Brianna Maitland is an American teenager who disappeared after leaving her job at the Black Lantern Inn in Montgomery, Vermont. She was 17 years old at the time. Maitland’s car was discovered the following day, backed into the side of an abandoned house about 1.6km away from her workplace. She has not been seen or heard from since. Due to a confluence of circumstances, several days passed before Maitland’s friends and family reported her missing.
On Maitland's seventeenth birthday in October 2003, she decided she wanted to move away from her parents' farm. Maitland enrolled at her friends' high school, but her living arrangements were unstable, as she moved in and out of several friends' homes.
On the morning of Friday, March 19, 2004, Maitland took an exam to receive her GED. Her mother described her as being in good spirits, and that Maitland had discussed plans of attending college.
After lunch, Maitland and her mother spent the afternoon shopping and running errands. While waiting in the check-out line of a store, Kellie said something outside caught Brianna's attention; she told her mother she would return shortly, and left the store. Her mother Kellie completed her purchase and met Brianna in the parking lot, and noticed that her daughter seemed unnerved, shaken, and agitated.
After completing her shift at work, Maitland clocked out and left the Black Lantern Inn at approximately 11:20 p.m. She told her co-workers she needed to get home and rest before working the next day at her second job in St. Albans. By all accounts Maitland was alone in her vehicle when she left.
Early the next afternoon, on March 20, a Vermont State Police trooper was dispatched to an abandoned house on Route 118 in Richford, about a 1.6km from the Black Lantern Inn. Maitland’s Oldsmobile was found backed into the side of the house. Known locally as “the old Dutchburn house”, the siding of the home had been breached by the rear end of the car. A piece of plywood that had been covering a window lay on the car’s trunk. 2 of Maitland’s pay checks were found on the front seat of the car, and outside it, law enforcement observed loose change, a water bottle, and a unsmoked cigarette. The trooper assumed the car had been abandoned by a drunk driver, and a towing company took the vehicle to a local garage.
Maitland was not reported missing for a number of days. Her mother did not learn of the discovery of the car until five days afterward. Her roommate saw Maitland’s note that was left on Friday, March 19, spent the weekend, and found the note undisturbed when she returned on Monday. Assuming Maitland was staying elsewhere, she did not call Kellie until the following day. On Tuesday, March 23, Kellie began calling various people in order to find Maitland, failing in her efforts—and still unaware that the vehicle Maitland had been driving had been recovered—she filed a missing persons report that day. On Thursday, March 25, Maitland's parents gave photos of her to Vermont State Police in St. Albans. A trooper showed them a picture of the Oldsmobile found at the old Dutchburn house, upon which they immediately identified the car as their daughter's.
After Maitland's reported disappearance, several individuals came forward to law enforcement to report sightings of the vehicle at the old Dutchburn house the night she disappeared:
A man who drove by the house between 11:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. on March 19–20 said the car's headlights may have been on. He said he did not see anyone in or around the car.
A second man who drove by between midnight and 12:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 20, recalled seeing a turn signal flashing on the car.
Around 4:00 a.m. on Saturday, March 20, a former boyfriend of Maitland's drove past the scene after a night of partying across the border in Canada. He thought he recognised the vehicle, but he did not see anyone in or around it.
The next morning, some passing motorists found the scene odd enough that they stopped and took pictures of it. One of the photographers reported some loose change, a water bottle, and a bracelet or necklace on the ground next to the car.
The Vermont State Police, who led the official investigation for the first months after Maitland's disappearance, were skeptical that foul play was involved, considering the possibility that Maitland was a runaway. The area surrounding the old Dutchburn house was combed on foot by police and search dogs, but nothing was found. Maitland's vehicle was processed by the state crime laboratory for evidence on March 30, 2004, after the car had been impounded at a local garage for several days. Upon the car's return to the Maitland family, Bruce noted that his daughter's ATM card, glasses, contact lens case, and migraine medication had all been left inside.
It was later concluded by law enforcement that foul play was the probable cause of Maitland's disappearance, and a 2007 flyer provided by the FBI stated that the scene at which Maitland's car was discovered may have been staged to appear as an accident. Maitland's parents publicly speculated that she may have been abducted by multiple people, stating that it would have been difficult for a single assailant to subdue her given her jiu-jitsu training.
In the week following Maitland's disappearance, the Vermont State Police received an anonymous tip claiming that she was being held against her will in a house in nearby Berkshire, Vermont, 16 km from Montgomery. The rented house, then occupied by Ramon L. Ryans and Nathaniel Charles Jackson, two known drug dealers from New York, was raided by police on April 15, 2004. Upon interviewing Maitland's close friends, law enforcement was informed that Maitland had allegedly experimented with hard drugs in the recent past and was an acquaintance of Ryans and Jackson.
In 2006, security footage at the Caesars World casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, showed a woman resembling Maitland sitting at a poker table. The woman was never properly identified.
In 2012, law enforcement investigated a potential connection between Maitland's disappearance and serial killer Israel Keyes, who committed numerous rapes and murders in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Vermont and New York. The FBI ruled out Keyes's potential connection to Maitland's disappearance in late December 2012, shortly after Keyes committed suicide in Anchorage, Alaska.
In March 2016, on the case's twelfth anniversary, investigators revealed to a local television station they had recovered DNA samples from Maitland's car. The results of the DNA tests were not made public. In July 2016, the farmhouse where Maitland's vehicle was discovered was destroyed in a fire.
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