Justice Denied: The Baffling Disappearance of Denise Pflum
The teenager left home to retrieve her lost purse and was never seen again.
Denise Pflum left her Everton, Indiana home around 12:30 pm on Friday, March 28, 1986. The 18-year-old, who was on spring break from Connersville High School that week, had gone to a party the previous night and realized when she got home that she had left her purse at the party. She made a few phone calls to friends to see if anyone wanted to go with her to retrieve it, but none of her friends were available so she told her parents, David and Judith, that she was going to go by herself. She climbed into her 1981 Buick Regal and drove off. She was never seen again.
The party Denise had attended Thursday night had been held outdoors on some local farmland, but it doesn’t appear that Denise ever made it there on Friday. A farmer working in a field in Glenwood, Indiana, approximately three miles away from where the party was held, saw her light-colored Buick parked on his farm Friday afternoon around 12:30 pm, but he never saw its driver. He assumed that the car belonged to someone who was hunting for mushrooms, a common activity in the area. He grew suspicious when it was still parked there on Saturday and called the Fayette County Sheriff’s Department to report it.