Seventeen-year-old Sharon Drover was living in a boarding house on Livingstone Street in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador, and had just started her first job at a McDonald’s on Kenmount Road when she disappeared after an evening shift on December 29, 1978. She left work wearing a beige jacket, pale blue jeans and black boots, collected her paycheck that night (which was never cashed) and is believed to have intended to hitchhike back downtown. A miscommunication between family and her foster mother meant Sharon was not reported missing until 46 days later, by which time potential evidence had been lost.

Over the years police followed several leads. In 1984 two anonymous tips claimed a body had been moved from a tractor-trailer near a McDonald’s on Topsail Road and that a body was disposed of off Foxtrap Access Road; searches turned up nothing. In the 1990s two brothers said they had given a female hitchhiker on Kenmount Road a lift and dropped her on Long’s Hill, where she spoke with a man before running down the hill. That prompted a 1995 excavation of part of the concrete floor in her former boarding-house basement, which produced no evidence. Investigators say a person of interest identified in 1995 remains a suspect but no charges have been laid.

Sharon’s whereabouts remain unknown.