Athletes Who Went Missing And Were Never Found

Over the course of his professional career, boxing great Muhammad Ali (pictured winning gold at the 1960 Olympics) fought 50 different men in 61 fights. Some of those opponents are equally iconic, and their bouts have gone down in history. In 1999, Stephen Singer, who already had an extensive collection of Ali memorabilia, according to The Boston Globe, decided to add a collection-within-a-collection that no one else had: he planned to get the signatures of each of those 50 opponents. Amazingly, it only took him four years and about $35,000 in early-2000s money ... to get 49 of them. The 50^th signature, of Ali's early opponent Jim Robinson? Seemingly impossible to find. As was Robinson himself.

A last-minute replacement to fight Ali (then Cassius Clay) in his fourth professional match, Robinson didn't stand a chance, per ESPN. But that fight meant his name was recorded in boxing history. Over his 7-year career, he only won five of his 28 bouts. And then...? "I guess he was a man of limited skills and education, and that when his boxing career was over he just kind of disappeared into the sunset," Singer explained. "He was like hundreds of fighters who look to boxing for the American dream, and when they fall there's no net to catch them. There are lots of Jimmy Robinsons."

When Singer contacted ESPN writer Wright Thompson for assistance finding the boxer, the reporter spent six years trying to find out what happened to Robinson and came up empty. It seems not even his old friends knew what happened to him.

Born Brian Williams before asking people to call him Bison Dele (although he never legally changed his name, according to The Edwardsville Intelligencer), the NBA player spent the 1990s hopping between teams, winning a championship with the Chicago Bulls in 1997. But in 1999, still only 30 years old, he turned down a new $35 million contract from the Detroit Pistons and gave up the game entirely to travel and enjoy life. Three years later, he disappeared.

Dele was on a sailing trip in the South Pacific on his boat Hakuna Matata with his girlfriend Serena Karlan and his older brother Miles Dabord, as well as the captain Dele had hired, Bertrand Saldo. Then, Sports Illustrated reports, everyone stopped hearing from them. Eventually, Dabord and the boat turned up, but the other three were never seen again.

The seemingly obvious answer is that Dabord killed the three other people on the boat, but despite an FBI investigation and many investigative reporters looking into it, this has never been proven, and no hint of the three has ever turned up. The brothers had a complicated relationship, Rocky Mountain News reported, and the trip was supposed to help mend their estrangement. No witnesses reported anything more than brotherly squabbles between the two on the trip, so it's unclear what could have happened to enrage Dabord so much he would kill his 6'11 brother and two innocent bystanders. If Dabord was responsible, he didn't have long to admit to it, since he died of an insulin overdose less than three months after Dele disappeared.

Rico Harris might have been a far bigger name in basketball if things had gone differently. According to Fox Sports, his mother always said he "was born to play basketball" while a former college teammate said, "He could do it all. He was Lamar Odom before Lamar Odom." But Harris seemed to have a talent at self-sabotage as well, failing out of various colleges or losing scholarships after an illustrious high school career, which saw his name routinely included on lists of the best young players on the West Coast.

Harris would not make it to the NBA as it once seemed he would. After playing with the short-lived International Basketball League, he joined the Harlem Globetrotters in 2000 for what a team spokesman would later call "a brief stint," per the New York Daily News. An argument on the streets of LA ended Harris' career at just 24-years-old when he was smashed over the head with a baseball bat, resulting in persistent headaches and issues with balance.

Fast forward to 2014, and things were looking up, as Harris had a job interview and a girlfriend in Washington. While driving from LA to Seattle, he was in contact with both his girlfriend and his mother. He told the former he was going to rest for a bit, pulled over in the wilderness, and disappeared. His car was found with battery and gas remaining, and no signs of foul play. Harris had no known physical or mental health issues, and an air and ground search turned up nothing. He was just gone.

