Vanished

George Bosque, 36, a Brink's guard who took $1.85 million from an armored truck in 1980 and went on a coast-to-coast spending spree, has died in San Francisco of a possible drug overdose, a coroner said Wednesday. He was 36. He vanished from San Francisco International Airport on Aug. 15, 1980, with two sacks of $50 and $100 bills. "There was all that money there, and it seemed like the answer," Bosque said after he was captured in a San Francisco supermarket parking lot 15 months later.

A little more than a month ago, the Washington Capitals called a players-only meeting in search of a wake-up call. Off to the fourth-worst start in franchise history at 2-8-1, they sat in last place in the NHL, five points out of a playoff spot. They've gone 8-5-0 in the 13 games since the meeting, at times showing enough noticeable improvement to suggest that things were finally starting to come together under first-year coach Adam Oates. But after losing to the Islanders and Rangers this weekend, the Capitals have little to show for their modest progress.

The night Thomas G. Demyon vanished two years ago, he had just cremated his father and hoped to inherit the old man's estate. Within hours, he planned to take control of the company his father once ran.But that night, Demyon was a poor man without even a phone -- a gambler whose only income came from a small business in financial shambles, whose disappearance would leave Baltimore County police baffled.Demyon's pager beeped as he and his wife, Cynthia, watched news of the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation at his father's Timonium condo that evening, Jan. 13, 1997.

Michael Maurice Johnson is scheduled to stand trial starting Tuesday in the death of North Carolina teenager Phylicia Barnes, with court proceedings that could include prosecutors playing a sex video and defense attorneys revealing details from an internal affairs investigation of the lead detective in the case. Barnes, 16, disappeared in late December 2010 while visiting her half-sister Deena Barnes in Baltimore. Her body was found four months later floating naked in the Susquehanna River.

WHATEVER REASONS the United States had in the early 1980s to withhold what it owed the United Nations have vanished. The Treasury has the money, which is peanuts in the U.S. budget. The demands that Washington made for U.N. reform are substantially met. The United Nations is an essential arena for U.S. foreign policy. Withholding dues and assessments as a bludgeon was successful for a period but backfired, and now diminishes U.S. influence.The latest example of the world body caving in to reasonable U.S. demands was shown by a related agency, the World Health Organization.

A Waldorf man whose accomplice called their 1996 killing of a Gambrills teen-ager "the perfect murder" was sentenced yesterday to two consecutive life terms in prison without parole. Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Pamela L. North said the killing of Joseph Aaron Demarest was "so over the top" that she believed it was the kind of planned, gruesome slaying that legislators had in mind when they enacted a no-parole measure. Veterinary technician Stefan Tyson Bell, 26, was convicted last year of murdering Demarest because Bell did not want to pay Demarest a debt for about two pounds of marijuana.

The photographs haunt him and there are thousands - grainy snapshots of Iraqi men, women and children. Their eyes stare back at him, begging the questions: Where did they go? Why did they vanish? Will they return? Zuhair Humadi has no answers. Instead, he has a mission: to document the disappeared. An Iraqi exile living in Falls Church, Va., Humadi has spent the past decade collecting information about Iraqis who disappeared during the regime of Saddam Hussein. Last fall, with the help of Fareed Yasseen, a technology consultant in Boston, and a grant from the State Department, Humadi created an online database, Mafqud.

WEST LEBANON, N.H. -- The missing Learjet.Mention those three words to people in New Hampshire and they'll know what you're talking about. Chances are each has a theory on where it crashed and why.Last Christmas Eve, two professional pilots and their jet vanished while trying to land in poor weather here. Thus began the most intense search-and-rescue operation in state history. The aircraft was presumed down, the pilots soon presumed dead -- but nothing has been found. Informal searches continue to this day. The mystery transfixes many.

Thomas Brown is a fan of the tried and true. His goal is to outfit his architectural millwork shop in Remington with no equipment made after the 1930s. That, he says, was the point at which beauty in design vanished from manufacturing. Brown says, "If we don't custom-make new work to the exact shape and forms of the old work, something modern would be substituted, and the information would be lost," he says.

A 31-year-old Cockeysville man who went fishing yesterday at Susquehanna State Park has vanished, prompting an extensive search yesterday of 1,100 acres of the park, police said.Richard Frederick Carey went fishing about 6 a.m. and did not return, prompting his girlfriend to notify authorities. Harford County sheriff's deputies found his car at the park.About 60 divers, firefighters and dogs combed the area, said John Surrick, spokesman for the Maryland Natural Resources Police."We have not been able to locate him," Surrick said.

