Some disappearances begin with an obvious crisis. A broken marriage. A threat. A journey that went wrong. A violent scene waiting for police.
Mimi Boomhower left nothing so convenient behind.
In the summer of 1949, the 48-year-old widow occupied a strange corner of Los Angeles society. Her late husband had made a fortune in linoleum and filled their Bel Air mansion with trophies from his big-game hunting expeditions. Mimi inherited the house, the money and the social standing that came with both. Friends knew her as outgoing, fashionable and independent. Newspapers would give her a nickname perfectly suited to the image: the “Merry Widow.”
Then, on an August night, Mimi disappeared.
What followed was not a conventional missing-person case. There was no confirmed sighting of Mimi beginning a new life somewhere else. No body appeared. No confession surfaced. Nobody was ever charged. Instead, the investigation accumulated questions, suspicious characters and competing explanations while the woman at its center seemed to disappear more completely with every passing year.
Was Mimi murdered by somebody who knew she had money? Had financial trouble pulled her toward dangerous people? Was an unidentified man connected to her disappearance? Did she take her own life? Or did the Merry Widow deliberately abandon a life that looked far more secure from the outside than it truly was?
The case unfolded during one of the darkest periods in Los Angeles criminal history, when corruption, organized crime, illegal gambling and a succession of unsolved murders created an almost perfect environment for somebody to disappear.
More than seven decades later, Mimi Boomhower has never been found.
And the closer her final days are examined, the stranger her disappearance becomes.