Canadian Bob Lymburne was born in 1909 and despite living in a very cold and snowy country, "Powder Pioneers: Ski Stories from the Canadian Rockies and Columbia Mountains" says that he isn't believed to have ever put on skis until he was already a teenager. Once he did, though, Lymburne fell in love with it, even building his own ski jump in rural Western Canada. Within just a few years he was competing, and after a bit of a rocky (pun intended) start, he began breaking records, in a career that "Powder Pioneers" called "outstanding and meteoric." Lymburne made it to the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, although he only placed 18^th. This showing seemed to spur him on even more, and he dedicated himself to training for 1936.

There would be no second Olympics for Lymburne, though. In 1935, while practicing, he fell and hit his head. Olympedia says the resulting concussion was so bad it ended his athletic career. Lymburne continued the day job he'd held before as a firefighter, but the loss of his passion obviously affected him deeply.

Even though he could not enjoy the great outdoors competitively anymore, Lymburne still liked to go for walks through the woods. However, over 20 years after his accident, sometime around 1957, Lymburne went for a walk and never came back. Questions about his mental state at the time make it unclear if this was deliberate. While it is likely he died in the Canadian wilderness, there is no proof of what happened to him after he disappeared.

As a member of The University of Oregon basketball team, Urgel "Slim" Wintermute was exceptional, leading the school to victory in the first-ever NCAA Basketball Tournament in 1939. His coach, Howard Hobson, later said (via The Eugene Register-Guard), "He was in his day the best center in the country. I've always said that he was the best defensive center I've ever coached. In fact, he's the best collegiate defensive center I've ever seen."

The Oregon Sports Hall of Fame says that after the two-time All-American graduated, Wintermute played professionally for Detroit in the National Basketball League (the NBA would not exist for several more years). He later played for and coached the Portland Indians of the Pacific Coast Basketball League. After his sports career ended, Wintermute went to work for Boeing.

In 1977, The Eugene Register-Guard reported that Slim Wintermute was missing. He'd been out on a 37-foot boat with a friend on Lake Washington when he vanished. The friend said he'd been napping, but that Wintermute had definitely been there when he fell asleep. Wintermute had called his work that morning to say he wasn't coming in, which was the last time anyone on the mainland heard from him. However, the police and Wintermute's family didn't think the friend had harmed him or anything like that. The former player had already had one heart attack in 1970, so it was theorized he might have had another one and fallen overboard. However, his body was never found and it's not clear what really happened.

The 21-year-old Hannes Kärkkäinen represented Finland in men's platform diving at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, per Sports Reference. While he beat out 11 divers and made the final, he then placed last of the remaining nine competitors.

Just two years after his Olympics showing, Kärkkäinen left Finland. And then – no one knows. At the time it was not that unusual to lose track of people from that country who immigrated somewhere else, often the United States, according to OlympStats. At least three other Finish Olympians from the early years of the Games also fell off the map eventually, although in their cases there is at least some evidence of where they went and what they did, at least for a period of time.

Hannes Kärkkäinen, on the other hand, is a complete enigma, with OlympStats calling his disappearance "the most mysterious of all." The two most common theories about what happened to him could not be more different. The first is that he headed for the U.S., eventually settling in Connecticut. The second theory is that in 1938, Kärkkäinen became a victim of the Soviet Union's Great Purge. Either way, he is certainly not alive now, and officially he died on January 1, 1993, the date given by the Finnish courts when declaring him dead in absentia.

The disappearance of three young athletes from the World Junior Handball Championship in 2014 (pictured: A match from the 2016 championship tournament between Hungary and Norway) didn't make a lot of sense. According to the Croatian language outlet Slobodna Dalmacija, 19-year-old Julie Betu Mvita, 20-year-old Mirnelle Kele Mazenga, and 18-year-old Laetitia Mumbala Mayunga were in Croatia for the finals as members of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's national team.

While the three disappeared from the hotel together and it was believed they had arranged for someone to pick them up in a car, they left all their belongings in the hotel, including their passports. Identification would have been important if they were planning on applying for asylum, which Slobodna Dalmacija notes they probably would have easily qualified for based on the danger present in returning to the DRC.

It appears they did not apply for asylum, or indeed resurface at all. Six weeks after their disappearance, the Croatian language website Jutarnji reported that despite the police conducting an extensive search, the three young women had vanished.