because no system yet existed to automatically alert parents of an absence, hours passed before her mother, Pat, learned that afternoon that Tammy was missing.

The response, once launched, was massive. Searchers on foot, in helicopters, and in boats combed six to eight square miles of the area, and divers searched a nearby flooded quarry. The FBI and New Hampshire State Police joined the Exeter Police Department, but no trace of Tammy was ever found. Within a week, investigators publicly acknowledged they had little hope of finding her alive. Her disappearance became one of the most haunting unsolved cases in New Hampshire history, and it helped spur changes in how schools notify families when a child fails to arrive in the morning.

In late December 1984, a prime suspect emerged: Victor Wonyetye, then 41, who had been living in a motel in nearby Rye. He had a 1979 conviction for the felonious sexual assault of his 13-year-old stepdaughter and had been released on parole in July 1983. A blue car with Florida plates and a broken taillight had been reported in the area, and Wonyetye had called in sick to work the morning Tammy vanished; his parole was revoked at the end of December. Investigators came to believe he was responsible for her death, but without a body or supporting physical evidence he was never charged in her case.

Wonyetye's later life was marked by further crime. In January 1992 he was convicted of burglary and indecent exposure in Florida and sentenced to 75 years as a habitual offender, though he was released in April 2012 and died in Florida that December at age 69, taking any secrets with him. Tammy Belanger has never been found. Her case remains open and is handled by the New Hampshire Department of Justice Cold Case Unit, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children continues to circulate age-progressed images of what she might look like today. More than four decades later, the disappearance of the little girl who simply set out to walk to school endures as one of the state's most enduring mysteries, and her family has never learned what became of her.