Camilla Steinaa seemed to be moving away from one life and toward another when she disappeared.
The 25-year-old had once been a familiar face in Copenhagen’s punk scene, surrounded by musicians, artists and writers. She partied hard, dated one of Denmark’s most celebrated young poets and earned a reputation as an intelligent, forceful woman who knew exactly what she wanted. Then something changed. Camilla began rejecting the world around her. She embraced increasingly austere ideas about food, religion and nature. She talked about abandoning technology, living from the land and leaving conventional society behind.
By the winter of 1986, Camilla was gone. There was no crime scene, no body and no confirmed account of where she went next. Her family would spend decades trying to establish whether she had died, deliberately disappeared or succeeded in building the hidden life she appeared to be seeking. Along the way came alleged sightings, a Danish hippie settlement, mysterious photographs, a religious text that had transformed her thinking and new leads substantial enough to send investigators back across Denmark more than 30 years later.
Nearly four decades after Camilla Steinaa vanished, nobody has been able to prove where her journey ended.