The owner of the life-sized stuffed goat that has served as the unofficial mascot for the Naval Academy Class of 1961 is offering a $500 reward for information that leads Annapolis police to identify a person in a photo and for information leading to the return of the stuffed billy goat. Dubbed Fearless, the billy goat has stood atop Ron Carlberg's SUV during tailgating before Navy games, and children ask to pet it. But the stuffed animal, bought several years ago by Carlberg's wife, vanished from the back of the couple's car during an Oct. 20 Navy-Indiana game.

Melissa Schehlein, a Towson native, walked the streets and byways of the Baltimore County seat in search of what was while documenting with her camera what is. The result of her search was the recently published book, "Towson: Then and Now," a 96-page photo essay that takes readers on a tour of contemporary Towson, which she contrasts photographically with images of earlier years. In her introduction, Schehlein writes that Towson is the "commercial, political and cultural heart of Baltimore County," and her mission and "primary emphasis is York Road, our defining corridor.

Asked recently to describe his first year at the helm of the Orioles, manager Buck Showalter searched for the perfect word or phrase. Has it been frustrating? Exhilarating? Draining? A mixed bag? "It's been, 'Under construction,'" Showalter eventually said. Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of when Showalter sat at a Camden Yards' dais and was introduced as the club's newest skipper — the Orioles' 19th overall, sixth since 2003 and third last season, following Dave Trembley and interim manager Juan Samuel.

More than 70 people gathered Sunday evening on an Edmondson Village street corner, rallying for the safe return of an infant who disappeared Friday with the teenager who had been left to watch him briefly. Pastors and relatives surrounded Whitney McGee, the mother of Ki'Yauhn Birch, as she tearfully pleaded for Jonae Boozer, the 16-year-old last seen with the 7-month-old boy, to surrender the baby. "Put my baby somewhere safe and call somebody. He's probably hungry," McGee, 20, wept, as she said she was deeply worried about her baby's well-being, especially in the intense heat of the past few days.

The mother of a Maryland man missing in Libya since March said Thursday that he is being held in a prison in Tripoli. Sharon VanDyke said she could not divulge details of how she learned the whereabouts of her son Matthew VanDyke, who was in Libya to work on a book, but she has been told he is in good health. "I am trying to get more information, but I will do nothing to jeopardize Matthew," she said. "The most important part of this information is that he is in good health.

Don't look now, but Maryland's state insect is fluttering away. The Baltimore Checkerspot butterfly, named for the state's founding Calvert family, has dwindled to just a handful of places, mostly in Western Maryland. Experts worry that the butterfly, once fairly common, may disappear entirely from the state. Pockets of dedicated butterfly lovers, though, are trying to slow or even reverse the decline by breeding the species in captivity. One such nursery is in a tent in back of an old maintenance shed at Black Hill Regional Park in Montgomery County.

One can't help but question the wisdom of launching yet another serialized drama this year after the costly implosions of more than a dozen such tales, including Six Degrees (ABC), Kidnapped (NBC), Smith (CBS) and Vanished (Fox). Yet tonight, in the next-to-last week of the network season, ABC introduces Traveler, a thriller about three graduate school friends caught up in a terrorist bombing and manhunt in New York City. The network is even showcasing the series in the middle of May sweeps in the hour after Grey's Anatomy, one of the most popular shows on network TV. And this for a show that failed to make ABC's fall lineup.

For generations, this downtown neighborhood close to Camden Yards has seemed almost Dickensian: a working-class district where humor, pathos, pride and concern for the people next door take the edge off hard times.With its narrow streets, weathered buildings and scraggly skyline, Pigtown evokes a 19th-century Baltimore where people walked to work for the railroad, set clocks by the whistles and swept soot off the sidewalks.Oddball things often happened. In the early part of this century, the spectacle of pigs being driven through the streets, from stockyards to slaughterhouse, was commonplace.

As the desperate search for missing honors student Phylicia Barnes came to a heartbreaking end Thursday, police said the discovery of her body in the Susquehanna River could be "instrumental" in hunting down new leads in a 4-month-old case that has yielded painfully few clues. "We're at stage one of a new phase of the investigation," said Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III. "Finding her body is really going to be instrumental in giving us an opportunity to bring closure to the family.

While most of the Chesapeake Bay's islands are slowly vanishing beneath the waves, one not far from Baltimore is staging a remarkable renaissance. Poplar Island, former hunting retreat, hangout for politicos and black cat farm, had nearly washed away by the late 1990s. But it's since been restored to the size it was when it was still a thriving 19th-century farming and fishing community, using muck dredged from the shipping channels leading to Baltimore just 34 miles to the northwest.