New book about Lauren Spierer case has never-published details from investigators' files

"June 3, 2011. There was a different energy in the air around Bloomington, Indiana, this time of year. Late at night, the streets, usually bustling with college students, could be eerily silent."

So begins investigative reporter Shawn Cohen's book "College Girl, Missing: The True Story of How a Young Woman Disappeared in Plain Sight" ($17.99 from sourcebooks). The book hits stores May 28, six days before the 13th anniversary of the night Lauren Spierer vanished.

Spierer was the petite 20-year-old blonde coed from Westchester, NY, fresh off her sophomore year at Indiana University, who disappeared on one of the college town’s silent summer streets after a night of drugs and drinking. She staggered off into the pre-dawn hours of June 3, 2011, and was never seen again.

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Her disappearance triggered a massive search, and has spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theories, amateur sleuths, psychics, Reddit threads, true-crime podcasts and TV magazine stories.

Where was Lauren? How could she vanish? Who knows the truth? Who isn't talking?

Cohen’s new book, written with the cooperation of Robert and Charlene Spierer and drawing on their private investigators' files, fills in key details of that fateful night. While it doesn't solve the case, it goes a long way to exploring the personalities and motivations of those at the center of the mystery, and the code of silence that has kept the Spierers in anguish for 13 years, not any closer to finding out what happened to their daughter.

Cohen is able to flesh out the story, to fill in the details beyond where Lauren went, from her off-campus apartment to a friend’s dinner party to a “pre-game” drinking bout to friend Jay Rosenbaum’s townhouse, to a local bar, on an odyssey during which she lost her shoes, her phone, her keys and, eventually, her life.

Cohen had unprecedented access

The Spierers granted Cohen access to the files of their private investigator Bo Deitl.

He sifted through that information, and supplemented it with interviews with case insiders. His knock-on-doors approach brings to light new elements of Lauren Spierer's final hours, permitting Cohen to craft a tantalizing single line that stands alone before the book’s preface, eight words to entice followers of the case: "This book contains information never before made public."

Cohen gets “persons of interest” Corey Rossman and Jay Rosenbaum — believed to be among the last people to see Spierer alive — to speak on the record about what happened that night. They are defensive and combative.

He describes a video not released to the public, one that shows Spierer and Rossman at about 3 a.m. At one point, Cohen writes, while Spierer slumps on the curb, Rossman makes two phone calls. Cohen tracks down the woman Rossman was reaching out to in the middle of a drunken night, as Spierer's friend sat incapacitated.

Cohen pulls apart discrepancies and inconsistencies in the various stories told through the years.

There have been so many theorized culprits, including: a serial killer who was active at the time; a man convicted of a late-night abduction of a female IU student; a former Indianapolis cop with a history of child exploitation; and an inmate who said he was told two men were with Lauren when she overdosed on ecstasy and they threw her body in the Ohio River.

Cohen follows the investigation’s rabbit holes — including one introduced by the Bloomington police, in the form of a mysterious white van — just far enough to disprove them.

“I needed to mention those folks and point out why they were shot down as possibilities,” Cohen said in an interview.

He said the lack of details, the not knowing, gives onlookers license to fill that vacuum.

“In my crime reporting over the years, this case, the lack of answers, I couldn't believe the cottage industry that cropped up,” he said. “Even Charlene Spierer would be up in the middle of the night, looking at some of the message boards about what people were saying and wondering, 'Is there any truth to that?' And getting frustrated how people were going off without real facts in every single direction. Rabbit holes were followed in every single direction and I tried to keep my focus on the facts.”

Cohen said he kept coming back to one fact.

“Here we are 13 years later, and there's not a shred of evidence that Lauren ever made it out of that townhouse complex alive,” he said. “Then the question becomes a deep dive into what we do know, and confront the people who were in that townhouse complex and also people who they may have interacted with in the aftermath.”

There from the start

Shawn Cohen was there from the start, an investigative reporter dispatched by the Spierers’ hometown paper The Journal News, part of the USA Today Network, to Indiana to follow a parent's worst nightmare: their college student vanishing, 800 miles from home.

