Journalist Uncovers Patterns in Nearly 100 Big Island Disappearances, Families Demand Action

Nearly 100 people vanished from Hawaiʻi Island over five years, and the patterns embedded in those cases went largely unexamined until Emmy-winning journalist Kristen Thorne began combing through Big Island police records.

Thorne's investigation identified overlapping locations and timelines across the disappearances, a cluster of details that, taken together, suggest the cases may not be as isolated as they have been treated. The findings have reignited a painful conversation among families who say they have spent years pushing for answers and receiving little in return.

The frustration those families describe follows a consistent theme: that Hawaiʻi Island police have historically required a body or a confession before treating a disappearance as something more urgent. Without either, families say, investigations stall. Cases go cold. People who were once someone's child, parent, or partner become a file number.

The geographic and temporal overlaps Thorne uncovered are significant precisely because they were already sitting inside police records. The data was not hidden. What was missing, families argue, was the sustained analytical attention that might have connected the dots years earlier.

Thorne's work is drawing wider attention to a problem that advocates for missing persons have long raised on the island: that the threshold for aggressive investigation is set too high, and that communities in more rural districts, where resources are stretched and visibility is lower, bear a disproportionate share of the consequences.

The nearly 100 cases span a five-year window, a rate that, if sustained, would place Hawaiʻi Island among the communities with the highest per-capita disappearance figures in the state. Families are now calling on Big Island police to revisit the cases Thorne has flagged and to account publicly for how the overlapping patterns were not identified sooner.