Publication Date May 28, 2024
I’m a big fan of well-done true crime. I also read WAY too much not-so-well-done true crime, and I occasionally get very curious about stories where someone just VANISHES off the face of the earth. (Bryce Laspisa or Patti Adkins come to mind). I had heard of the disappearance of Lauren Spierer but wasn’t really familiar with the story, so I was happy to get a copy of College Girl, Missing from Sourcebooks and NetGalley in exchange for this honest review.
Shawn Cohen is a skilled reporter who left his newspaper job in New York after a scandal involving him, a hooker/witness, and a court case. He worked on Lauren’s case for years after being one of the first to cover it and now has written a book with cooperation from the Spierer family, and it is THOROUGH.
Lauren was a student at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN who went out for a night of fun with friends, after they all apparently got ready (“pregaming”) with plenty of alcohol and other drugs. Despite the fact that Lauren was a very petite woman, she was reputedly able to handle the partying – but was she really? She had been cited for alcohol use at college after being sent to rehab for her drinking and drug use when she was even younger, but she really liked to be social and party. Cohen doesn’t sugarcoat her story, and I understand why her family has been less than thrilled with every tiny detail of Lauren’s life being used to sell ads (in one way or another, including print, TV, and podcasts).
The book has great detail about the less-than-stellar police work, the sketchy frat boy/rich kids she hung out with, and the way her story exploded in the media. The whole pretty-white-girl-gone-missing story, so reminiscent of the stories of Natalee Holloway and Laci Petersen, is all too familiar to true crime fans. And while there are too many options to think it will be solved (stranger abduction, drunken mishap, body buried in trash site, hidden corpse thrown into construction site next door, even a suggestion of an encounter with Israel Freaking Keyes!), Cohen has skillfully given the reader a sense of what her family has gone through along with a message about how the media handles cases like Lauren’s. A sad cautionary tale. Four stars.