Cohen started breaking news as soon as he arrived in Bloomington in June 2011. He tracked down video that showed Lauren hadn’t been with her boyfriend that night, but was with another student, Corey Rossman. Robert and Charlene Spierer weren’t fans of Cohen’s early coverage, saying it distracted from the work of Bloomington Police. Robert Spierer blasted Cohen, shouting: “Leave the investigating to the police.”

But the Bloomington Police weren’t making progress, stonewalled by key “persons of interest” — young men who were with Lauren that night and were among the last to see her alive — who had lawyered up and were declining to detail what they had seen. Despite the searches and the flyers and the press conferences, police were no closer to finding the girl who stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed 90 pounds.

The family grew frustrated with Bloomington Police, who Cohen said were more interested in giving updates on how many tips they’d received than cooperating with any and every law enforcement agency that could help them. The family would eventually hire their own private investigators.

Nine months after Lauren's disappearance, Charlene Spierer wrote an anguished letter, titled “You Know Where She Is,” and posted it to a blog. It detailed the nightmare the family was enduring and pleaded with those who knew about her daughter's whereabouts to come forward.

“You were with Lauren, you know what happened, and you know where she is,” Charlene wrote. “Whatever the events of the night, you hold the key to what happened to Lauren at night’s end.”

The Spierers, who still live in the home where they raised Lauren and her older sister, Rebecca, grew to trust their local reporter, or at least to see him as an important conduit.

In the recent interview, Cohen said: “At the one-year mark, I remember returning to Indiana and they really weren't giving many interviews, but they did agree to sit down with me because they knew that people were paying attention to the coverage. They started to open up about their honest feelings about the case at that point.”

'You left these parents dangling'

The investigative files and the interviews he conducted, Cohen said, filled in “the various relationships, the motivations, the reality of that night — and that's what brings it to life.”

Thus prepared, he approached key persons of interest, including Mike Beth, Corey Rossman and Jay Rosenbaum, whom the Spierers sued unsuccessfully in 2013, hoping to shake loose details about Lauren’s final hours and current whereabouts.

Of Rosenbaum and Rossman, Cohen writes: “Clouds of suspicion had followed them into their adult lives.”

Cohen said he sees the book as a cautionary tale, of secrets kept by college students with their parents completely in the dark.

He quotes Stu Baggerly, a Bloomington public defender, who thinks there is a wall of silence surrounding the case, secrets held by young men of means with a lot to lose if the true story is told.

“If one of them cracks, all of them are going down,” Baggerly says. “Even if they weren’t directly involved, they’re going to be involved in the scandal. You left these parents dangling for a decade.”

Cohen says losing Lauren has “taken an immense toll” on the Spierers.

One of the most haunting images is of Charlene Spierer standing in a storage room upstairs in their Edgemont home, among plastic bins filled with papers related to the investigation, bins stacked higher than she is tall.

“It’s like a really weird existence,” she tells Cohen. “Because on the one hand, it’s almost like I’m hallucinating, because I have one side of me that’s living currently, and I have one side of me that’s living June 3. I would not say that we have grieved, because I think the not-knowing keeps you from moving forward.

“I’m just literally stuck on June 3,” she said. “It’s too painful to think about before, and there’s no after, because we don’t have any answers.”

This week, as another June 3 approaches, Charlene Spierer is hopeful Cohen's book might be the catalyst that convinces someone with news of what happened to her daughter to step up and do the right thing − tell the truth.

"Please let Shawn's book be the impetus for someone to finally come forward," she said.  "I often worry that getting to the truth might be worse than not knowing, but I don't think anything will come close to losing Lauren." 

If you go

Author and reporter Shawn Cohen will be at Morgenstern's Books & Cafe, 849 S. Auto Mall Road in Bloomington, at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 28 a, to discuss his new book, "College Girl, Missing: The True Story of How a Young Woman Disappeared in Plain Sight."

Reach Peter D. Kramer at pkramer@gannett.com.

Herald-Times reporter Laura Lane contributed to this story.