The Vanishing of Ingrid Anderson
May 21, 1971. Richmond, California. 27-year-old housewife Ingrid Anderson waved goodbye as her husband Steven left the house with their two young children for a trip to the barbershop.
Steven returned with the kids several hours later, but Ingrid was gone.
She was never seen again.
While researching my last article on the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders, I came across a shockingly high number of crimes perpetrated against women in the 1960’s and 70’s. As long as that article was, I tried to focus only on the most relevant cases to that topic.
But this case caught my eye.
The disappearance of Ingrid Anderson is scant on details. In fact, the above paragraph represents almost the entirety of what is publicly available about her disappearance. Here’s the sum total of what the cold case website, Uncovered, has to say about it:
Ingrid was last seen on May 20, 1971 in Richmond, CA.
There’s even disagreement about when she went missing. Uncovered says May 20th but, three weeks after she vanished, a blurb in the paper claims May 21st. The next mention of her disappearance doesn’t occur until 1973, and that article also says May 21st.
And…that’s it as far as information about Ingrid Anderson goes.
A 2022 post on whereaboutsstillunknown tried to fill in the blanks but, good intentions aside, it got just about every detail wrong—including stating that she wasn’t married and that she went to high school in San Jose. The yearbook photo included in the article is of a person named Ingrid Anderson, but Anderson wasn’t her maiden name. So:
Is there any way to find fresh information on a missing persons case over 50 years after the fact? Did anyone miss anything?
For Ingrid’s sake, let’s take a look.
I’m going to keep calling her Ingrid Anderson because that’s what all the missing persons posts call her. But even before she married Steven H. Anderson at Presbyterian Church of the Redeemer in late summer of 1965, she apparently wasn’t a big fan of her name.
Ingrid Routt was born to parents Sterling and Trinidad Routt. Her father, Sterling, had been a postal worker until he was caught stealing money out of envelopes in 1938. He served five years at McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington State, then met Trinidad Olmstead shortly after. Ingrid was born in 1944. Her friends called her Ronnie, or Roni, for short.
She attended Richmond Union High School, where she was a year ahead of Steven. Yearbook photos show an attractive, serious couple—but of course a yearbook only tells part of the story. Friends described her as an accomplished if “flighty” ice skater, dancer, and pianist who obsessed over makeup and her figure.
The couple both attended Contra Costa College for two years and married shortly after. Her father walked her down the aisle. Ingrid was 21. Steven was 20.
They joined a bowling league.
Their first child, Ken, was born in November the following year.
On November 2, 1968, Steven graduated from training to join the Richmond Police Department.
Two years later they had another boy, Chris.
And then, on that Thursday morning in 1971, Steven took Ken and Chris, 4 and 1-years old, to the barbershop.
And in the short window of time they were gone, every trace of Ingrid’s existence was erased.
Her mother took out a small ad in the newspaper on Ingrid’s birthday in 1986. Sterling had already died in 1977. Trinidad was 80-years-old, and her daughter had been missing for fifteen years.
The heartbreaking message was easy to miss in the sea of black and white.
Perhaps pointedly, the message addressed Ingrid by her maiden name:
“To Ingrid Roni Routt, When you left, I felt sadness, even strangers felt my grief. I cried and cried, until I didn’t have any tears…I pray to God that we will be together again. Please remember me. I love you dearly. You have been a precious gift to me from God. Miss you terribly, MAMA. HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARLING. Please call —”
Trinidad died ten years later.
She never got an answer.
Trinidad spent twenty-five years grieving. Thirty more years have passed.
That seems like a lot of time—it is a lot of time—but the rest of Ingrid’s family is still alive.
Her children. Her husband. His new wife.
And here’s where this simple story—Ingrid was last seen on May 20, 1971 in Richmond, CA—gets complicated.
On one of the many websites that cover the sparse details of this case is a message:
“Ingrid is my grandmother. I just found out from family that she disappeared when my dad was a baby. And I’ve been finding a lot online about her disappearance. I’m just trying to find more information related to her disappearance.”
(I normally link to this sort of thing, but for the sake of even minimal privacy, in this instance I won’t.)
There were only two contemporary newspaper articles about the vanishing of Ingrid Anderson. The first, dated July 10, 1971, offers a photo of her and notes that “Mrs. Anderson apparently had taken some clothing with her.” Whether intentional or not, the conclusion one draws is that Ingrid packed up and left of her own free will — “had taken some clothing with her.”
Where this information came from is never stated.
The second article comes nearly two years later, in January 1973. Richmond Police Department Sgt. Dave Rodden, it reminds us, “is deliberately vague in discussing the current situation.” Rodden describes Ingrid’s personal life as normal and happy, and says that Ingrid stayed close to her mother, who “reported her daughter’s absence to the police.”
The article goes on to state that Ingrid’s children, “live with their dad, who has moved out of state and reportedly has remarried.”
Everyone processes grief in their own way. It’s easy to jump to conclusions—especially with so few details.
The spouse is always a suspect.
But out of the few details that publicly exist about Ingrid’s disappearance, nearly all of them appear to come from her husband, Steven Anderson. From what we know, he was the one who first noticed that she was gone.
Why did her mother call the police?
Why didn’t Steven, a policeman, call the police?
How long had Ingrid been missing by the time Trinidad made the call?
No information publicly exists to answer that. But there are other records that raise more questions. Details that aren’t mentioned in the newspapers.
Do you see it?
No? Enhance!
Ingrid, happily married according to police, got divorced the same month she disappeared.
By all accounts, the last known sighting of Ingrid Anderson was on May 20–21, 1971. The Richmond Police Department, where Steven Anderson worked, was in charge of the investigation into Ingrid’s whereabouts and was tight lipped about all information on the case.
Steven Harry Anderson married Diane Wray Carter on February 11, 1972, less than nine months since his first wife simultaneously vanished and got divorced.
Steven and Diane are, as far as I can tell, still married to this day.
At the time of their marriage, Diane was 24 and Steven was 26. She had been married twice before. Her first marriage was at age 16 to a Bradley Nall in 1964. Her second marriage was in 1966 to a William Barnett. That union ended in 1967.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but the numerous name changes amid all the weddings didn’t make things easy. In a few short years, she went from Diane Carter to Diane Nall, but apparently never changed her surname to Barnett. Records of her wedding to Steven list her as both Diane Nall and Diane Carter, but what does that even matter?
That’s when I found this tiny excerpt in the June 4, 1969 edition of The Independent. Like Steven, Diane was also working for the police department—in Pinole, California, ten minutes from Richmond.
I imagine it’s how they met.
The vanishing of Ingrid Roni Routt received virtually no attention at the time it occurred in 1971. The last person to see her alive was Steven Anderson, a policeman who worked for the police department that was responsible for investigating her disappearance. Given the timing of her disappearance and the timing of the paperwork, he either divorced her a few weeks before or a week after she was never seen again—information that wasn’t disclosed to the public. He remarried in less than a year to a woman who had been working for the police since 1969. He then resigned from the force and moved out of state.
The police never located Ingrid Roni Routt. According to the State of California Department of Justice, her case is still being handled by the Richmond Police Department. Her case number is 06–82237.
Perhaps it’s time for a fresh set of eyes on the case. Ingrid’s family would undoubtedly welcome a proper investigation.
Because the question in my mind isn’t: Where did Ingrid go?
The real question is: Did Ingrid ever leave?
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